Name: ian

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Bio: Ian Fenwick: management educator, entrepreneur, and digital marketing consultant. Dr Ian co-authored DigiMarketing: The Essential Guide to New Media and Digital Marketing, published by Wiley & Son (native language editions also available in Japan, PRC, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam). In its first few months, Norman Pearlstine (former Editor-in-Chief of Time, Inc. and Managing Editor, the Wall Street Journal) hailed it as “the definitive guide to marketing in the digital age”. Microsoft Corporation invited Ian to address their key distributors on DigiMarketing at their annual World Partner Conference in Houston, Texas. Ian’s previous experience includes working as Senior Branding and Marketing Consultant at The Business Generation Group Inc.; Senior Consultant to Market Facts of Canada Ltd.; and serving as expert witness on market research and branding in Canadian provincial and federal courts. Most recently Ian is a Founding Partner of digiAindra, a one-stop (actually a non-stop) digital marketing turnkey solutions provider.

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Finding, and correctly attributing, images

November 9th, 2011

Although this may not seem to be directly about digital marketing, indirectly it is. As more and more people start DIY digital marketing, finding neat, free, images…and displaying them with the required attribution becomes important. Digital is all about sharing. Never have there been so many images available for you, at no cost. But they deserve the respect of attribution.

Finding free images

I haven’t had much success in searching for “royalty free images”. My experience is that all you find are the bait of paid image websites. A frustrating trek through bait and switch goodies aimed at getting you to pay for something. Of course, I may be doing it wrong. Your mileage may vary.

The 50 Ways Wikispaces site has some good ideas for finding good, free, royalty-free, images. As does Skelliwag.

FriedBeef recommends FlickrStorm, personally I find the thumbnails it produces a little small, and the search process very hit-and-miss.

What I usually do is search on the Attribution Licensed page in Flickr Creative Commons page. Enter whatever keywords you want.

As I’m in Bangkok with flood waters destined, slowly, to arrive; I searched for “Thailand floods”. Then, here’s the trick, on the Sort line click the button for “interesting”. This will show images that have been used, commented on, saved…and they do tend to be “interesting”. Like this one:


  by  DVIDSHUB 

The attribution data with this image is worth quoting:

U.S. Marines comprising the humanitarian assistance survey team, III Marine Expeditionary Force, not shown, conduct an aerial assessment of the flooded areas in and around Bangkok, Thailand, Oct. 24, 2011. Kristie Kenney, U.S. Ambassador to Thailand, flew with the HAST during the assessment. The HAST is providing information as to any support for humanitarian aid and/or disaster relief III MEF may be able to provide. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Robert J. Maurer) III Marine Expeditionary Force Combat Camera Date Taken:10.24.2011 Location:BANGKOK, TH Related Photos: dvidshub.net/r/fn4lrj

But if I didn’t want to list all that, I could grab the required attribution data using the method below (that’s how I got that little link under the image…which is probably worth more to the image creator than the words in the attribution…and is usually actually required).

Other than Flickr

The US National Parks Service has photos, videos and podcasts. The photos are arranged in useful albums by themes/locations…but the copyright position is not completely clear to me. I had thought that all .gov content was free to use, but this page suggests that might not be true.

Then of course there’s Wikimedia Commons of images, sounds and videos. This categorizes images by quality. Valued images are a good place to start. A valued image is “considered to be the most valued illustration of its kind by the Commons community” . Each file comes with a box of HTML attribution code, making it easy to get things like on a blog or a wiki.

Getting the attribution right

One excellent tool for this is ImageCodr. Given the URL of a Flickr image, ImageCodr will generate the code for the image and the necessary attribution. That’s how I got the code for the image and attribution below:


  by  paul (dex) 

I just flicked myself (in WordPress) into HTML and stuck in the code. I find it helps to put in a line with <nbsp> (a non-breaking space) at the start AND end of the ImageCodr code. Then when you flip back to Visual (my HTML isn’t up to much), it’s easy to restart typing. If you don’t have that <nbsp>, WordPress in visual isn’t always happy

Paste the URL

ImageCodr lets you paste in the Flickr image’s URL here. Or (what I prefer to do) you can drag a link into your toolbar, and when you find an image you want to use, simply click the toolbar link. ImageCodr launches and generates the necessary HTML for you. Just be careful to copy it all: triple click or whatever in the HTML box, and scroll the box up and down to check you grabbed all the code.

Other image attribution solutions

I’ve seen reference to a similar tool, PhotoDropper, which works as a WordPress plugin, but I haven’t tried that yet.

Attribution for saved images

What I would really like to find, is a way to save attribution data with images.

I prefer to scour for images when I’m too tired to do anything else. Then save the images for later use. Often the images make me thing of how I want to use them.

Then I use them in presentations more often than in HTML. Unfortunately by the time I use them, I rarely have the URL where I found them. For a while, I tried keeping the exact filename as on Flickr, then adding some descriptive info, thinking I could search for the filename on Flickr and recover the attribution data when I used the image. Sadly, this yielded very long filename and made everything a bit unmanageable. The closest solution I’ve found is the MIRFLICKR image collection. This claims to have downloadable images with attribution data…can’t check as it’s still downloading, If anyone knows how to download Flickr images AND the attribution data…perhaps two files with the same name: one an image one text, I’d really like to hear it.

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Interesting digimarketing for automobiles from VW

October 31st, 2011

I seem to be seeing more and more interesting digital marketing for autos. Maybe it’s just become more salient to me since a did a Digital Marketing Seminar for Chinese auto-marketers in Beijing. Sponsored by Tencent and organized by CEIBS, it was a very interesting group.

One of the requests they made was that I present some of what I considered to by leading, marketing-cutting-edge (which is often NOT technical cutting-edge), digital marketing. So I started clipping things as I see them. Please jump in and add more.

VW Tiguan Cross-country

One simple, effective, on-brand, and with a twist, TVC that has great viral video potential, I saw courtesy of Creativity OnLine, was a  piece by DDB Sydney for VW. Take a look yourself:


VW LinkedIn

Then I came across another VW while doing some research on marketing with LinkedIn. One of the first brands to get linked up (sorry) with the LinkedIn API.

This ran in the Netherlands, April (2011) I think. It’s called “LinkedUit” which is LinkedOut in Dutch. The way it works, you can challenge another LinkedIn user to see who has the “strongest” profile. The overall winner gets the VW Passat.

The DigitalBuzz Blog, has the branding angle as that, like LinkedIn profiles, the VW Passat is fully loaded with standard features. Mashable claims the campaign “supports the tagline, ‘Nogal vol van zichzelf,’ which translates to ‘Quite full of himself.’”

Social Times believes they’re ‘comparing the various powerful features of business moguls—lots of connections, great recommendations and more—to all the powerful features of the Passat’. Which is sort of what DigitalBuzz Blog thinks too.

Whatever, so the brand link is a little bit of a stretch. But think of all the potential customer info that pours out of those LinkedIn accounts.

What’s more, as Simple Zesty point out, there’s also an end for LinkedIn. It actually encourages people to fill out more details in their LinkedIn profiles!

Volkswagen Linkeduit from Fethi Uluak on Vimeo.

It’s by t Achtung in Amsterdam

 

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Klout, TweetLevel…what are they worth?

October 28th, 2011

How not to explain Klout

Take a look at this video, (came to me via Mashable)

This video is a great example of using Xtranormal, an incredibly easy to use service that lets you make cartoon videos from your own scripts. I’ve experimented with the free version a while back, and kept meaning to go back to it, seeing this video reminds me to look into it again.

Kout moved down this week

The trigger for this video seems to have been the drop in many Klout scores this week as “they” refined their algorithm. My personal score seemed pretty unaffected so I can take a disinterested view. My score’s  here. As I write this I’m at 47: 47.15, 485, 18, 19 to give my full vital statistics.

But I recall a few months back, an earlier algorithm change dumped me, and I felt quite down.

Measures that define themselves

Klout is one of those ideal businesses. They’re measuring something which is important to many people: how important they are in social media. But which is not easily to cross-check. Its measured in a way which they make little attempt to explain in detail. It’s like a modern day AC Nielsen rating or market share stat. Hard to live without, and hard to check. It’s a bit as though the beauty pageant judges also took all the vital statistics (do people still use those words? apparently they do: Google shows up 6m plus results; with 200 plus in News), in a way that no-one could check.

I preferred the old-style Klout of a few months back. That showed in more detail the people they claimed influenced me. I have no idea at all how they measured this. But it gave a useful repertoire of new people to follow. I simply drilled down in Klout to find the people that influenced the people they claimed influenced me. They tended to be journalists or broadcasters, mainly in UK, who had higher Klout scores than me. And mostly they followed me back.

This resource is much depleted now. Klout now focuses on people I influence, with tags suggesting I invite them to Klout. I have a nagging feeling that if I did my Klout score would go up.

Klout Perks

Then they’ve added Klout Perks. These are offers, most of which carry the small print “Sorry you’re not eligible” and a “How to be eligible” roll over. For me eligibility mainly requires that I tweet about different topics, and move to the US, or a specific part thereof.

These perks are an outgrowth of earlier celebrated marketing use of Klout scores. A couple that I recall: last June (2010), Virgin America offered free flights to high Klout scores to launch its new route out of Toronto. Then Las Vegas Palms Hotel and Casino set up a special Klout Klub last September (2010): jacket not required, but Klout score essential. The Virgin application seems more appropriate as if high Klout scores are really influentials, and if the flight service is good, it should get a deal of social media buzz.

Basically I think Klout Perks are hoping to bring Klout promotions within the reach of smaller, local, businesses. Buzz word of the year: localization. Easy do-it-yourself promotions that get lots of views, and a few actions: with the actions only available to the influential, defined within a locality.

Who guards the guards?

It makes me feel a little uneasy that the fox is assessing the solidity of the henhouse. Should the people whose magic gives you the score, also be making money from it? So those beauty pageant judges, decide the contest, measure the contestants, sign the sponsorship deals, AND take the sponsorship funds.

Competition

Now there is a Klout competitor: TweetLevel from Edelman. Now they provide a lot of (apparent) information on how their scores are derived. And one of those laughable formulas that looks as if it came from the mad scientist’s blackboard in a horror movie.



 

One of my thesis supervisors long, long ago, at London Business School, the late Professor Andrew Ehrenberg, coined the word “sonking” for this sort of thing. Stands for the Scientification of Non-Knowledge.

He would often say “I SONK therefore I am”. Needless to say he greatly discouraged us PhD students from doing it. It is a very bad habit.

I’m amazed to find that I can even find a hyperlink for SONKING. That source aptly describes Professor Andrew Ehrenberg as iconoclastic. That he was, and a brilliant man, and magnificent teacher.

My TweetLevel score right now is 67.8: my complete vital stats? 63.3, 51.7, 43.3. I see my lowest score is for “trust”. This is cross-referenced to Edelmans’ Trust Barometer.

 

 

The blurb says that its basically the rate at I which my tweets are re-tweeted. Not sure that’s what I would mean by “trust”. More like it’s interest. newsworthiness, or the intriguingness of the headline.

Refinement

But these are the days of alchemy in digital marketing. Different recipes are bandied about and hailed as elixirs. Over time the least trustworthy (omg, according to TweetLevel, that’s me!) will be officially designated as snake-oil. And there will emerge reputable measures that marketers find really do measure influence and reputation.

It will be a while before we get there. And Hey! if my scores go down, I’ll say it’s because they didn’t like this piece…

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Interactive TV via YouTube

October 27th, 2011

A Taste of What’s to Come..and what’s not quite there yet

Mashable tell me that Coldplay will stream a live concert “today at 4 p.m. ET” on YouTune, as part of the American Express Unstaged performance series.

Viewers will be able to watch a live performance (from Madrid), and be able switch between different camera view, and take part in a global live chat. We’ll actually be our own directors.

What Time is it Mr Wolf?

Now for me, the challenge is to decode the exact timing. The Mashables piece reveals–fleetingly–that it’s dated October 26. After a moment, the date changes to “11 hours ago”. So you have to be alert to know that “today” is October 26.

As I’m in Indochina time, I need to go find a world time zones site. Grabbed TimeandDate.com, World Time Converter page.. Entered October 26 16:00…decided that “ET” is Eastern Standard Time …and found the concert happened at about 3:00 a.m. this morning. Missed it already.
Anyway, you can still check out the trailer for the concert (it’s v short):


And you can take your chances with the website for the event. Pretty much a dog’s breakfast site to my way of thinking. My humble internet connection is still trying to load the video; while the flash on the righthand side slowly drives one insane. Maybe you’ll have better luck. For me it’s a “flash flood” (sorry).

Swatch Internet Time

Maybe there’s an easier way to do these global times. Certainly, I think we should be away with ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’ on global blogs. Too bad that Swatch’s internet time never really took off .  A quick google leads me to the Internet Time on the Official Swatch Website. It tells me about the concept but not what time it is!

If I click on What Beat is It?, the URL promises an iTime Converter (did Apple let that slip past?). Unfortunately the page wants my mobile phone number and email address and offers a newsletter…not the time.

Seems Swatch Internet Time may be stopped. The beat is gone?

World time

Is there an app, or a plugin, that would translate times into users’ local time zones? Or allow such a conversion to be seen on mouse-over perhaps?

There should be. Anyway this kept my mind off the approaching, fabled, Bangkok floods, which have not yet (14:15 Indochina Time) reached where I live.

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Interactive media creep over more surfaces

October 23rd, 2011

Starbuck’s Windows

From Digital Buzz Blog, I see that Starbuck’s in Toronto and Vancouver are installing some interactive windows to promote the new loyalty program. It looks like it’s strictly one way interaction.

I always think interactions with digital media should be #1 on-brand: teaching the consumer more about the brand. I guess this qualifies on those grounds as it does inform interested (effectively opted-in customers about the brand).

AND #2 meaningful: teach the brand something about the customer. Looks like this one doesn’t go that far. Doesn’t seem that your membership of, and status in, the loyalty program gets read or used at all. Maybe that’s phase two?

Then there’s #3: the viral component. What is there about the interaction that compels me to recommend it to my friends? There certainly could be something like that here. If they solved #2 and had consumers login by NFC card. Then maybe interested consumers could generate Twitter/FB content to friends and earn points?

Lot’s of potential: let’s hope it gets realized.

Starbucks Interactive Storefront from The Media Merchants on Vimeo.

Floods in Thailand

I write this, sitting in downtown Bangkok, waiting to see if the floods will get here. I guess interactive store fronts will not be here for a while! 
My local 7-Eleven just built themselves a metre high concrete wall across their store front…even across the door, which is now furnished with sandbag steps to allow you to get in the door!
Have to feel for all those people already flooded out. Some moved from one evacuation center to another. Probably they won’t be home for a month or so. Good background piece on how we got into this sorry mess by the Guardian here. Will anyone really take responsibilty?

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Merging digital and real worlds

October 21st, 2011

I seem to be seeing more and more examples of aspects of the digital world entering the real world. As digital becomes commonplace, looks like it’s becoming cool to do digital things in the real world.

Really Angry Birds

Some examples are just plain silly. Like this Mattel plastic version of the game. Hard to believe this will the cool toy of the year!



A mere $17 (about 8 time the cost of the app)

 

 

3D Angry Birds

If you’re in Changsha, Hunan province, at the WIndow of the World theme park, the you can fire real plush Angry Birds at a wooden structure, in “The 3D Angry Birds Game“, an unlicensed knock-off of the game.

Rovio Entertainment Ltd, the makers of Angry Birds, are in talks to regularize the licensing arrangement. They view their status as the third most copied brand in China as a compliment. Imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery.

They’ve also just announced they will set up their first overseas operation in Shanghai, hoping to be operational by the end of 2011. There are already almost 40 million downloas of Angry Birds in China, with deals now in place to make the app playable on feature phones (86% of China’s reported billion mobiles are feature phones).

 

 

 


Theme park creates real-life Angry Birds game by Zoomin_UK

Meanwhile, in Barcelona…

At least this version uses a smartphone as the trigger:

Then there’s Chelsea

Using football skills to repulse Space Invaders:

Honda’s Interactive Ads

More directly related to digital marketing, is Honda’s Interactive Dream Wall. This was the talk of the Australian International Motor Show in Sydney late last year.


One of the first large-scale advertising installations to incorporate facial recognition software, using 6 cameras to look for smiling visitors, with each smile triggering part of an animated story on the display. This seems a promising way to anchor digital in the real world.

Facebook friends in lights

And lets not forget the brilliant installation art piece by  Obscura Digital. As you’ll see in the video below, they  created an augmented reality experience (“Connections”) at the F8, Facebook’s developer’s conference last September. Users swiped-in with their RFID event badge.

Multiple overhead projectors tracked people on the floor, and projected  ”radial visualizations”, representing the social graph of each person. Colored lines extend to join the visalizations of friends.

Just watch the video it’s easier! I can imagine one day soon this will project onto my eye as I walk along, and I’ll never (unintentionally) cut a Facebook friend again.

Connections for Facebook from Obscura Digital on Vimeo.

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The China Difference

October 14th, 2011

Preparing to give an executive education seminar in Beijing, I’ve been brushing up on my digital marketing a la Chine.

It’s interesting to see how global brands tweak their execution around the world. For a while now I’ve been showing seminars how Lever’s Lynx/Axe brand has rather cleverly replicated their “Even Angels Will Fall” TVC in the real world, using augmented reality.

Just in case you haven’t seen the TVC (and because it is rather good), you can see it below:



The first “live” performance (if AR can be said to be “live”), seems to have been in London, England’s Victoria Station, March 5, 2011. Thanks to a large digital screen, the perfect illusion of angels falling:



Not sure just how many markets Lever has taken this to, but one of my students pointed me to the event at Paragon last June (a major shopping mall in Bangkok). Looks very similar to the UK version, although the video is not quite as good.



Mobile App

In Thailand there’s also a popular (and even more sexist) mobile app version. This let’s you catch angels in your mobile, where they simper gentle to you.





 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can even choose which ones to catch.

China…no angels

Lynx/Axe seems to have just entered the PRC market (with the Lynx name), in June 2011.

The positioning seems about the same. But sans angels. Perhaps this is based on religious differences: are those females who sweep through Kung Fu movies and kill people angels?

Or perhaps based on other cultural aspects.

In any event the AR aspect is certainly there. Here’s the Shanghai version as performed September 2011. They’re wearing a bit more, and not visibly angels. But otherwise, very much the same.



…and in private more explicit

Then there’s the Chinese AR app. Again they aren’t visibly angels.

And, perhaps in cultural respect, Razorfish Shanghai designed the app for use in private. But the “un-angels” do dance in your hands…and, hey, what’s the significance of that tissue at the end?



(many thanks to kindtyrant for providing these on YouTube…so much easier for non-Chinese readers to navigate than Tudou where these are also available).

Sequel

And if you still want more angels. The sequel to “Even Angels Will Fall” is here now. It seems a lot less sexist to me…basically illustrating some of the occupational hazards of living with an angel.

Reportedly this is the first time Lever have had a global sequel campaign like this.




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The power of connected networks…and visually attractive sharing

October 4th, 2011

Last Friday, September 30, 2011, my good friend K Siwat Chawareewong (Managing Director, mInteraction Co., Ltd.) came to along to my Digimarketing MBA course at Sasin as a guest speaker. He gave an interesting and entertaining talk on 20 Questions about Digital Marketing in Thailand. It was especially entertaining as we all knew he had about 90 minutes to speak, and at minute 85 he was only on question 12… Fortunately he had a trick up his sleeve: there were really only 13 questions!

Dog-A-Like



One of the many apps K Siwat demonstrated was Dog-A-Like. This is simple but addictive app from Australia, funded by Pedigree, is aimed at helping Australians adopt dogs from dog pounds (in Oz they seem to be called ‘shelters’).

You take your own picture. The app analyzes it and compares it to pictures of dogs from shelters across Australia. It then presents you with your “Dog-A-Like”. A dog that looks like you! You can adopt the dog, or donate funds. You can also share the results on Twitter and Facebook.

When I saw his materials immediately before the class, I knew this would be a hit. But what a hit.

Within three days, this Australian app was the #1 free iPhone app and the #3 iPad app in Thailand. Meanwhile, I guess, the folks in Australia were wondering why so many Thais were downloading this dog adoption app (perhaps they thought “are they going to eat them?” ).

 

What are the lessons?

First, digital marketing is global by definition. Attractive apps will escape from their country of origin.



One of my FB friends asked "Is this a dating app?"

Second, getting take-off is not that hard. You need an application which can be shared in a visually attractive way, which makes people say “that’s cool, I want to try that”. And, you get it into the hands of users with large connected networks: like Sasin students. Thir, maybe we could get an animal rescue group interested in launching a similar app in Thailand!

Makes me also think that one day, classes will become promotional vehicles…maybe I could get brands to sponsor the examples I give in class (or even better, to pay not to be mentioned).

By the way here’s a video about the app (and looks like Pedigree donate a bowl of dog food for every view).




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People, people, people

April 7th, 2011

It’s ironic that digital media (at first sight so cold, and, well, digital), have released a surge of creative out-pouring and brought people to the fore.

Clay Shirky, the internet writer and thought leader points out: “we are living through the largest expansion of expressive capabilities in the history of the human race”(New York Times, January 15, 2007). Never before have so many been involved in the creative expression of so much!

People as media

Marketers are now familiar with viral marketing. Just as a virus makes the infected person behave in a way that spreads the virus (by coughing and sneezing), so viral marketing spreads by the action of people. Part of the fun in receiving that cute and quirky video is being the first to send it out to your friends.

Marketers love it. People do the work, distributing the message: no media to pay for. What’s more people choose to whom they send the video. They send it to those they think will most appreciate it. No need for expensive market research and complicated media plans: people, again, do the work.

People are becoming the medium by which messages are spread. And as we saw last column, people trust messages from other people far more than any paid media. Of course creating the viral content is very hard. I don’t think anyone has the secret of producing videos that will consistently “go viral”.

People as message

Digital media have made creation of content, and publication and dissemination of content, open to all. In the old days—before we had YouTube—(that’s pre-2005) to make a video and broadcast to almost half a billion people was well beyond the resources of most!

Making videos was thought to be a specialized skill to which only the practiced and creative could aspire. To broadcast that video required access to an expensive TV station.

Now, six years after the launch of YouTube, creating videos and making them available for viewers around the world, is commonplace. To make the video and upload it is almost costless. The sheer volume of creativity that has been unleashed is mind boggling. In 6o days, more video is uploaded to YouTube alone (and YouTube is certainly not the only video hosting site), than was made by the three major US TV networks in 60 years.

Of course the quality of all that video is anything but consistent: skill, training and creativity still make a difference. But audiences are now earned not bought. Everyone, and every business, has the opportunity to have their videos seen, despite lack of budget.

For delivering “how to” information, or service advice, or quick tips to your customers, video is unrivalled and can take some of the weight off your customer support people. This use of video is sometimes call “just in time training”. The information waits patiently until customers need it. Then they search and discover the resource, just when they need it. Conventional education rests on “just in case” training: we learn lots of things that may be useful one day, and hope we haven’t already forgotten them when they’re needed.

People as people

If possible, marketers tend to steer clear of thinking about their markets as people. We talk about “targets”, “seats”, “eye-balls” etc. to try to distance ourselves from flesh and blood people.

Well, the era of mass, anonymous, marketing is nearing its close. Marketing is more and more about people: about individuals. About listening to individual customers and responding to their individual needs. This is what smart marketers have always tried to do. Digital media make this personalization possible, and affordable.

The necessary change in marketing mindset is dramatic. To go from top-down, marketer-speaks-people-listen to interactive, consumer conversations is a leap. No wonder there are so many digital marketing disasters. Digital marketers will never have the control that traditional marketers had (or possibly just thought they had).

In digital media, everyone has access. People can (and do) talk back, and expect their comments, questions, and complaints to be met with timely responses. Marketers ignore social media comments at their extreme peril.

Social media give marketers immediate, candid advice from their markets: the sort of intelligence that was once only obtainable from custom market research. Many marketers are mining the surge in people creativity for new product ideas. Listen carefully to what people are asking for in their social media, you just might find that there’s something you can deliver.

A shorter version of this article originally appeared in the Bangkok Post on April 7, 2011.

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Less can definitely be more

March 20th, 2011

Many  marketers seem to believe that in social networks quantity is everything. They’re wrong. Don’t  measure the success of your Facebook page by the sheer number of fans you’ve got; or the success of your Twittering by your number of followers.

It’s comparatively easy to build (or even buy) a fan- or follower-base. Giving something away usually works well. From a marketing perspective, fans and followers aren’t just headcount commodities. It’s engagement that you want.

A Facebook page that’s engaging has posts by “likers” (that’s what we should be calling the people previously known as “fans”, now they “like” us, not “fan” us) not just by admins. And it has replies to posts, and comments on replies, and comments on comments. The page shows ongoing conversations. An engaging Twitter account has “re-tweets”, people passing your tweets on to their own followers, often with their own comments added.

Participation

Successful digimarketing is all about participation: getting your fans and followers actively involved. Whether it’s writing posts, sharing/liking posts, uploading, tweeting or retweeting, participation is how you learn what your market really wants. It’s also how other consumers learn just what your brand and your marketing is about.

Facebook rewards brands that engage. The more a post is liked or shared (these two activities are now very similar), the more probable it is that the post will be repeated on the walls of likers. From there, it may be echoed on the walls of friends of likers, and so ripple across the social media.

We already know that the most trusted source for recommendations and reviews are consumers own (real) friends and family. The second most trusted? Reviews and recommendations posted on-line by other consumers. These are more trusted than similar information posted by “experts”, and vastly more trusted than paid advertising in traditional media.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

It takes courage for marketers to open up their brands and their marketing to consumer scrutiny. But that’s the only way to get consumer engagement. If we don’t allow consumers to have their say, we won’t get participation, we won’t learn about them, and (although we might avoid some criticism), we won’t get the persuasive power of positive comments.

A recent Burson-Marsteller study looked at the use of social media by companies in the Fortune Global 100. They found that, overall, 74% all companies allow likers to post comments to the brand’s page; and that 57% bother to routinely respond to posts by these likers. It’s a little disheartening to realize the a quarter of the largest global corporate players don’t allow consumers to have a say on their brands’ pages. It’s even more dismaying to see that almost half of these corporate giants choose to ignore their customers’ comments!

But it gets worse.

In Asia-Pacific, only 60% of companies permit likers to post to their brands’ pages, and a mere 28% routinely respond to such posts. Perhaps they feel it’s better to stifle criticism, or to ignore it and hope it will go away. Of course it isn’t, and it won’t. Europe fares about the same for permitting likers to post (59%), but a lot better in responding (half respond, half don’t bother).

Social media are built around conversations. Conversations help us learn the interests of others. Conversations help us convince others of our position; or help convince us of theirs; or (most likely) help us both adapt, and both learn. If, as brands and corporations, we aren’t responding to our customers’ voiced opinions, we aren’t engaging, we aren’t making best use of social media. It seems that leading Asia Pacific corporations are well behind the game in getting customer engagement.

Listen and respond

Another recent study, involved on-line shoppers in the US, who had posted negative reviews in social media. 68% of them reported that the retailer responded to their complaints. Following that response 34% of them deleted their own negative review; 33% turned around and posted a positive review; 18% became loyal customers and actually made additional purchases from that retailer.

The other 32% heard nothing from the retailer about whom they had complained. 61% of them said they “would have been shocked if the retailer had responded”.

What should a successful digimarketer do: (a) Prevent complaints from being made? (b) Ignore complaints when they are made? Or (c) “Shock” complainants by responding, turn negative reviews into positive reviews, and perhaps even increase sales?

Is that what you are doing now?

A shorter version of this article originally appeared in the Bangkok Post on March 17, 2011.

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