Is it time yet for us to create a Do Not Text Registry? This list would work similar to that of the Do Not Call Registry but instead of allowing marketers to be able to contact you if there is an existing business relationship, this registry would allow mobile phone users to opt out of receiving such messages altogether whether or not you have a business relationship with them.
I respect the fact that companies have to make money and people buying their product/service would seem like a lucrative and attractive customer segment to solicit. What I do not agree with is that I have to make an effort on my part to opt out from unwanted marketing messages. It seems like it would make more sense for both sides if mobile users had to opt in to receive these marketing messages.
I know how annoyed I get when I receive an unwanted text message without giving my expressed consent; this usually results in me silently cursing the company who sent it. It also seems to me that this practice would negatively impact companies as well besides the most obvious affect of creating an unfavorable brand impression. An unwanted text message would likely be a liability for a company in the ways of wasted marketing dollars and loss of ROI (albeit SMS or MMS campaigns are cheaper than traditional advertising). Budgeting costs should be looked at more seriously when taking into consideration over half of brands expect to shell out between 5-25% of their total marketing budget on mobile marketing in the future.
There needs to be a better way for brands and consumers to come together and agree on texting and mobile media solicitation guidelines. IMC professionals should be strategizing now to circumvent what could be a heated debate in the future. What are your thoughts? How can the mobile marketing industry protect consumers but also build marketing databases?
There is money to be made out there folks and all it takes is a computer, some creativity, a knack for the written word. Forget about the current recession we’re in just join the Blogosphere and your pockets will become so full you’ll hemorrhage money. People are getting paid to blog ya’ll. I know you have seen the ads online where companies are coaxing you to blog for them and earn anywhere from $5-$100 per post. Even if you’re not making cash money some companies will compensate you with free products for your services. Not bad, right? The crazy thing is that this is not even where the real dollars roll in. Some bloggers are bringing in upwards of $75,000 a year based on the number of hits their site gets.
This is a great opportunity for job seekers but what about people who are searching for product reviews and information? There are such things as professional bloggers, people who go out and write content for many blogs with some of the postings earning them compensation and others not. Do you feel this is a legitimate business undertaking for writers to offer reviews and receive compensation? Or do you see this as a conflict of interest? Celebrities endorse products all the time but there is usually some type of disclosure about their compensation however, there are no regulations in place to govern the Blogosphere.
I like to think that most people can be trusted to give consumers unbiased reviews however, I have to be realistic and assume that some will be influenced to by their compensation to make a review turn out a certain way. All consumers should have the right to know about a blogger’s compensation package. If there is no wrong doing involved, what is the harm in this type of disclosure? Some bloggers may worry that if their compensation is revealed that people might not visit their site. I beg to differ on the premise that a blog post which is well researched and written will still attract visitors even if the blog’s creator gets to keep the digital camera they reviewed.
Advertising to children is a very touchy subject among many members of the population; some site that it unduly tries to solicit youngster for sales, and still others object because children are more susceptible for falling prey to deceptive advertising.
Proctor and Gamble brand, Tampax may be guilty of deceptive advertising. Currently the tampon maker is heading up a viral marketing campaign known as Zack16.com.
This campaign follows the adventure or misfortune (depending on how you see it) of Zack Johnson a 16 year-old boy who wakes up to discover that his male genitalia have been replaced with girl parts. Zack16 is headed by a blog on which the main character chronicles his story; the site also features other new media such as video diary entries and Twitter feed. This all seems innocent enough even though the P&G company is not disclosed on the site; however the Tampax brand name is casually mentioned in site posts or shown sporadically in video scenes.
It seems rather sneaky that P&G would not want their name associated with such an innovative concept. Maybe P&G are following a theory expressed by Melissa Wolfson, president of the Creative Couch a promotion agency that specializes in youth marketing?
Or is it something less innocent like the personal care giant wants to push their brand on teenage girls but not be called out about the fact? They want to make it look like it’s the teens’ own discovery and not some tricky marketing ploy for sales.
Take a look at this Zack16.com and tell me what you think. P&G’s approach seems harmless enough. Most girls by the time they have reached womanhood are aware of a number of feminine hygiene brands and will recognize a veiled marketing attempt, no matter how innovative it is.
The world of advertising is changing. People are no longer excited by things like YouTube videos or viral posts. New media is not new enough anymore we want innovative media. Innovative media is not edgy enough we want shock and awe mediatising. A brave new world of advertising is afoot…or rather should we say underarm. Enter the new frontier of advertising brought to you by Right Guard deodorant, I give thee Pitvertising! Eww…pitvertising you stammer. Yes, pitvertising I answer in the affirmative.
No, I’m not kidding you folks; apparently somebody in the Right Guard camp out of London came up with the smart idea of sewing digital TV screens into the armpits of shirts. Right Guard hired male models referred to as “Pitvertisers” to go out on a summer excursion and promote the brand in this innovative fashion. According to Right Guard, “Pitvertising is a new and unexpected way of reminding the consumer to stay cool this summer!” The Pitvertisers took to mass transit and did whatever they had to in order to make their underarms public business. Now I’m not sure if this marketing method will make it anywhere in the United States but I beg of them to please stay out of South Carolina. Our humidity here is crazy as it is and I do not want to hear about any accidental deaths on the news from a silly advertising medium such as this. Now what do you think people, is this going too far? Or can you see this being applied to some other body part? Scary isn’t?
What’s the hype behind this new marketing medium? Is it all what it’s cracked up to be? How receptive would you be to receiving message on your cell phone? Are some of the questions that come up when the phrase mobile marketing is mentioned. Mobile marketingas defined by the Mobile Marketing Associationis the use of wireless media as an integrated content delivery and direct response vehicle within a cross- media or stand-alone marketing communications program.
Mobile marketing can be used for a variety of reasons by a company—increasing customer loyalty, generating brand awareness, building customer databases, cheaper campaign cost, etc.
Even with these metrics in place companies are still slow to saddle up to the mobile marketing horse; the main two culprits center around consumer consent and ROI. Personally, every opt-in message I have received via text has been declined. It kind of put me in the frame of mind of the calls I used to get from telemarketers before I registered with the Do Not Call Registry. Andrew Hawley from TCN cautions marketers about using mobile marketing due to the personal nature of the medium. Marketers need to make sure the mobile messages they’re sending are relevant to users, considered valuable by users and possess clear opt-out instructions. Mobile marketing’s ROI is largely unproven since the medium is still in its infancy. When marketers have other media that they can throw their dollars that have proven and quantifiable results it makes mobile marketing seem a little less attractive.
So what does the future hold for mobile marketing? In short the answer is limitless because the potential of this medium is largely undiscovered. My hunch leads me to believe its usage will continue to expand as the population of mobile users increase. What do you think about mobile marketing? Do you think it’s a smart evolution of the selling game or do you feel it’s an invasion of privacy? Would you be willing to opt-in to receive mobile advertising and if not is there anything that would make you change your mind?
While researching on search engine fatigue I ran into some other examples of fatigue hitting internet users but the one that most caught my eye was e-commerce fatigue. I am an avid online shopper, possibly using the internet for up to 90% of my purchases so this seemed a good topic to investigate to make sure I don’t run my hobby thin.
One proposed cause of this retrograde to bricks and mortar shopping is the increasing shipping rates of ecommerce retailers. Another reason hinges on the affinity for interactive shopping experiences.
Nancy F. Koehn, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies retailing and consumer habits posited that bricks and mortar stores have stepped up to the plate and related to in-store customers by making “in person buying experiences more pleasurable.” Online outlets on the other hand give shoppers a mediocre experience. Koehn pointed out that online shopping feels more like a chore than an escape because it involves a computer and makes shoppers feel like they are doing work.
Ecommerce fatigue is a solvable problem according to some experts and the answer lies in the cornerstone of integrated marking communications—delivering a consistent consumer experience across all brand channels.
“When you introduce new channels, consumers tend to use them all, not migrate from one to another.” A retailer practicing this concept through a “clicks and bricks” strategy is Banana Republic. Banana Republic excels in offering their customers a consistent and interactive brand experience; the website mirrors in-store color and classic styling choices while online customers get the same conveniences as in-store ones through quality features such as their accommodating return policy.
The lesson here is that online retailers will have to work harder and anticipate consumer needs better if they want to stop the revenue slump. It will take more than a pretty home page or a 40 percent off sale to keep customers online and spending money. Online retailers have to be proactive in making their sites engaging and accessible and this can be accomplished by keep it in-line with their overall brand message.
Did you know there is a new illness going around and chances are you are likely to get it during sometime in your life? In fact 7 out of 10 Americans do experience it. It’s not deadly as in the case of the media’s current obsession, swine flu. It is however, crippling to its victims in a way that is considered excessively debilitating. This illness of which I speak is known as search engine fatigue. Search engine fatigue you scoff? What kind of made up internet psychobabble is that you ask? Well, it actually seems like a legitimate problem when one takes in consideration the results of a poll conducted by Kelton Research which surveyed 1,001 United States adults.
Search engine fatigue is defined as a feeling of dissatisfaction when search results do not return desired information. Some of the highlights from the study include:
72.3 percent of Americans experience “search engine fatigue” when researching a topic on the internet.
65.4 percent of Americans say they’ve spent two or more hours in a single sitting searching for specific information on search engines.
75.1 percent of people who experience search engine fatigue report getting up and physically leaving their computer without the information they were seeking.
How/why does this happen is another question people may ask when informed of search engine fatigue’s existence? According to Jeffrey Beall, catalog librarian and assistant professor at the Auraria Library, University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center, “it is a lack of rich metadata and a system that can exploit the metadata.”
For those who do not know, metadata is a term for describing how and when and by whom a particular set of data was collected, and how the data is formatted. So the problem with search engines result when their metadata metrics are all too inclusive and return an abundance of hits—some relevant, most not.
There are some sites trying to remedy the search engine fatigue syndrome that is affecting millions of users. The first site AllMyFaves.com I came across through and email that circulated around my job about a week ago. The subject title of the email read: “Mother of all Websites!” The body simply said: “This is the coolest thing since the invention of the remote control. Just Point and Click! Then pick a site! BOOM! And there it is.”
AllMyFaves Week Page
So of course I had to try it out and I’m glad I did. AllMyFaves is billed as an innovative visual exploration of the internet. Brothers Shachar and Ray Pessis developed the idea out of frustration with the cumbersome state of internet search. They brainstormed the idea of a virtual directory that included “a list of top and most visited sites in major daily- used subject categories, a list they knew would introduce new and interesting things to others as it grew larger.”
So suppose a person was looking for information on weather and visited the AllMyFaves site. All s/he would have to do is scroll down to the weather category on the home page and BOOM—11 top sites listed! This seems really cool because in my case I only was aware of five of the sites but now I have a whole different set of resources related to weather that I can use. This looks to be pretty encompassing with categories from video to insurance to recipes. AllMyFaves.com also offers Weekly Faves (which is a roundup of AllMyFaves Internet Team’s favorite sites of the week) and Weekly Games (which are handpicked each and every week by their game experts who actually go and test the sites).
The other site, bing.com is actually a redesign of the MSN search engine. MSN realized the evolving state of internet search and felt their search engine capability was out of touch with the information people were really searching for.
As their introduction proclamation states:
“We took a new approach to go beyond search to build what we call a decision engine with a powerful set of intuitive tools on top of a world class search engine. Bing will help you make smarter, faster decisions.”
Bing looks like it is off to a promising start from my preliminary investigation of the site. To test it out I put in the term kayaking and Bing redirects me to a page with concise meta data selection categories. The left hand navigation boxes on the side of the screen direct one to sub categories like images, local and related searches. At this point, I click on images and get over 2 million of them. On a regular search engine this would seem daunting but Bing lets me further whittle down my results through segmenting tools like size, style or people. By choosing people you still get more choices to help you further narrow down results. I choose just face and it narrows down the number of hits significantly to a little over 6,000. There is still room to go where the site will keep segmenting down to your specific relevant search results but there is no need to go into all of that here. Take a look at Bing and AllMyFaves for yourself. Let me know what you think. Is this a way to battle the threat of search engine fatigue? Is there another approach or site that you think is better? Share your thoughts, share your cure.
Is social networking ruining our personal relationships? I don’t know. Do you? Some experts claim that it is destroying the very fabric of personal interconnectedness. Other experts claim that it connects you on a deeper level to others through “ambient awareness”. This state of consciousness allows one to be aware of other people’s lives on an almost omnipresent level.
Okay, I can buy any of those theories but what is social networking doing exactly for businesses? As an up and coming IMC professional the Integrated Marketing Communications discipline says that we are supposed to develop deeper relationships with customers. We need to involve ourselves in a two way dialogue that uncovers what consumers want and lets them know how we are trying to meet those needs.
What do you think about businesses on web sites like Twitter, is this hurting or helping them? Even though they are examples of companies who have encountered success using social networking it still seems too early to say. The future of web 2.0 still remains to be seen.
Everything’s going high tech or at least it seems that way. Even fast food is getting a technological makeover and not the boring kind involving placing your order online. Welcome to fast food 2.0—the evolution of the restaurant industry which puts the public into a voyeuristic state of consumption. What is all this crazy talk you ask? Well let me explain…
Kogi is a mobile taco truck motoring around the Los Angeles area selling Korean tacos. This seems strange by itself but to Kogi Chef and owner, Roy Choi it makes perfect sense, making Mexican dishes with Asian flavors. “These cultures—Mexican and Korean—really from the foundation of this city. Kogi is my representation of L.A. in a single bite.”
So you may be saying to yourself, “what’s so special about all of this.” Well it’s not just Kogi’s food but the way they are connecting with their customer base. Kogi is America’s first viral eatery, one that is utilizing the social networking site Twitter as a high tech word-of-mouth engine.
Twitter gives users the ability to post short mobile updates that can be seen by friends. Owner Choi felt this was a great move for the restaurant; posting the locations of their roaming mobile taco trucks to Twitter for Kogi admirers. “I can cook for 100 people a night, “says Choi. “But Twitter can hit, like 5,000 people a second. It’s word-of-mouth times a million.”
What a brilliant ideal; giving fans of your restaurant the ability to keep up with your adventures 24 hours/7 days a week! One company that could have much success with a Twitter strategy like Kogi’s would be Krispy Kreme. For people not in the know, Krispy Kreme is a southern legend for glazed yeasty creations having started out in small town Winston-Salem, North Carolina back in 1937. This franchise has a loyal following of fanatics, especially when it comes to their original glazed doughnuts affectionately referred to as HOT NOWS, because of a lighted sign stores turn on when these particular items roll hot off the line.
As a Krispy Kreme fan myself I would gladly join anything that will give me a heads up on when these things are coming off the line. Maybe Krispy Kreme should look into starting a Twitter feed. If Kogi can gather crowd exceeding 600 in Los Angele then I know a feed like that could at least wrap the drive-thu line around the Krispy Kreme building twice, if not more. Social networking is providing another avenue for customer contact, of course this has been copied time and time again but Kogi has put yet another exciting spin on this medium.
