Monday 26 February 2007

I have been reading an excellent piece of research jointly done by the IPA, ISBA, MCCA and PRCA entitled 'The client brief - a best practice guide to briefing communications agencies'.

Well worth a read, even if it is 40 pages long. Key bits I liked:

82% of clients believe that briefs should focus on making sure the business problem is properly defined.

55% of clients agreed that the brief being worked on is often changed once the project has started.

'The main difference between a good brief and a bad brief is that a good brief leaves you with a clear understanding of what you are trying to do. Bad briefs drown you in contradictory information and objectives.'

'Ultimately, the point of communication is to get people to do things... Which people? What things?.. You've got the basis of the brief right there. Everything else is detail'.

I like this last point. How much of what we put in our briefs is just detail?

The value of questions

Just a short slide show to pose a few questions.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/93401239@N00/sets/72157594557657573/show/

It will only take a minute to review.

Wednesday 21 February 2007

Web 2.0 - two great views.

This guy came across these two diferent views on Web 2.0. Carl found the page - I pinched it. Cheers Carl.

http://www.simon-law.com/archives/107

I kind of have to agree with the second view, not least for the fact that it recognises that what the web does is enable human interactions to occur but through a different media.

Consumer generated media - eh?


An extract from the pocker guide to consumer generated media
Pete Blackshaw, 28 June 2007.

The fastest-growing media is one consumers create and share among themselves. It's trusted and TiVo-resistant. It presents long-lasting sources of influence. Listening to and leveraging such media may well be the most important source of competitive advantage for companies and brands.

Unlike paid media, CGM is created by consumers. It's often inspired by relevant product or service experiences and is frequently archived online for readers convenience and other consumers or key marketplace influencers. Examples of CGM include blog entries, consumer email feedback, message board posts, forum comments, personal Web sites, and personal email.

1.4 billion CGM comments are archived on the Web today. That number is growing 30 percent annually. None of this is terribly surprising when you consider the Pew Internet & American Life Project estimates 44 percent of online consumers have created online "content."

CGM can be influenced, but not controlled, by marketers. CGM delivers high-impact, targeted ad impressions well outside the scope of conversation among "familiars," a big reason it bears an important distinction from word of mouth. Search in particular magnifies CGM reach and effect by matching those who create it ("speakers") with curious, information-hungry preshoppers ("seekers").

Most important, CGM leaves a digital trail. It's highly measurable, allowing advertisers to gauge brand equity, reputation, and message effectiveness in real time. Advertisers must take accountability for the scope and effect of such media and use it to make more-informed decisions. One important first step is to understand CGM various forms.

blogs. The majority of today's blogs are rich, unaided first-person narratives across a host of topics. They mirror insight-rich focus groups but are even better. Though consumers rarely dedicate blogs to brands, brand experiences abundantly decorate blog narratives. Often, the texture of brand commentary is incidental, implied, even unconscious in nature. This can shed light on how advertising truly works. Thanks to RSS and blogs highly networked nature, they're quickly becoming the most potent form of CGM. They also index fastest on search engines.

Message boards and forums. These are industry- or interest-focused areas that draw consumers based on a particular product, specialty, or niche. Typically, they draw consumers interested in specific products (automobiles, computers, electronics, software) or issues (politics, baby/parenting, lifestyle, travel). Active participants tend to be folks who have experienced the products or issue in question. Buyers tend to be the listeners. Social network sites also make ample use of message boards.

Review/rating sites. There are far fewer CGM "impressions" in this venue, but the reach and effect are enormous, especially in regard to consumer purchase behavior. Reviews are typically grounded in relevant experience, which significantly dials up credibility and trust. Amazon.com, eBay, Edmunds.com, and Epinions.com all fall into this category. Ratings add an important quantitative dimension.

Clubs or groups. These are highly focused, often specialized sites where aficionados congregate around a single issue, product, or item. They can be public or private. Although membership is usually small (up to hundreds of users), tens of thousands of such groups exist. Groups can range from celebrity fan clubs to stamp collectors sites to automobile owners sites to book clubs.

Direct company feedback. This critical, often overlooked form of CGM is targeted directly to companies, but consumers who exercise this channel typically offer their feelings across multiple platforms. Some of our recent research shows nearly 70 percent of consumers who provide feedback through company/brand Web sites are active across other CGM venues, including boards and blogs. The good news for companies is this channel is controllable. The challenge is shifting from an operational, "I don't want consumer attention" cost-center mindset to a marketing-centered, "I'll take whatever consumer attention I can get" one.

Third-party Web sites. Smaller yet active groups of consumers generate high-impact CGM on third-party feedback sites such as Complaints.com and My3cents.com. The Better Business Bureau's online service also captures, archives, and makes publicly available certain forms of "escalated" CGM. Media writers and financial analysts often quote such sources.
Introducing CGM2

CGM is rapidly adopting the same rich-media formats we see in online advertising. This, too, needs to be understood. A few examples of CGM2, or consumer-generated multimedia:

Moblogs, photo sharing, and tagging. Moblogs are mobile-enabled blogs that let users post photos from anywhere. Interestingly, many of the online photos today are efficiently tagged with labels such as "BadMcDonaldsExperience," which makes them easier to find, organize, and index through search engines. Camera phones play a huge role in moblog growth.

Vlogs/personal videos. Vlogs are basically video-based journals, almost like reality TV for online. Thanks to iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, and other tools, it's getting easier to create sticky, viral, even incriminating online video.

Podcasting. Think of this as TiVo meets radio. Consumers create their own radio broadcasts and make them available for others. Because they're so darn easy to create, expect to see a ton of them.

Consumers are dictating the terms of media reach, frequency, and impact. We must stay on top of this. Increasingly, we live in a consumer-controlled surveillance society, and CGM the currency.

Thursday 15 February 2007

Data mining

Extract of article from Search Engine Strategies

Data Mining: The Heart of Analysis
By John Tawadros Feb. 14, 2007

18 month ago showed that 31 percent of search marketers do not, or cannot, measure the ROI of their search marketing efforts.


Start With the Basics
Begin by thinking about the user behavior patterns that exist between queries and sites, and about the correlations between various online initiatives (not just paid search) and offline marketing activities. Which initiatives are driving which programs' results? Which programs' success depends on other programs? Are your TV and radio ads effectively driving prospects to search for you online? Are your search programs leading consumers to call your call center or walk into your stores?

There are also some fundamental and commonly understood steps that can be taken to gain efficiencies and improve paid search advertising performance:
  • Improve your call to action. Improving your click through rate (CTR) through a more persuasive call to action in your ad will allow you to gain higher positions within the sponsored listings, which may yield yet more volume.
  • Settle for second place. Decreasing your bid to lower your position in the sponsored listings can save click costs without significantly diminished returns.
    Focus on the funnel. Improving your landing pages and conversion funnel can help to gain a better response rate and increase returns.
  • Look to the tail. Increasing the number of long-tail keywords on which you bid can typically produce traffic from less expensive clicks.
  • Go beyond Google. Expanding your bidding to tier-two engines or content networks can increase your reach to a broader audience.
  • Just by getting the basics in order, you should see some improvements. But when you take the next step -- to actual analysis -- there are creative and complex patterns that you may be able to observe that will help you better understand ROI and hence drive greater performance.


Then On to the Analysis
Before you begin any type of analysis, make a list of questions you'd like answered, or perhaps suggest a potential theory that you'd like to prove or disprove. You want to look for those answers that would make you to do things differently. This approach will help guide your analysis. However, it's critical that paid search NOT be examined in a vacuum. Too many marketers treat the channel solely as a direct response mechanism. Granted, this might be necessary from a financial perspective, but there is other valuable information in the data if it is mined and analyzed properly.


Relationships
There is typically some form of relationship between your audience's keywords. Many in the industry claim that searchers first search on broad phrases then narrow their query to become more specific; hence marketers shouldn't discount broad terms just because they don't look favorable from a ROI perspective. Clearly, there is some truth to this claim, but so too is the opposite -- specific queries can lead to broad searches. But don't take my word for it, look at your data!


By analyzing the cookies of your site visitors, exclude from your data all those who have only clicked to your site from an ad once and then have a look at the statistics and trends of the queries launched and ads clicked by those visitors who performed multiple queries. This will not only help you understand what keywords to buy, but also affect how you attribute cost and returns between keywords.


You should also look at the ROI value of early-stage keywords, by attributing the eventual conversion to the first keyword a user queried and clicked on to arrive at you site. Then compare that to the ROI value of keywords if you were to attribute the eventual conversion to the last keyword queried immediately prior to converting. This type of analysis goes by many names such as: Multi-Query Analysis, Search Funnel Analysis, or First versus Last Click Analysis.


There is also insight to be found by analyzing the search properties that your audience may be visiting. If you're running campaigns in multiple engines and ad platforms, you should examine the behavioral patterns of your audience segmented by source. You may find that there is a greater propensity for a user to click to your site and convert if they saw you on search engine XYZ.


For example, imagine for a moment that you observe that 10 percent of your conversions that came from Google had also visited and clicked on an ad in Yahoo. What would happen if you throttled Yahoo back? Surely, that would be nice to know before you negatively impact your overall ROI by neglecting to take Yahoo's contribution into account.


It would also be a good idea to observe the effects on conversion when ad messaging is kept consistent or varied across paid search sites. Again, too many people focus on ROI per engine, per keyword, without looking at any of the correlations between the elements.


Making it Happen
Obviously, tracking is a key factor in being able to conduct this type of analysis, never mind having enough in-house resources and the skill sets required to perform the analysis. And as good as you may be at managing paid search campaigns, it would behoove you to have a statistician or data miner analyze the data to find the interactions of these touchpoints and report back to you, especially if the data set is large. Ultimately, what you should find is a set of scenarios and circumstances that will guide you to either prevent losses and/or capitalize on newly identified opportunities.



PowerPoint - 5 tips

8 minutes and 45 seconds of good advice about PowerPoint: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFQ7OMFAcl4

Blogenvy


Here's another candidate. http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/

This guy's really got the planning blog sorted. Brilliant my sites, lots of depth, all the subjects covered. I may as well send everyone here.

Monday 12 February 2007

Blogenvy

The irrational dislike of others caused by their superior quality and achievement in relation to blogging. It's not made wikipedia yet, but it will.

My first candidate for blogenvy: http://www.mb-blog.com/

Check out this guy's archive on brand. I particularly like the article on scented outdoor advertising http://www.mb-blog.com/index.php/2006/12/08/fresh-baked-or-half-baked/
not least for the fact that we had a similar 'ish idea on a recent pitch.

Thursday 8 February 2007

Let's get started.

OK. Blank screen.
Let's get started then.
Need to think about a place to start....

What do I usually suggest people do when faced with a blank screen? or a blank piece of paper? or just a blank mind?

Come on... think of something, you're suppose to be a planner.

Right got it. Why are we doing this?

I'll get back to you.

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