Sandlines

I’ve long thought of  First Capital Connect’s ‘thamselink’ service as the train line that time forgot. So I was quite surprised earlier this year when they launched a potentially great Twitter service, promising that, if you tell them where you travel to and from, they will direct tweet service announcements that affect your journey.

The direct tweets generate and email and a text message to give me more-or-less instant notification of problems, so I can plan around them. This is a great customer service/marketing promise… I signed up.

I’ve since had all kinds of updates about stuff happening at opposite ends of their service, on trains that have no connection with my own little branch line. Oh well, you come to expect disappointment from train services I guess. Not the end of the world, just somewhat spammy.

This week, I’ve tried to use their trains on four separate occasions, only to discover that, for reasons that have gone unexplained (unexpected autumn leaf falls?), they have been unable to offer trains. Or, it seems, notifications on their twitter feed.

I’d never seek to discourage organisations from trying new things to improve their customer service or perception – and I strongly believe that the types of service messages First Capital Connect promised show enormous promise.

But if you make a promise, you have to keep it.

My frustration at the cancelled trains is severely compounded by the failure of the train company to keep their notification promise. I’d not have like the cancellation anyway, but would have been impressed with their ability to advise me ahead of time and therfore allow me to make other plans.

In the language of tweets, #fail

*===* UPDATE *===*

(no) more trains?

(12th November, noon) – I’ve found out why First Capital Connect are in such a bad way: they’re suffering from industrial action. They’ve even devised a new timetable. They just haven’t bothered to tell any of their twitter followers (to my knowledge) about this. Genius.

Oh – and it turns out compensation can be claimed at their website. Maybe that’s why they’re not telling anyone?

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Broad's career takes off

Disclosure: I’m a bit schizophrenic when it comes to nationality – I’m a Kiwi by upbringing but have lived in the UK since I was 20. In other words, this weekend, in sporting terms, was golden for me: NZ’s All Blacks beat the Australian Wallabies 18-19 in the Rugby to secure the Bledisloe Cup and England clinched the final (cricket) test match of the Ashes series to win the trophy back at the Oval.

Throughout my time in the online business world, I’ve recognised that sport is a key ‘passion centre’ driving the way that people consume media online – be it on any of the ‘three screens’ we like to talk about.

But for me, one of the key elements of this summer’s Ashes series has been the way in which Twitter has played a significant role. If I had a pound for every time I’ve read Lily Allen’s comments about cricket…

Not just that, but there have been tweets galore from various cricketers – including Graeme Swann (who got into mildly hot water when clearly tweeting while driving), James Anderson and (most controversially) Phillip Hughes, whose one and only tweet revealed that he’d been dropped from the Australian side before the news had reached the England team in more conventional fashion.

Against a backdrop where a research company derided most tweets as ‘meaningless babble’, it seems to be meaningless babble that newspapers love quoting…

More to the point, to me, it signals again that we have moved further and further away from a world where what makes it into the public domain is controlled by how interesting the comments are to real people rather than to the editors of various forms of broadcast media. Or, put another way, the ‘democratisation of the means of distribution’ of content.

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Welcome back to Sandlines for 2009.

As you may have noticed, since the last few days of 2008, I took a brief Christmas break from blogging, while reflecting on the year gone by, and the challenges of the year ahead.

At the same time, I’ve been considering options about what I’ll be doing for a living in 2009 and beyond. I’ll spill the beans next week, but the decision is made and I’m starting my new role on Monday.

Don’t expect any major changes in content here: Sandlines is still fully focused on the changes that technology is bringing to the marketing discipline – and how the current recession plays to that. And more than ever before, Sandlines believes that relevance is the key to unlocking return on investment.

To what extent will marketing expenditure online be positioned as a ‘cost of sale’ rather than a separate budgeting line?

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Facebook? No thanks.

Thanks to Dylan Fuller who, over in the Local Search Summit on LinkedIn drew my attention to this article. It seems that P&G are no longer interested in running advertising on Facebook. Ted McConnell, GM of Interactive marketing over at Proctor and Gamble said:

“I have a reaction to [Facebook] as a consumer advocate and an advertiser: What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?”

Now there’s a hefty dose of rhetoric about the circumstances that McConnell describes, but the point is clear: he sees Facebook (and their peers) as C2C communications, not media opportunities. He feels it is arrogant to interrupt it.

I’m unsurprised by this reaction – and I tend to agree that banners on FB are not the way forward. But it’s nothing new. After all, ad placements have funded Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail …. for years – and often quite successfully.

But it’s the placements that occur outside the composition and reading of the emails that works best – i.e. the log-on or log-off pages, or the pages that confirm an email has been sent in the old style webmail accounts. Which is logical: you’re not interrupting someone in the middle of another conversation.

Several years ago, when I was at Yahoo!, I devised a campaign for Vodafone that was deliberately designed to sit inside these types of C2C interactions. There was an obvious relevance to such a campaign that fitted with the creative tone. However, these types of campaigns have always been the exception rather than the rule.

Historically advertisers have been shy of placing brand sensitive advertising near user generated content. The risk of negative association has been deemed too great. Imagine, placing your family friendly cereal brank ad next to content that celebrates gore or porn. Not an attractive proposition.

Meanwhile the low responsiveness of such placements have made the inventory generated on UGC amongst the most commodotised online.

So what is a social network to do?

Invent a new model, is what. Old skool advertising is (Sandlines believes) never going to be the way forward for such businesses. They need to figure out a way of converting the obvious engagement they build with their user communities into a commercial proposition. And the starting point to that is to consider where the exchange of value can occur that benefits all parties: the community members, the marketer – and of course the network owner.

Simple, huh?

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Last week I got into a discussion that started over on LinkedIn about whether simply placing ads on social networks sites was enough to claim that you are engaged in Social Media Marketing (SMM). The question was linking to a post over at Windchimes which does into more detail.

Of course, my view is that all you are doing is advertising in this instance: you are not engaged in SMM unless you are, ahem, engaging with the audience. And that takes a lot more work.

So I was interested to read that online video upstart Hulu is outgunning YouTube in terms of revenues over in the US. Forecast revenue, that is, for 2009.

This is on the back of 6m users compared to YouTube’s 83m.

That would appear to be a useful measure of the ad-revenue-value of ‘professional’ content versus user generated (or, dare I say it, pirated?) content. 14:1 – not a bad multiple… and wholly understandable.

So, the question remains: what is the revenue model for social media? Doesn’t look a lot like it’s advertising as we know it… it must come down to engagement marketing. I wish I had some great examples to share wtih you but they are still too few and far between IMHO.

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I opened my copy of the Economist today and read yet another plea for Jerry Yang to step down as CEO of Yahoo!

I’ve rehearsed the arguments on this question before, but I’m more interested today in the subtext to this story: the extent to which Yahoo!’s reliance on display advertising is going to hurt them during the current economic difficulties.

It’s chastening to think how much of digital’s growth in revenue is purely from search – and yet that’s just the beginning of what the medium can deliver.

Search marketing words (both SEM and SEO) because it is by some distance the most effective way to introduce someone to what you are offering/saying… providing that they are already in the market for it. It’s all about steering someone toward your version of what they already know they want. Powerful, cost-effective and an essential weaon in the marketing arsenal. And almost totally transactional.

But what about the other side of the line?

For most businesses, it’s not just the first sale that matters – it’s the ongoing relationship that the first sale might lead to. This is very strongly the case with subscription-type businesses (e.g. utilities, mobile phones, satellite tv, magazines etc). It is also central to FMCG (or CPG as they call it in the US) marketing.

But it’s also the basis of what your local retail outlet hopes for. Or what your window cleaner relies on. In fact most businesses in the real world tend to prize the ongoing relationship past the first sale very highly.

So why has the digital economy been so hung up on the idea of paying Google (or their affiliate marketing partner) every time they want to conclude another transaction?

Of course, this is still very different from the display advertising model that Yahoo! and the like espouse. But it is, for me, crucial to digital marketing’s success in this recession – and to the rosier times that will sooner or later follow it.

If you haven’t already, start planning for it now! Google is NOT the only show in town.

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I read a tale of woe from the Economist this week, about how both Virgin Atlantic and British Airways had flown into turbulence over their respective employees’ use of blogs and social networks. Seems that passengers took a dim view of being described in less than flattering terms online.

Odd that a similar furore didn’t arise when Air Babylon was published, yet the idea is essentially the same. Hence, I guess, the use of ‘Anonymous’ as the alleged source of the insider’s view.

It’s amazing how badly some organisations are dealing with the democratisation of production and distribution of content that characterise the web 2.0 world.

I recall a couple of years ago being on a panel at a marketing conference at which we were asked by a marketer from a University how he should handle the fact that students were using social networks to actually tell prospective students what life was like at his university. Should he ‘control it’?

My jaw is still bruised from it’s severe drop when a fellow panellist told him “Yes!”

That is, not just contribute to the discussion, but actually try to quash genuinely expressed views.

I wonder if the same answer would be give a couple of years later? Surely to do this is merely chasing bubbles in a water bed. You might stop them appearing in that location, but the commentary will merely appear somewhere else – and probably with deeper bitterness.

Anyone remember f***edcompany.com? I wonder if we’re due a version of that for social media snafus.

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Paul Dacre

Peter Wilby, over on the Guardian’s site, is complaining about Paul Dacre (editor of the Daily Mail and set for much grander things as he celebrates his 60th birthday this week) complaining about the BBC. Apparently Dacre’s comments are ’self serving’ (and worse).

Now there’s a surprise. Editor of major news outlet gives speech in which he says something that is true to his (and his employers’) interests. Hold the front page.

The various titles down at Wapping seem equally happy to take a poke at the BBC whenever possible too. Both the Times and the Sun (and their respective Sunday iterations) have been known similarly to attack Auntie on sometimes flimsy grounds. Witness the News of the World’s (pernicious? self-serving?) lead last weekend about the amount of money paid to top execs over at the BBC. I noted that no mention was made on the packages paid to senior execs over at Wapping – or indeed at sister company Sky.

So does Dacre have a point? The Daily Mail is part of a larger group that has a large swathe of regional papers (Northcliffe Media) who are falling on harder times at the moment, not least because of the rise of decent online content, and the BBC is investing heavily on 65 ‘ultra-local’ websites. This won’t help Northcliffe Media any – and it’ll be interesting to see what they try to do with their ‘ThisIs…’ brand website extensions to those local papers.

It is Sandlines’ view that the local markets are the next really interesting battleground online. I’ll be watching with a great deal of interest. Who knows, perhaps something will come out of it that actually helps the people these sites are trying to reach – and the advertisers who are trying to talk to them. Sandlines lives in hope.

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Over on Razorshine, my old pal Kanani has been shopping – in the real world – and hoping that Google would help him. As the organisation dedicated to ‘…organi(sing) the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” this is perhaps not an unreasonable expectation. Especially when, as Riaz says, the new Westfield Shopping Centre has linked to Google Maps to show us how to find them. Ah well.

It raises a question that someone asked me a couple of weeks ago over a pint – and which has come up several times recently: is it possible to go up against Google and win?

Privately, many inside Microsoft would say that perhaps it isn’t – at least for Microsoft.

So if you’re going into business doing anything around the ‘organisation’ and provision of information, does that mean you should pack up and go home?

No.

Google does an outstanding job most of the time – but they are not perfect, or infallible. And, for all their 16,000+ employees, they still cannot do everything. At least, not all right now. Pick the right one of those areas and you’re in business… perhaps.

Then there’s the new semantic search technologies that are touted as the foundation of a ‘web 3.0′ world. Google, of course, will play in this sandpit, but it’s a different approach to presenting information than that which is hard coded into Google’s corporate psyche, so the jury is not quite in yet as to whether they’ll rise to the challenge.

Of course, there is also the entire ecosystem that has sprung up around the way Google makes money. One friend of mine calls this ‘feeding the monster’. Shopping comparison and much affiliate marketing could be described as falling into this bucket. And it’s a healthy one, even in a downturn.

But one of the more interesting perspectives is coming from a book I’m reading at the moment – Randall Stoss has published a near-insider’s view of Google in ‘Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know” ( I link to the ebook, but you can get it on Amazon too). And it’s a compelling view. Doubtless I will mention it again over the coming days.

It’s curious in how it compares Google’s ‘open’ view of the world with the essentially closed environment that social networking (well, mainly Facebook) is once again introducing to the web.

Just as Google wins the legal battle to index the content of pretty much any published book it likes – and extend beyond the virtual world – it’s curious that its biggest threat may well come from the web itself. Food for thought.

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yesterday's news? BE MORE DEMANDING!

So it turns out I was right.

Somewhere between 8 and 9pm, Ocado kindly delivered, without direct prior warning, a copy of that day’s Times.

Thanks.

There are at least two things wrong with this:

• What value do you put on the day’s morning paper at 8pm?
• What if I’d already bought it?

In the days of concern about the amount of printed paper we get through, I’d estimate the capacity for dissapointment from this marketing gesture is about 85%. Seriously Ocado, this is a great way to turn something that *should* be a positive into a reason for a customer to feel let down instead.

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