Warren Cammack

Came across ExploreEngage today at the Online Retailer Expo and thought they deserved a mention as a company to watch. Having seen a couple of applications using Layar I’ve been impressed from a technical perspective but haven’t really seen a great business use until today. ExploreEngage spoke about utilising the augmented reality applications to encourage customers to interact with the company in a variety of different ways. Imagine being able to star in the latest company advert – interact in your own way and post the results onto YouTube. The company can then choose the best video, the customer gets the kudos (and a prize?!) for putting the hard work in and you’ve created an instant viral campaign in the meantime…

I came across http://drop.io/ via an article in the Sydney Morning Herald. The service is free and offers the ability to quickly and easily share files on the Internet. A short (custom) url is created for you and you can upload as many files as you want (within the 100MB limit), additionally you can add notes etc. This is a great little service that makes perfect sense when you have a need to quickly share / collaborate with users outside of your organisation.

Google Sidewiki is coming and it’s going to revolutionise the way you interact with your customers. From this point forwards anyone will be able to make comments about your brand, products, staff or whatever and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. The social media savvy amongst you reading this will say well what’s new? Twitter and blogs have allowed us to do this for ages now. Well, the difference is that the comments will appear on your website whenever a user is browsing the website with the SideWiki plugin.

What does this mean for you?
Get ready to have to respond to yet another channel if you want to maintain your brand reputation. Ignore it at your peril as did Cotton On. Download the Sidewiki toolbar (ironically not yet available for Google Chrome) for Firefox and Internet Explorer and see what your customers are saying about you.

I attended AdTech’s breakfast seminar this morning which saw Tony Palmer (CMO, Kimberly-Clark) discussing the impacts of the GFC on consumer behaviour. A great quote from Tony was that marketers spend their entire careers attempting to change consumer behaviour then the GFC comes along and consumers are changing behaviour through their own free will! The most memorable quote was that marketers come up with a million fuzzy reasons for being but in the end they are here to:

Sell more shit to more people, for more money, more often. Classic.

Tony began by commenting on how the majority of individual marketers out there were keen to emphasize how important it is to maintain (or even increase) marketing spend during a recession but advertising figures in the US show at least a 25% drop since the previous year. Kimberley-Clark had maintained their spend and as such had managed to gain market share particularly in regions where their competitors had reduced spend.

The more interesting part of the talk focused on Tony’s belief that the traditional ways of developing a marketing campaign were now no longer effective. The new way of enticing customers to buy your widget over anyone else’s is as follows:

1. Develop your brand promise (traditional)
2. Determine the potential barriers that consumers may have to buying your product
3. Determine the sell proposition based on the promise and taking into account the consumers potential barriers.
4. Create campaigns to target each of the barriers.

A great example of this was a campaign for a KC nappy that focused on the consumers desire to provide the best for their child but having the barrier of being concerned about the cost of the premium brands. The campaign focused on the fact that for $1.50 you could keep your child in these nappies and this is about half the cost of a Starbuck’s coffee.

This evening I attended the ACS (Australian Computer Society) where the guest speaker was Mark Toomey who presented on ISO/IEC 38500 – a new international corporate governance standard. The topic itself was extremely dry (no surprise there!) and whilst I didn’t expect to be entertained in the same way as a social media presentation it was difficult to stay focused. The biggest disappointment was the speaker’s apparent desire to place the blame of the failure of previous IT projects on the shoulders of the business rather than IT. The argument centred around IT’s changing role over the last decade (or two?) which sees them taking on more of a business role. I’m all for clear responsibilities (read RACI) but isn’t it a better outcome if IT representatives have a seat at the table and are able to understand and clearly articulate both an IT and a business reason for a change? Furthermore does the current trend towards hybrid business/IT roles mean that the “business” is no longer an us and them term but a concept that means everyone should be considering the needs of an organisation regardless of which side of the table they sit at?

Interesting evening attending the latest Social Media Club Sydney event at the Oxford Art Factory. Russ Weakley gave some great insight into how he dragged the Australian Museum website kicking and screaming into the wild world of web 2.0 . A little bizarre was the decision to go with a complete custom content management system which he himself admitted had backed them into a corner in terms of ongoing maintenance costs. An amazing leap forward was the management buy in to allowing comments to be posted on the website without moderation. The second was distributed content creation – he cited the example of allowing everyone from the cleaning staff to the hardcore academics at the museum being able to create and own their own content on the site. This topic wasn’t covered in much detail but I’d certainly be interested to see how this works in practice given the drivers to remove central administration of content from any organisation.

The commercial slant on this is that you should be able to allow your users (read customers) to freely comment via your website – they’re going to talk about you anyway, you might as well give them the chance to do so in plain sight. It allows your staff (and advocates) to easily correct inaccurate comments with minimum effort on your part.

Chris Betcher was next up and provided an insight into the benefit of tagging content on the web. The talk contrasted the “old fashioned” way of categorising information (such as Dewey Decimal) and how this would be impossible to manage in today’s user-centric environment.

The key take out from this for any business is that you shouldn’t focus too much on categorising information – users should be able to do this themselves. It will save you time and effort and enable your users to locate what they are looking for in a more effective manner.