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.

A recent article by Lara Sinclair in The Australian claims TV advertising rates have risen 63% since the year 2000. A further rate rise of 10% is being sought by some networks this year despite a 5% decline in audience numbers across the 3 major free-to-air networks.

And it’s not just TV faction wanting more for less; the inky finger folks are also in on the act. The latest Audit Bureau of Circulation report paints a sorry looking picture for press media with national newspaper circulation down 2.28% for the 12 months to December 2009. The main contributors being The Australian Financial Review (-10.08%),  The Australian (-4.2%), The West Australian (-2.69% Sat/-2.46% weekly) and The Daily Telegraph (-2.66%). With these kind of audience drops you’d think it would be embarrassing to ask for more money. Not so, a 3-5% annual rate increase is par for the course in the world of press advertising.

But asking press and TV media buyers to pay more money for less product maybe starting to wear thin.

The latest Internet Advertising Bureau’s numbers certainly suggest so. Another year of growth for internet advertising revenues, up 9% (2009 compared to 2008) clocking $513m for the 3 months ending December 2009, the largest fourth quarter result in the industries history. Where did this 9% come from? Certainly not from an overall increase in all media advertising spend, remember last year? It was horrible. The growth in online most certainly came at the expense of press and to a lesser extent TV.

There is no doubt that this growth in online media is partly due to the shift in media consumption habits; but there’s another force at play here, it’s called the online media revenue model. Put simply, it operates more fairly. The online media industry will never charge you more money for less milk. In fact many publishers won’t even sell it by the litre – hey you might not want a whole litre this week. “That sounds fair”, says mum. “They only charge me for the milk I drink, maybe I should shop there more often”.

Traditional media channels, particularly press, will continue to lose ground to online media (trust me on this one) but how long will it take before online media surpasses press in Australia? Paul Fisher, CEO of the IAB seems to think this will happen as early as 2013. Usually I find these predictions by the IAB too keen, the result of the youngest media channel getting a overly excited by some good early results, but this time I tend to agree. By 2013, press and TV buyers will have seen three years of increasing rates and reducing audience numbers.

Mum will have had just about enough by then don’t you think?

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?

Leave enough space between action taps - One of Bill's "8 Rules of Thumb" (source: How People really use the iPhone - Bill Westerman)

It wasn’t until I stumbled across Bill Westerman’s presentation – How People Really Use the iPhone that I started to think maybe it wasn’t me. Maybe it was my phone, or more specifically the application’s user interface design. Maybe all of my additional holiday usage was starting to uncover flaws in the way some iPhone apps were designed. Turns out Bill’s study uncovered a number of common usability issues experienced by people when trying to navigate a series of common apps.

These common issues have formed Bill’s “8 rules of thumb” a great checklist for iPhone application planners and developers.  Just as no serious web project would be undertaken without a strong planning, prototyping and testing cycle neither should the brave new world of phone based application development.

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.

To give you a flavour of what can be done take a look at what the folks at Market United did for BankWest for a credit card campaign. They mashed prospect data (first name, last name) with images to create a highly personal HTML e-mail campaign where the prospect’s name appeared on the card.

So if you are thinking of new ways to personalise e-mail or landing pages then consider how you can mash pictures and words to add some wow.

“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.

And so, for this reason only,  I wasn’t expecting much when Karen Ganschow (Telstra’s Executive Director of Relationship Marketing) took the stage at the iMedia Summit to talk about customer relationship management. I couldn’t have been more wrong, ADMA’s Direct Marketer of the Year, Karen gave a frank, insightful presentation on Telstra’s strategies for using social media to listen to their market and facilitate conversations. For example  four Telstra staff:- Jase, Scott, Tristam & Paul power a twitter help desk @telstra and @bigpondteam that allows customers to request help without having to “press 3 for greenfields”. As Scott makes it his personal mission to sort out your problem, so a twitter conversation ensues and you get a feeling that the company (or at least Scott) is trying to help you. Just because it’s not over the phone (or face-to-face) doesn’t mean it’s not a conversation and Telstra’s strategic use of social media is making a very big company seem small and caring again.

So it is “good to talk” but it’s also good to listen and social media provides the  opportunity for business to do both and  resurrect the art of conversation. And, like I said, things do tend to happen when people have conversations.

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.

It’s about time the Australian/NZ online industry placed more value in user centred design improvement tools such as Tobii and FaceLab. Hopefully James’ company will be the catalyst to help bring about this change.

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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i’m just sayin’

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.

How many of the major Australian web properties have customised their web experience for the iPhone (and other smart phones)? I’ve seen a few, Realestate.com.au for example but most brands are missing an enormous opportunity to engage via what is the fastest growing form of web access. If you’ve got a smart phone then go take a look at some of your favourite sites….they’re bad huh!?

It’s not just about missing opportunities either. In many cases a mobile alternative version of your web site could be required to maintain an acceptable level of accessibility and usability. For example Flash is not supported by the iPhone’s safari browser and sites that rely heavily on this plug-in will not display as intended (if at all). And it’s not going to be fixed overnight either as there are some fundamental reasons why Apple is resisting the inclusion of Flash.

So stop sitting on your handsets and take action. Start by including mobile based browsers in your web testing standards for all new development, that’s a bare minimum. Most importantly strongly consider developing a unique version of your major web application or site especially for mobile web browsing.  It amazes me that Seek currently has no iPhone version (or app) of their site – imagine the take-up of mobile based job hunting – come on guys what’s taking you so long, surely it’s not the business case!