Three trends for 2011

What are the three key digital trends for 2011? Here are some thoughts.

1. Location

Location based services haven't taken off yet, but smartphones are starting to go mainstream. 20% of adults currently have a smartphone in the UK, and this will rapidly increase in 2011.

Expect consumers to start using location to find their friends when they are out socialising. And expect retail brands to quickly start offering deals to groups of people who buy or eat together, as Gap, H&M and McDonald's (client) have already done in the USA. 48% of 18-24 year olds already have smartphones, so expect all of these to take off fastest for youth brands.

Smart brands will start to think about how to use this in more imaginative ways. Trade conferences, party political conferences, meetings, festivals and live music events are all obvious places that could use location effectively.

2. Social

Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerburg has repeatedly said that almost any experience is better if it's social. In other words our offline friends really matter to us - and make our online experience much better.

And Facebook's Like button has spread like wildlfire across the internet, showing that people love 'liking' things.

Personal endorsement by a friend is massively powerful - so it's not surprising that corporates are quickly catching on to the value of social plug-ins (such as 'Like' buttons and embedded Fan page boxes which show you what your friends have liked, commented on or shared). 2011 will be the year that social plug-ins move to become as popular as sharing buttons have.

And expect marketers to start becoming much more inventive in extending the socialness of their campaigns, whether it's photo tagging, Facebook's social plugins or simply incorporating fan pages into advertising and PR.

3. Data

Direct marketers have known the value of CRM databases for years. And webcentric businesses like Amazon have been very effective at using customer data to provide quality recommendations.

In 2011 more and more marketers will extend the use of this data across their marketing strategy. For instance:

• Web traffic analysis from firms such as Hitwise (client) allows firms to understand what their target audiences do online, cross referenced with customer databases such as MOSAIC, and to benchmark themselves against their competitors.

• Auditing and monitoring online allows firms to use the internet as a continual rolling focus group - telling them how consumers are perceiving advertising and experiencing products every day.

• Narrative and messaging can be easily tested online before launch. A/B testing on websites, and pay-per-click advertising on Facebook (client) and Google allows firms to quickly and cheaply test creative concepts, tactical approaches language and competition.

• Crowdsourcing and customer forums, such as those run by GiffGaff (client), Starbucks and Dell are a great source of creative ideas and day-to-day feedback on product experience.

Why digital can transform organisations

Here are three good reasons that digital can make organisations much more effective:

a) You can join up communications that are currently done separately - so reducing duplication and wasted messaging. So for instance you can create an integrated stakeholder, consumer and internal communications programme, rather than paying for 3 streams of activity.

b) You can also reduce duplication between the functions of the main business and communications. For instance integrated customer services and communications potentially allows your brand marketers to get daily customer insights at very low cost.

c) Measureability of digital is far better than conventional communications - so it's easy to rapidly understand what is and isn't working. This can be applied both at the strategic end of planning a campaign (e.g. testing alternative competitive spaces, testing messages) and at the execution end of the campaign (which media coverage actually drives sales?).

For a great example of a company that has put digital at the core of its entire corporate strategy, have a look at GiffGaff (a client of ours):
http://www.lithium.com/pdfs/casestudies/Lithium-giffgaff-Case-Study.pdf

Improving your personal brand online

How can you make sure that you have an effective personal brand online that attracts potential employers and clients?

It’s surprisingly easy to rapidly improve your showings in search engines and make yourself more findable. Here are five easy things to do:

• Keep your LinkedIn profile up to date and complete. And make sure that your ‘public profile’ (which is what Google indexes) is complete. Somebody we know recently updated his profile and got a series of former colleagues to recommend him. A month later he was working in 10 Downing Street.

• Invite your contacts to be your connection on LinkedIn. It’s extremely easy to upload your entire address book from Outlook and invite hundreds of contacts to connect. The more people who are connected to you, the easier you are to find.

• Get a vanity URL (e.g. http://uk.linkedin.com/in/robblackie) for your LinkedIn and Facebook profiles.

• Link up your Facebook profile, Twitter account, LinkedIn account and anything else you do online. Services such as Posterous and Hootsuite make it very easy to share one piece of content (for instance an article you have written) on your blog, Twitter feed and Facebook page / profile all simultaneously.

• Upload any public presentations you’ve done recently onto Scribd. Presentations on there are very visible for search engines – especially if you tag your presentations appropriately.

And if you want proof that these points work – Google ‘Rob Blackie’.

Getting people to attend your events

Thanks to my colleague and campaign guru (and author of the great Obama London blog) Karin Robinson for these hints about using email to get people to attend events:

Most people, if they see [an email telling them about an event]... might think, "That sounds interesting, I might try to come along" but having made no explicit commitment they are highly likely to be "busy" when the moment comes.

However, if you ask them to e-mail you if they want to attend then 1) you can hint that there are limited spaces making it more attractive because a slightly rarer opportunity 2) you can then reply to them saying "Thanks for coming! I'll let the team know you're coming and we'll make sure to save you a place." - thus manufacturing a deeper sense of commitment and 3) You can then follow up with an e-mail just to the RSVPs reminding them that they've confirmed to come - people are more likely to attend an event if they get a personalised reminder.

What can we learn about digital from JFK?

In 1960 the first Presidential debates were held.

Richard Nixon, incumbent Vice-President, campaigned until a few hours beforehand, hadn't fully recovered from an illness and refused make-up (which he thought was effeminate).

Among voters who heard the debate on the radio Nixon's experience trumped Kennedy's youthfulness. But the larger audience who watched on TV thought that Kennedy had won. Kennedy subsequently pulled ahead in the polls and went on to win the election by a nose.

Nixon essentially lost the election because he didn't put on make-up. Or more broadly his advisers didn't understand that TV debates would be different from traditional town halls or the radio. The technology had changed, but their strategy hadn't.

What mistakes are being made in communications today which will look as basic as refusing make-up in 1960?

My starter would be mistaking digital for just another way of broadcasting your message to your audience. Yes it is valuable for broadcasting to large numbers of people - but that's a very narrow way to see it. Facebook's genius is that it realises that a lot of the time, most of us prefer spend time consuming relevant content produced by our amateur friends than from professional entertainers.

Tracking the impact of a story online - a partial solution

Many 'influence trackers' online implicitly assume that all mentions of an issue online are equally meaningful. This is clearly rubbish - not least because different websites have very different sized audiences online.

There's no easy way to crack this - because there isn't a public directory of the number of users that most websites have.

However on Twitter at least you can see how many followers a user has - which allows you to have a decent stab at estimating reach for stories which are discussed on Twitter.

The helpful Backtype.com website aggregates followers for each mention of a specific URL and gives you a reach figure. So for today's BBC story on a camera that can take photos round corners, it gives a Twitter reach of 281,000.

A basic online campaigning guide part 3 - message

Your overall messaging is a bigger picture than will be covered by this guide. But people often neglect how online analytics can help you refine your message.

Here are four easy things you can do to test your message:

1. Do split tests on emails that you send out - with different messages in the subject lines of messages to different people, to see what is most likely to persuade people to open the emails.

2. Use the click analytics on these emails to find out which subjects people want to find out more about. This is obviously has similarities to 1. but you can test a wider range of subjects.

3. Web page comparisons - as with emails test how people respond to different messages. An excellent example of how this was done is provided by the Obama Presidential campaign.

4. Use advertising metrics. Facebook and Google adwords make it very easy to test different versions of adverts that are shown to the same audience. You can rotate primary messages, wording, pictures etc. and measure how your audiences react.

Corporates routinely use market research to inform their campaigns. And they routinely use message testing tactically for individual email campaigns. But it's surprising how few are using online testing to test their overall corporate narratives, or even competitive creative treatments on different marketing campaigns.