Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: marketing

  • Facebook’s war on nipples continues

    Facebook’s war on nipples continues

    Mike Stevens, a cartoonist with the New Yorker magazine, found himself the latest victim of Facebook’s War On Nipples when his cartoon depicting Adam and Eve caused the magazine’s Facebook page to be shut down.

    This is the latest shot in Facebook’s War On Nipples. Two years ago a Sydney jeweller found her page shut down for using a naked doll as a model and breast feeding mothers waged a long campaign against the site taking down pictures of babies being fed.

    If you live outside the US, it’s amusing to observe Americans’ bipolar attitude towards women’s breasts — on one hand they are celebrated though Pamela Anderson, breast enhancement and Hooters while the merest flash of nipple sends the nation into purient overdrive.

    So Mark Zuckerberg’s ban on female nipples is understandable in that context as is the reaction to that ban by people who don’t see much wrong with breast feeding mums or harmless cartoons.

    What we should remember though is Facebook have the right to run their site whatever way they like — if Mark Zuckerberg decides he doesn’t like plaid shirts or broccoli he’s within his rights to ban pictures those as well.

    This is the risk if you’re basing marketing strategies around social media services. If you want to play on Facebook, you have to play by Facebook rules.

    So take your nipples elsewhere.

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  • This is what happens when you rush things

    This is what happens when you rush things

    Nokia are going to release a smartphone with the best camera seen so far on a mobile phone.

    Desperate for good news and positive coverage, Nokia decided to announce the Lumia 920 prematurely and their marketing people are forced to fake the videos and sample photos.

    Then they get caught.

    And instead of having the media fawning over the impressive features of the Lumia 920, Nokia are scorned. A particularly damaging thing in a fortnight where Amazon and Apple have major announcements.

    The problem is giving yourself artificial milestones that can’t be met. People take shortcuts to meet those deadlines and debacles like Nokia’s are the result.

    Artificial “drop dead dates” are the mark of panic by poor management. One wonders how long this can continue at Nokia.

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  • Finding the perfect customer

    Finding the perfect customer

    With the rise of social media we’ve spoken a lot about customers’ ability to rate businesses and overlooked that companies have been rating their clients for a lot longer. The same technologies that are helping consumers are also assisting companies to find their best prospects.

    A business truism is that Pareto’s Rule applies in all organisations – 20% of customers will generate 80% of a company’s profits. Equally a different 20% of clients will create 80% of the hassles. The Holy Grail in customer service is to identify both groups as early as possible in the sales cycle.

    Earlier this week The New York Times profiled the new breed of ratings tools known as consumer valuation or buying-power scores. These promise to help businesses find the good customers early.

    While rating customers according to their credit worthiness has been common for decades, measuring a client’s likely value to a business hasn’t been so widespread and most companies have relied on the gut feeling of their salespeople or managers. The customer valuation tools change this.

    One of the companies the NYT looked at was eBureau, a Minnesota-based company that analyses customers’ likely behaviour. eBureau’s founder Gordy Meyer tells how 30 years ago he worked for Fingerhut, a mailorder catalogue company that used some basic ways of figuring out who would be a good customer.

    Some of the indicators Fingerhut used to figure if a client was worthwhile included whether an application form was filled in by pen, if the customer had a working telephone number or if the buyer used their middle initial – apparently the latter indicates someone is a good credit risk.

    Many businesses are still using measures like that to decide whether a customer will be a pain or a gain. One reliable signal is those that complain about previous companies they’ve dealt with; it’s a sure-fire indicator they’ll complain about you as well.

    What we’re seeing with services like eBureau is the bringing together of Big Data and cloud computing. A generation ago even if we could have collected the data these services collate, there was no way we could process the information to make any sense to our business.

    Today we have these services at our fingertips and coupled with lead generators and the insights social media gives us into the likes and dislikes of our customers these tools suddenly become very powerful.

    While we’ll never get rid of bad customers – credit rating services didn’t mean the end of bad debts – customer valuation tools are another example of how canny users of technology can get an advantage over their competitors along with saving time in chasing the wrong clients.

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  • Selling old rope

    Selling old rope

    “Big Data is a fad” announced a speaker at a technology conference. “We’ve had Big Data for years. We used to call it business analytics.”

    He’s right. The IT industry is very good at rebadging technology and the term ‘Big Data’ is just the latest of many examples — the best of which is how ‘cloud computing’ which is largely a rebadging of SaaS, Application Service Providers or client-server.

    While it’s easy to be cynical about this IT industry habit, there is a valid underlying point to this repainting old rope — that the refurbished old string is cheaper and more useful than what came before it.

    The problem for innovators creating accessible, cheaper and faster ways to do things is they risk that their product will be likened to the old, expensive and inaccessible methods. No cloud computing provider wants to be associated with IBM’s expensive client-server products or the flaky Application Service Provider of the dot com era.

    Most innovations aren’t revolutionary, they have evolved out of an older way of doing things. So saying “it’s being done before” when seeing an innovative product may be missing the point.

    In the case of Big Data the principles aren’t new but we’re collecting more data than ever before and the old tools — even if they could manage with the volume of information— are far more expensive than the new services.

    So repainting old rope isn’t always done for purely marketing purposes, sometimes there’s a real benefit to the customers.

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  • Losing the hospitality battle

    Losing the hospitality battle

    Travel review site Tripadvisor released its 2012 Industry Index examining the 25,000 responses from hotels around the world and 1,000 Australian hospitality businesses who took part in the survey.

    The index covers a wide range of areas of how the hospitality industry is dealing with connected customers, the web and how hotels are dealing with the relative performances of markets in Europe, North America and Asia.

    A disturbing part of the survey was how many smaller businesses are falling behind their bigger competitors with less than half of Australian Bed & Breakfasts agreeing the statement that an “ability to book via my property’s website on a mobile device is ‘very important,” while 70% of hotels agreed.

    The failure of smaller properties to engage online is borne out anecdotally as well, at a recent business breakfast a B&B owner – whose main business was furniture retailing – moaned about the negative TripAdvisor reviews his place had.

    When it was suggested he might want to engage with the unhappy customers, the proprietor threw his hands up and said “our solicitor told us that it was too expensive to sue.” He wouldn’t accept that the dissatisfied guests might have a legitimate complaint that should be addressed.

    At the same time larger hotel chains have full time teams monitoring comments on Tripadvisor, Facebook and other online forums, fixing problems that are being mentioned and then telling the world they have resolved the issue.

    There’s a good reason for this. Ask someone planning a major holiday and you’ll find almost all of them are reading reviews on sites like Tripadvisor, Fodors or Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree before booking accommodation or flights.

    While many of the hotel management responses are boilerplate – repeated replies like “Thank you for your review and we appreciate you taking the time to share with us your experience as we are always pleased to receive feedback from our valued guests” is not what social media or customer service is – at least there is a perception that senior management is listening.

    At many establishments senior management really is listening, a country manager of one of the world’s biggest chains describes how his three person team sends him a report each day of any complaints being listed online. These are checked out and any systemic problems they find such as surly front of house staff, poor housekeeping or incorrect billings are addressed immediately.

    Having a direct line to happy or dissatisfied customers is one of the major benefits social media offers businesses. That smaller hotels aren’t doing this while their multinational competitors indicates the independent sectors of the hospitality industry are falling behind the majors.

    The furniture shop owner with a B&B investment illustrated the problem, not only was he not engaging with dissatisfied customers on TripAdvisor, he had no idea whether his businesses were listed on Google Places, Facebook or any other online listing service – “my wife does that” was his dismissive answer.

    Possibly the most overused quote in modern business is ice hockey star Wayne Gretzky’s “skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been”. Those smaller hospitality businesses not taking the mobile web, review sites or social media seriously aren’t even in the skating rink in today’s game.

    There’s a lot more interesting ideas in the TripAdvisor report that should have any hospitality thinking about how customer service and marketing are evolving in a connected society. It’s worth a read.

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