Posts

Wow, couldn’t stop picking great posts for this week’s Roundup. What other marketing communications insight brings you all this in one nifty email?… A look at what makes P!nk special and how your brand can learn from her Straight forward advice for GM’s marketing team at a time when they really need to listen Debunking “viral” A fantastic video poking fun at clients who try and get too much for nothing ; and A counter-balancing reminder to consultancy folk what it’s like to be a client All the best, Philip and the MarCom Professional team. ...

This was the question I posed upfront at the Convergence Conversation I chaired last night. The topic of the conversation – “Advertising and the impact of convergence”, and a topic sufficiently compelling to attract 80 people on a summer’s evening. Deloitte kindly hosted us, with Jolyon Barker , their Head of TMT, kicking off proceedings, and Knowledge and Research Director Paul Lee presenting an overview of their third “The state of the Media Democracy Survey ”. One of the reports main findings is that, following a survey of 2000 Brits, 60% regard their computer to be the premier entertainment device, relegating TV to second place. Not an inconsequential finding for the advertising industry. Which begged a second question “What is TV?”, and this garnered more responses than my first question of the evening, which went uncomfortably unanswered. How could such a simple question about describing a great ad, particularly when we have hundreds every day to chose from, draw such a blank response? (I’ve posted here one of a series of ads from Lloyds TSB that I loved because they tell a story rather than simply hit me over the head with a product.) ...

Crystal clear, unarguable insight. That’s what I like. Sure, articulating complex stuff usefully can be most impressive, but stating the obvious when it’s only obvious with hindsight or with the assistance of an able guide, that’s cool in my book. Graham Jones gets the complex stuff… he’s known as the “Internet Psychologist” after all! But he’s rather good at seeing the world for what it is, when the rest of us are running around with our costs-per-click, bounce rates and adword strategies. Check out his post this week “How to ensure your web site makes money from offline marketing ”. Seems he’s found some excellent examples of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, and all in a quick scan of the daily press. Have a super weekend. Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team. ...

A brief Roundup this week. Firstly, we had dozens more members join this week, so “welcome” to everyone who has joined since we last said “welcome”! Secondly, good to see everyone at the Dog and Duck in Soho, London, on Wednesday, including Ted Shelton and Marissa Root of The Conversation Group over from San Francisco, courtesy of Mark Adams . And lastly, a quick heads up re. another London event, this time hosted by Deloitte on the impact of convergence on advertising , 4th June, chaired by yours truly. See you there? And if you’re running a meetup, let us know and we’ll plug it here in the Friday Roundup. Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team. ...

Well I don’t know about you, but I’m totally confused. What is happening at Blyk ? For those beyond the UK’s shores, Blyk came to market in 2007 as an MVNO (mobile virtual network operation) piggy-backing on the Orange network. Nothing revolutionary so far. But they set out to convince young adults that they could get free airtime in return for opting in to adverts with ad selection based on the customer’s completion of a personal profile. It was being called permission marketing. But on comparing this claim to Seth Godin’s articulate definition of permission marketing, I posted at the time that this wasn’t the game Blyk was playing . The ads may be targetted more closely than commercial TV, but most everyone I know still wants to skip those ads. The mobile and marketing industries have been watching Blyk closely ever since and then, this week, two articles from NMA’s Alex Farber: “Blyk scraps consumer offer to concentrate on operator partnerships ” and “Blyk’s MVNO shift causes industry stir ”. Now if anyone has the inside track on this market and what the Blyk statement referred to in the second of Alex’s articles means, it’s Bena Roberts of GoMo News . Perhaps the title of her post betrays otherwise… “Is anyone else extremely confused about blyk or is it just me? ” ...

I’ve just found out about the Blinkx and Miniweb deal from the Guardian’s article “Blinkx moves into telly with new set-top box deal ”. Blinkx is the rather astonishing video search engine that emerged from Cambridge University (with some confusing ties to Autonomy ), and Miniweb is into “next generation TV” with their platform already powering set-top boxes in over 9 million homes according to their website. Now you will be able to search through 35 million hours of video from your sofa. Cool, although you might be running dry as you approach your 4,000th birthday, although one would hope some more content will have been indexed by then. But that’s not the point. Just over four years ago I posted a blog about “myChannel ” which described a future without, effectively, any channels as we know them today. Or to put it another way, if there’s 7 billion of us on this planet then there are 7 billion channels. Everyone has their own. myChannel will be created bespoke based on a customisable combination of four sources… ...

Time for a change. Having sold Fuse PR to Racepoint Group in 2006, and as much as I will miss everyone, it’s time for me to leave the business in very fine hands and, well, do something else instead. One thing I’m really looking forward to is developing and growing MarCom Professional. We’ve got some cool ideas, as you’d expect I hope, and we’d love to hear your feedback and ideas too. So, fancy a pint? If you are in London on the 20th May, I invite you to join us at the Dog and Duck in Soho. ...

Chew the cud. Share a beer. With over 500 members and two to three thousand unique visitors every week, we want to uncover brilliant ideas for what we can do together; what next for MarCom Professional? Where and when… http://tinyurl.com/dogduck , Soho, London, 6.30pm, 20th May 2009. Updates here and @sheldrake . Hope to see you there! P.S. The current description of what MarComProfessional is about is here FYI.

Those of you with whom I’ve discussed social Web strategy, or even helped define and execute it, will know my analogy of the social Web with the social life of a typical city. For example, the Facebooks, MySpaces and Bebo’s are the mega night clubs on the ring road. The blogs and small forums are the pubs and bars on the high street. The likes of Ning are the market stalls or local fair rides. The tweeting of Twitter is the chitter chatter in passing and over the garden fence. And this isn’t analogy for analogy’s sake, this is a great way to orientate social Web newbies to the norms and expectations of social media, applications and services. Take the example of participating for the first time in a Facebook group, or a business forum, or blog meme. Enough to make the most confident of net newbies hesitate. Yet no-one enters a room buzzing with people they don’t know and starts gobbing off immediately before assessing the etiquette and the tone of the conversation, so why do that online? Social media newbies just need to look out for the analogous sort of things to which they are so naturally accustomed offline. Offline - is drinking from the bottle acceptable? Online - is proper punctuation and spelling expected? Offline - who’s got gravitas, attracting people around them? Online - whose point of view is attracting the most comment, the most feedback and interaction? ...

The likelihood of outstanding business success is greater with great teamwork. I’d say that was an obvious and uncontroversial thing to say! For the Friday Roundup, I’d condense the management texts I’ve read and the experiences I’ve had to date into five teamwork must-haves: a shared and clearly articulated vision; mutuality (individual success is team success, and vice versa); honesty; clearly defined roles and responsibilities; and a self-sustaining determination and hunger for success. These qualities are being put to the most extreme of tests in current times. The economic climate today requires great teams to tend to these must-haves like never before, to keep them resilient and vibrant. But the ultimate test is for those teams that observers within or without rate as sub-par today. ...