Opine Consulting » Strategic marketing

Old-school hip-hop and a pretty strange lesson in customer engagement

Simon Kirby — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 15:59:49 +0000

Old School Hip-Hop and Customer Engagement

I picked up my first celebrity Twitter followers this week. Let me elaborate. Eric B and Rakim are old school US hip hop artists. Their 1987, album, Paid in Full, pretty much launched hip-hop’s modern era. These days, Eric and Rakim are big on personal empowerment, Islam, phat beats and making money. I’m a UK management consultant who’s big on strategy, service design, innovation and … well … um, making money.

These guys started following me on Twitter after reading my post on why employees should be entrepreneurs. My self-esteem went up several notches because of my new and notable Twitter following. The iTunes store ran up a couple more purchases of Paid in Full (the Deluxe Edition) and I got busy posting stuff about the rappers on my Facebook page.

In short, I’m now thinking that Eric B and Rakim are better than Eminem, Elvis, Grandmaster Flash, the Beatles and potentially Jesus.

Eric B and Rakim are a big deal in hip-hop circles; you could say that they’re a brand. Which made me think that the point of brand and engagement isn’t what customers think about our brand. The point is what our brands think about our customers.

Customer respect

A few years ago I did some marketing strategy for a big UK insurer. It had products for pretty much every socio-demographic and it called it’s poorest customer segment “bottom-feeders”. Lumping customers into categories with disrespectful names is not good humanity. There are three reasons why it’s also not good business.

Internal language shapes employees’ attitude and attitudes inevitably leak out to customers. Contemptuous language is a great platform for lousy customer service.
Contempt blocks empathy. Customer empathy is the best tool known to man for coming up with new product and service ideas.
Marketing is (at least) two-way these days. If you’re reading this on social media, you know this already. The days when a consumer brand could run in broadcast-mode only are long gone.

It’s interesting that companies think so much about how to build fans and followers and so little about following the people who buy their products and services. There are lots of brands that I like. I’d love them even more if they gave me back a little bit of social media love.

Three resources for B2B strategic marketing using social media

Simon Kirby — Mon, 24 May 2010 21:25:12 +0000

Lots of strategic marketing is B2B. But there’s not much strategic marketing resource out there on using social media in a B2B context.

So here are three good places to start:

Social Media & B2B

View more presentations from Ryon Harms.

Social Media B2B Marketing: Adhesives and Sealants Industry

View more presentations from Ira Kaufman at Entwine Inc .

Lastly, let’s not forget our old friends at Mashable for a good article on strategic marketing in B2B here.

10 management truths for the web age

Simon Kirby — Tue, 04 May 2010 08:00:10 +0000

I don’t often post other peoples’ content.

But I thought this was such a great presentation about why “online” continues to be a disruptive technology.

It encompasses beautifully why putting “eLipstick” on the pig of a fragmented legacy organisation doesn’t meet customers’ service and experience expectations.

The Digital Deca: 10 Management Truths for the Web Age eBook

What the home entertainment industry that never was can teach us about Google and Facebook

Simon Kirby — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:44:01 +0000

In March 1876, the New York Times trumpeted the birth of the home entertainment industry. It would be powered by the telephone. It (mostly) never happened:

“By means of this remarkable instrument, a man can have the Italian opera, the Federal Congress, and his favorite preacher laid on his own house.” (New York Times, 22nd March 1876, see here)

Facebook overtakes Google, the social web wins

Almost exactly 134 years later (13th March 2010 to be precise) Facebook became the most visited website in the USA, pulling in more visitors than Google. Last week’s data from Hitwise (an online competitive intelligence agency) shows a quiet, creeping discontinuity:

The graph says that once we used the web mostly for information; now we’re primarily social users. So what does that have to do with the New York Times and its prediction of telephone-based home entertainment?

What disruptive technology is really for

It takes twenty years to work out what any disruptive new technology is for. Disruptive technology has a lifecycle. It’s invented. A thousand flowers bloom as entrepreneurs and visionaries vie to make their fortunes. Some businesses fail. Others succeed. After twenty years or so the dust clears on a new consensus about what that particular technology was for.

The year 1881 was a good one for French inventor Clément Ader. At the Paris International Electrical Exhibition, he demonstrated how his théâtrophone system would open up the vast opportunity of a French home entertainment system based on a stereo telephone line.

He wasn’t the only person thinking that way. In 1893 Telefon Hírmondó was launched by a colleague of Alexander Bell to 60 subscribers. It’s opening message declared:

“We greet the inhabitants of Budapest. We greet them in an unusual way from which telephone broadcasting all over the world will start its victorious journey.”

By 1907, its subscriber base was 15,000 and it only stopped broadcasting with the Second World War.

Just as we eventually found out what the telephone is really for, last week’s Hitwise data shows that we’re discovering what the web is mostly for. If the web really is primarily social, that has big implications for online proposition development.

Things we may need to do more of include:

Design based on the needs of communities, not just individuals.
Emphasising social functionality as much as content and transactions.
Building content that can travel on social networks, rather than driving traffic to your own site.

The Attention Arms Race

Simon Kirby — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:27:22 +0000

If we measured customer attention like Gross Domestic Product, we’d know we were in trouble. Advertising, promotion and information are locked in an inflationary spiral as too much data chases too few eyeballs. Per capita, ‘Gross Domestic Attention’ (let’s call it GDA) is falling off a cliff.

The SEO money pit

Here’s a personal example. Yesterday, I paid $299 dollars to Yahoo for a little, insignificant Directory listing for Opine Consulting (which is here, in case you’re curious).

Submitting to the big directories is part of basic belt and braces Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). However, $299 is a lot of money for an obscure little raindrop of a link in the big, wide ocean of the internet. For the keyword “innovation” my site is competing against 112 million other pages on Google. For ‘marketing’, I’m up against half-a-billion alternatives. For ‘service’ there are just a shade under 10 billion pages.

SEO is at the sharp-end of the global attention famine. In the SEO arms race, only the biggest juggernauts (and of course the channel owners) can be long-run winners. The internet is moving towards a globally perfect market and back-links, directory submissions, paid search, and article marketing are money-pits.

Innovation is worth more than cash

Thinking about the SEO arms race, is making me get very clear about these principles:

Imagination is worth more than cash. A resonant idea that people pick up on, creates more exposure than £££s of traditional marketing expenditure.
Innovation has no monopolies. If anything, it’s inverse to size as many large organisations are bound by conservatism and process. That’s an incendiary thought because of what it means for competition.
Innovation can’t be faked. It comes out of fun, interest and obsession. Like any right-brain process it’s unpredictable and isn’t confined to 9-5 thinking. People doing what they love will win in this particular game.

I can guarantee that I won’t be spending much more on SEO. Watch this space…

Aesthetics, statistics and strategic marketing plans

Simon Kirby — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 23:29:12 +0000

Strategic marketing plans need to build private foresight out of (often) public data and to seize their audiences’ hearts and minds. So successful data presentation needs elegant, resolved simplicity.

For inspiration, here are three sources on the web about data design and statistics:

Information is Beautiful is the blog of an independent journalist and data designer with a focus on how “designed data” can help us understand the world.
Gapminder is a non-profit venture for sustainable development through the increased use of statistics and information. It describes itself as a “modern museum” that helps make the world understandable.
The Guardian Newspaper Datastore Flickr Group showcases data visualisations drawn from the Guardian Newspaper’s database.