Why do we call it ‘word’ of mouth? I can’t remember the last time somebody recommended a product or service to me with one single word; there’s almost always a story – and it’s this story (and it’s authentic delivery) that sells.

Think about the last time a friend suggested something to you… there was a story, wasn’t there? Maybe they didn’t tuck you up in bed and read it to you, but it was conversational and it contained hooks that resonated with you and convinced you they were a good company for you too.

"Please miss, tell us a story and we'll tweet it, promise."

The same is true of social media. If you expect people to be online brand advocates you need to arm them with your brand stories. The kinds of story that get told every day inside your business, but for some reason never make it onto the company website. You know the stuff that hasn’t been smoothed within an inch of its life, the real stories you tell new employees about the business, the reasons that make your people proud to work for you. These words of mouth start from within but quickly spread through social networks, become embellished along the way and ultimately become your brand proposition. Remember, your brand is only what people say it is.

Google is a great company because it delivers an excellent search product but so does Bing.  Google, however, is a brand we want to associate with because they have a great story, one that we love telling and embellishing. You know those stories, the one about the Google chefs that cook staff gourmet meals, the one about the allowance given to Google engineers to work on a project of fancy for one day a week, whether it’s commercially viable or not. The story that Google really does try to be fair, that they aren’t really into placing cookies on our machines and tracking the shit out of our web behaviours.

These stories, in turn, give us a story to tell – and oh how we love telling them. Sharing such stories now comes at the click of a retweet and boy do these words travel fast. So start thinking about the stories you have to share, just the process of thinking like this will open up your business, make you more authentic and give your advocates something worth talking about.

I blame Jamie Oliver, Mario Batali and the little skinny dude off The Cook and the Chef. These modern day heroes have us discussing the secret to a good celeriac pure and how you simply must use a good shiraz in your red wine jus, because nothing else will do. I’ve been to dinner parties where the host has perfectly slow poached quail eggs for her crispy noodle and asian green salad but couldn’t manage to cook the rice properly.

Potatoes. Read on, I'll explain.

Let’s face it the world would have starved a long time ago if it weren’t for potatoes, rice and pasta. Man cannot live off coconut foam and micro-greens alone.

There is a lesson in this (it’s a stretch I know) for digital marketers currently obsessing with the finer frills of SEO, the engagement rates of their home page take-overs and the eCPM of their performance media buy. We’re forgetting the Internet (and it’s users) need feeding.

Cast your mind back to 2004, the Internet was very hungry. It was fed up with small portions of flash intros, gourmet brochure-ware websites and reductions of one-way communications. We demanded something bigger to chew on.  Comfort food finally came in the form of Blogger, Wikipedia and Co. who, in successfully bringing down the worldwide walled web, encouraged a new breed of chefs cooking up simple meals of content and conversations we could all digest.

It’s been 6 years since this wall came down yet big business is still struggling with getting simple well cooked content (user generated or otherwise) onto the menu. There’s little encouragement from the industry to change our ways. The ‘c’ word rarely gets a mention in agency land, maybe because there’s no award for “Best User Generated Content” or maybe it’s because, like potatoes, it’s hard to charge big dollars for.

All excuses to one side, it is time to put focus back on content. It is content that makes for great SEO, it is content that delivers great user experience and it is content that reduces bounce rates and improves conversion – nothing more complicated than that. So get back to basics, put ‘content strategy’ at the head of your brief and and give it the due time and consideration it needs. Don’t fear you can still add a touch of truffle oil at the end.

OK so this is a tad self promotional but there’s something in it for you so don’t be too quick to judge. I will be presenting at this year’s Sydney ad:tech and if, despite this announcement, you were still thinking of attending (16th and 17th March) then drop me a line (marc@thinqdigital.com.au) as I can send you a code that scores 20% off your ticket(s). Here endeth the promotion.

"...Mum’s no fool and she’d never shell out more money for less milk."

It’s generally accepted that a litre of milk gets more expensive every year, an unfortunate economic reality we call inflation. But can you imagine how angry mum would be if an additional $0.10 in price was inversely matched by a 50ml reduction in volume? This is all hypothetical of course because mum’s no fool and she’d never shell out more money for less milk.

But this is exactly what’s happening in the world television and press advertising. Less milk (audience) is starting to cost advertisers more money.

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Ham? Maybe.

Wine? Quite possibly.

Limited strenuous exercise? Almost certainly.

There are a number of reasons why my fingers might feel fatter in 2010, that’s “twenty ten”  people, not “two thousand and ten”. Stop wasting good syllables. A problem shared is a problem halved, so I decided to discuss my condition with a few close friends. Turns out a number of the folks I surveyed were also suffering from podgy digit disorder. After much contemplation we uncovered a common factor in the way we all behaved over the Christmas holidays.

We had all spent more time playing with our iPhones. From DoodleJump to Tweetie we’d all been tapping, swiping and pinching far more than your average working week and it was starting to have physical effects. Or so we thought. Why else would we be tapping a back link when we were trying to hit the search field?

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Came across this thanks to Barb Dybwad over at Mashable. Although the application of spelling your own company name in images from Flickr is fun for about five seconds, the idea of mashing images with text in general has some cool campaign applications.

Given the idea of personalising HTML e-mail campaigns with “Dear <Firstname>” is now the rule, rather than the exception, marketers need to find new ways of delivering personalisation to achieve cut-through and the ability to mash in images on-the-fly offers a whole new range of creative opportunities.

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“It’s good to talk“, said Bob Hoskins in the British Telecom (BT) campaign of the mid 1990s.

Here we had the largest telco in the UK encouraging folks to talk more to each other. Great advice, as things do tend to happen when people have conversations. Shame they couldn’t apply some of this thinking in their own back yard instead of throwing dollars at “solutions” that prevented conversations. A decade on and we’ve been paid back with Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Auto Attendant technology, technological gatekeepers to the  conversation. I haven’t witnessed such a relentless investment in technology, in spite of consumer needs, since the amphibious car.

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If, like me, you’ve been thinking about using eye-tracking studies to improve your user-centred design process but were unsure of where to start – well you’re in luck. I was fortunate enough to bump into James Breeze the CEO (his card has it as “Chief Experience Officer”) of Objective Digital at last weeks iMedia Summit. Objective Digital is the official Australian/New Zealand reseller of Tobii Eye Trackers well regarded as the world leader in eye-tracking hardware and software solutions.

James took the time to give me a one-to-one tutorial on the system and point out it’s less obvious benefits. I must admit I was surprised by how easy the system was to operate and how quick results were mapped. Now these machines aren’t cheap ($70,000 plus) but if you’re not sure it’s going to get enough use, then Objective offers them for hire (daily or monthly rates apply) and if you can choose to book them with or without an operating consultant.

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An experienced digital marketer and self-confessed Internet addict, Kristen specialises in helping brands use social media to build engagements, foster brand advocacy and generate positive word-of-mouth online.

In her previous role as the Creative Director for Attention – a New York based boutique digital agency – Kristen helped build and execute social media strategies for the agency’s impressive client roster, including: MAC Cosmetics, Aveda, Ritz-Carlton, Bluefly, Newsweek, Clinique, Hudson Jeans and Mashable.

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OK, so Gartner recently revealed that Smart Phone sales were up 27% (whilst standard mobile sales were down 6%). The iPhone was a major contributor with 13% of all new handsets sold in 2nd quarter 2009 up from 3% in the corresponding period of 2008.

I haven’t seen a personal device get traction like this since the Sony Walkman in the 80s and there’s a real simple reason. It’s not the phone, the phone is actually rubbish – it’s the promise of a truly decent mobile web experience. The crux of which lies in the ability to zoom in and out with ease – funny that whilst the cynics were saying that mobile web will never work because the screen is too small, Apple invented a way to take screen size out of the picture…so to speak.

And Joe Public loves this new type of web experience. According to AdMob’s April 2009 Mobile Metrics Report Apple’s iPhone accounted for 43% of all mobile web traffic despite having just 8% of all handset sales in the same period. So, mobile internet usage is on the march and yet many digital marketing folks don’t seem to be paying attention.

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