The Perfect Microsite… is now Social

I was reading this post:

http://wearesocial.net/blog/2009/04/death-microsite-act-4/

and was wondering why anyone thinks that Microsites are anything useful anyway. Most microsites exist to support a campaign and are temporary anyway.  The fact is that I don’t like them because they generally support an expensive marketing campaign and are essentially identikit anyway.  They’ll have some cool content, they’ll “hero” a brand and then there’ll be a “register” and a “send to a friend” type of thing.

Microsites have been dead a long time – Agencies just don’t know it

The thing that always amused me about microsites was how they generated traffic from all the wrong people. A large proportion of the traffic was from workers/friends at other agencies wondering what the agency that built it had just done. A large other part of the traffic was from those who received the campaign anyway, and so weren’t new customers.

Microsites start in the wrong place

Basically, social networks make the rules change so significantly, that Microsites become much less important (unless you are still working to the same metrics as 10 years ago – Hint: they’ve changed!).  It’s far more about who the audience is than what you are trying to promote.

Microsites (or their replacement) must now be social.What that means is yet to be understood as nobody has yet done a highly successful social campaign yet.  When it does, all I hope is that agencies don’t just do their usual “copy and screw it up” routine.

Marketing costs will reduce, Community Consulting will Increase

This is the key. The world will change to be much more about who your community is and where they talk, rather than trying to setup “microsites” which are at best temporary and at worst a celebration of how much money an agency can make out of a stupid company just for some old style print design on the web.

Community is now so important that it cannot be ignored. Most of the major companies are aware of this, but it changes marketing into a much more conversational activity. It’s not even about permission to talk to me, as I now have an expectation of a conversation with any brands.

How do you manage community?

Psychology and Sociology are far more important in marketing now than they ever were. Maybe the key people are not techies or designers any more, but those that are able to understand people and the business models of a client. It’s a very different world.

Startup Sales and Lead Generation Tips (from my Twitter friends)

I’ve been wondering how a twitter stream can help a business, so I thought I’d try a quick test on twitter.  First a bit of background…

I run a business!

It’s called Vida (or various other names I choose to call it) and it’s always been a vehicle to allow me to have lots of fun doing interesting projects for companies like Gap, Honda, Isuzu, Coke, Unilever and Tesco. Mainly working through other agencies, as Vida doesn’t have a large sales and marketing budge and I never really wanted to employ people.  I have 2 kids and I’ve seen them grow up to be 6 and 8.  Best choice I’ve ever made.

Now my kids are in school, I’m thinking it’s probably more important to build up the company, so I need a new Sales and Marketing approach.

Crowd Sourcing Business Consultancy via Twitter

I have around 250 people on Twitter who follow me. I also post my twitter feed to Jaiku, Friendfeed, and Facebook, so lots of people read my twitters.  I’ve seen people ask questions on Twitter and get very useful responses, so I thought I’d try it.  My question was:

if you were to start a company now, what would be your tips for lead generation and sales?

I then direct messaged a few people to ask for their responses. I got several very interesting ones.  Some of the answers are picked out below:

martinpacker @pjnet Sniff around the tragedies of others?

epredator @pjnet share everywhere work a freemium model and see every person on every network as customer trust serendipity

NikkiPilkington @pjnet SEO, online networking and article marketing – work hard to build brand and reputation

stevepurkiss @pjnet network, network, network…

rooreynolds @pjnet asks “if you were to start a company … tips for lead generation and sales?” – be Interesting. Don’t treat social media as marketing

PBJohnson @pjnet but SEO is easier to grasp than networking … so easier to outsource?

epredator @pjnet if you attract people they are the right people you may have to alter the “product”

NikkiPilkington @pjnet fair enough – I misunderstood “reserve of small biz”

SuButcher @pjnet think about the client/user/purchaser. What are they thinking? What do they want? Where will they go to get it?

epredator @pjnet “no publicity is bad publicity” social media and long tail engagement seems to offer opportunity to engage with customers new and old

Other Comments

I also received several direct messages, and one of which caught my eye. Roo Reynolds sent me 2 links on Interestingness, one from his own blog and one from Russel Davies which I think are stunningly good links on how to be interesting as a person:

how to be interesting A brilliant and timeless blog on how to attract people

Russell Davies well worth a read to give Roo’s take on Russell’s ideas

So What Now?

So, I’ve had lots of advice, and I’ve generated lots of ideas. I personally think that SEO is far from useful when going after large corporate accounts, but I see the purpose of it.  I do think however, I’m going to remember to blog more, and make myself more interesting!

So watch this space. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll be more interesting.

Difficult Social Media Questions

After reading Andy Piper’s blog I found one of his delicious links very intriguing:

Ten Questions Not To Ask A Social Media Panel

It’s basically asking difficult questions around the subject of how Social Media is seen in the advertising/marketing world.  Things like “How do you plan a Social Media Campaign?” and “What’s a friend worth?”.

All really valid questions, but it does raise some interesting points. The best part of the article is the comments though.  Why? Because they bring more pertinent information out about the state of the market and how executives and corporates see the Social Media world.  Especially F100 companies in the US (and therefore FTSE100 in the UK).

I recently had the opportunity to sit in a marketing meeting with a large clothing retailer in the UK.  It was an odd meeting as they were being sold a marketing campaign around real metrics (100k+ people) with the aim of “getting more email addresses”.  In other words, sending an email out with a 50% off voucher, and “send to a friend” emails.  The aim was to increase the number of people they could spam to.  How very 1990s.

The interesting thing is that this ideas is self-perpetuating for the marketing company (not the brand).  If you get a whole load of email addresses in one campaign, you’re going to do the same campaign the next time.  What happens when email becomes less important?  What happens when all the important conversation is on Facebook, or worse, distributed over different social networks?

The conversation then turned to Facebook because the key demographic fits the Facebook profile.  Their question was “How do we use it?”.  I think there’s a fundamental flaw in that exact question.  In the end, I advised the company not to even go near thinking about engaging with Facebook (or any other Social Media) unless it was going to change it’s entire marketing approach. Why? Because people are far less easy to fool directly (on a 1 to 1 basis), rather than as a crowd.   Social Media works at the 1 to 1 level.

Social Media is not to be used, it’s to be engaged with.  It’s not to be controlled, it’s to be released.  It’s not for trying to get more “customers” it’s for trying to create brand advocates.  It’s higher risk, but with much higher reward.

Brands and Companies need to realise that Social Media is not a “strategy” that is either easy or non-disruptive to their organisation. There is no easy way to start a “campaign” – and as the blog post says, there’s no guarantee that there is such a thing as a “campaign” in Social Media.

So, how do you incorporate Social Media into your brand or company? I think I’ll leave that for the next blog.

Marketing/Advertising agencies – they’re dooooomed

According to everything I read at the moment, traditional marketing agencies (offline, online, digital etc) are doomed.  I don’t agree.

The business model of throwing money at an agency to get a revenue from sales will change. The talent for advertising and marketing will also not be focussed on several main companies/groups, but will in the end transfer to a bunch of smaller much more loose knit collaborations. The winning agency will become the agency that embraces community.

I read recently that there is more advertising budget from blue-chips going into starting and maintaining social networks (both internally and externally) and all that goes with it. However, I think that’s the right area, but a misguided proposition.  I suspect it’s been sold-in by agencies without a full understanding of what they’re doing.

Companies will never be able to build big social networks, because they aren’t trusted.  People will not join as they will feel “sold” to.  The ones that do join, are almost certainly not the people they want to talk to either, unless their long-term aim is to get those people to consume more of their product.  That’s fine, but unlikely to work, as people are feeling less and less affiliation with brand and are more and more seeking out their own personal communities.

Companies need to recognise that they need to participate in the network to build up credibility. Then recognising that they have credibility, they will need to push the idea of value… for the community but not necessarily for them.

Shareholders won’t (and don’t) like it, unless the business model is entirely around the advert model (I have the eyeballs, you pay to place something in front of them).  In the end, shareholder led companies care only about the money.  Social networks are difficult value propositions in that sense.  Control of the message and conversation is reduced. The internet makes web investment more of a gamble than more old-school industries and models, so it requires a different type of investor and a different type of shareholder.

So, advertising will – and is – become more about showing how companies can be more community-centric and community-valuable.  Unless agencies pick that idea up, and more importantly work out how to sell it to their clients, then they will struggle to retain clients.

There will always be companies that stick to the old models until new ones come along. I remember listening to a Unilever representative about 2 years ago saying that they were going to “wait and see” what happens with social networks and associated business models before deciding on whether to throw marketing budgets at them. Unilever and others appear to be the safe industries, that will throw large budgets at “tried and tested” approaches.  These are the companies with the safe investors.  These are the companies with an unimaginative view of the world.

If your agency has that kind of client, then you’d better watch out that they don’t drag you away from the future and drag you down with them.