People’s mobile phones are incredible personal devices. They are what we use to communicate with close family and friends and generally have been quite marketing and advertising free. People dislike their privacy being invaded on their mobile phone.

So a few simple rules before you start communicating via mobile:

- Get permission first
- Make sure you know what they want sent, i.e. their preferences
- Trust - you need to gain their trust as a brand first
- Make sure the information being sent it spot on relevant

Same kind of rules as any communication channel, however with mobile, it’s all the more important right now.

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At the future of digital marketing from e-consultancy (a great event by the way), there was a great speaker from John McCain’s presidential campaign who headed up the digital channels for the campaign. He said some very interesting points that made me wonder how they can be applied to traditional marketing. After all, even though there are many similarities, politics brings some pretty unique challenges.

Rapid Response
In the campaign they used Google Trends to look into what was affecting the population that hour / that day and react to that quickly and effectively. Whatever issue seemed to be being searched for the most by the public, or the issue that was rising fast, would be the subject of a Pay Per Click campaign or banner ad.

We’ve seen this to a certain extent with companies like ScrewFix. When there were some high winds a year or so ago I got an email the next day saying they had plenty of replacement fence panels in stock - I bet that campaign returned some great sales.

This kind of marketing should be undertaken more by other companies, and do it quickly. There’s no point launching a ‘beat the credit crunch’ campaign now for instance, that boat has sailed.

YouTube videos
None of the top 20 YouTube videos for either John McCain or Barack Obama were generated by their campaigns. They were all user generated content. That’s a very interesting observation. Despite all the money both of these campaigns had, users trumped their content with their own.

Empowerment of your market
What both campaigns did well, and in particular Obama’s campaign, was to empower their target markets. When you think about it from a marketing point of view, Obama’s target market is ‘everybody’. Now whenever a client says that to us, we force them to narrow it down much further because we know the more targeted the message, the more effective it will be.

What the campaigns did was to stop micro targeting markets, ethnicity or particular groups, as they recognised this is an almost endless and time consuming task. Instead, they empowered their entire target market to micro group themselves. From Obama’s site you could order everything you needed to help them spread the word in your home town or even just your street. This led to a massive number of micro pockets of supporters appearing everywhere, even in the middle of seas of opposition supporters.

When every vote counted, this kind of grass roots support is essential.

So how can you empower your market instead of targeting them?

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For the past couple of years, digital has been touted as the thing that every marketeer should be focusing on and what was and is going to provide the best returns for marketing spend over time. The time has come to stop thinking of digital and offline marketing as separate entities and deciding that ‘digital is the way forwards’ because, quite frankly, that’s too narrow minded.

Data needs to be at the centre of all marketing strategy and really, it always has been under the guise of CRM, web analytics, etc. Now however companies need to recognise that all channels be they your website or email marketing, outdoor or TV, are all about driving useful data into the organisation to help shape and drive your message to your target market.

Minority report did it well. Remember where everyone was eye scanned and shown appropriate ads - to support that you need to integrate your data in an effective way to drive message.

Let’s look at the benefits of a clean, deep database of your clients:

- A deeper relationship with each client
- Greater ability for anyone in the organisation to help a client
- Much greater client retention and satisfaction
- Easier client growth via targeted messages

This, of course, is a much wider subject of good CRM and data management. However let’s not forget the key message here (coming from a Digital director) - digital channels should never be looked at in isolation, and should never be seen as the sole saviour of your marketing. It’s always deeper than that.

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I’ve been reading a lot about Zappos and their CEO Tony Hsieh recently and most recently, in Inc magazine (a greate publication by the way). I’m really interested in him and them mainly due to them being a pureplay online retailer without stores and those overheads, and also due to their exponential growth.

There are some fantastic lessons to be learnt from Zappos and it’s all centered around creativity.

Some snippets I love:

1. Zappos seems a bit like a religion and Tony says that Business can learn a lot from Religion - I agree
2. At the end of their training, new Zappos employees are offered $2000 to quit - creative way to prove loyalty
3. Tony’s purpose now is to find out the secret to happiness - talk about a lofty aim! I love his boundlessness

I’ll keep watching them however in the mean time, I’m going to look at how we can take inspiration from what they are doing into Blueleaf and how we operate.

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Today I received an email from a networking group asking me to a ladies lunch. Now I’m not often offended however calling me a lady is a little extreme I thought.

It’s just an example of bad targeting. They may come back and say that you might know someone who is interested. Well if that’s the case you should send me a separate email asking me that - not the general one. Please, a little bit of segmentation and targeting would not go amiss.

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As some of you may well know, the cat went for a little bath yesterday when he accidentally dived into the pond in the back garden. Now this pond is not a well looked after and hence he smelled pretty bad. Today though we thought we’d see if he wanted to try his first outing into the wild of Broughton again and so for an hour or two he explored the back garden and surrounding area before coming back into the house.

Now he’s back though - he’s quite insane. Meowing much more than usual, running around with general lunatic tendencies and generally acting odd. We’ll see how he does tomorrow when we let him out in the evening, however right now, he’s certifiable.

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Recently I have been reading a lot on the emerging market of service design, and how it affects our industry as an agency at Blueleaf, and how it affects my role.

Service design is the process of using design methods and experience to change the way services operate and interact with their users. This could be the service of airport check in to how an agency manages their client’s account.

I went to visit Engine Group (a service design consultancy in London) and met Oliver King on of the directors there which was a fascinating meeting to find out more about they operate. Thier process is this:

Which makes good sense. Thye have done some great projects as well for some great clients, and generally seem to have a great time doing it.

This got me thinking to the fact that no one is really, including some of the current service design guys, aren’t doing a lot from the point of view of digital service design, i.e. the use of experience and knowledge to design digital services for organisations to make the most of the web. It’s a perfect fit between Blueleaf, myself and our experiences.

I’ve just registered digitalservicedesign.co.uk so we’ll be looking into that more into the future to really develop it as a service. It’s a very interesting area.

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“Your inbox is a todo list that anyone in the world can write to”

- Unknown (but it wasn’t me)

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I don’t understand.

I was walking to the local shop to get some chocolate for Verity and so walking around the estate and all the grages were the same. Pointless. Small, not wide enough, too far back, impractical. You can’t get a car in, out or anything.

Nightmare. Why did the US get it so right? Why did we even build garages that were so poor.

That’s it really. Slight rant.

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2008 to 2009 is really the emergence of streams into the common culture.

Let me explain what I mean. A stream is simply a set of information that is updated all the time by events, communication, conversation, anything that could be occurring right now. Generally a lot of people are now signed up to Facebook. The information you get when you sign into Facebook is effectively your Facebook life stream. It’s what you and your friends are doing, saying, feeling, thinking right now and it’s constantly updated. Twitter is another even faster moving example of a stream.

So if you’re a business - what does this mean to you? Well you need to think about what opportunities, if any, there are to fit into that stream. The online store Zappos does this really well. Anytime someone mentions Zappos on Twitter they reply to that, with a human response, saying thanks, or offering help. Great service, great response, great customer engagement. don’t go too far though or people will think you’re invaded their space - banks for instance are organisations that generally try to push their message, not listen to their audience and so can get caught out by this backlash of personal intrusion.

So, think about how your organisation could fit well into a life stream - but don’t push it. The best way is to use the stream to help a person or to spread word of mouth recommendations (of course this can work the other way!)

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