Very clever. Although the irony is that this is Microsoft advertising their digital advertising products…using a TVC…developed by an above the line agency. Still, clever none the less.

When we are trying to define customers that we have not yet interacted with, we refer to them as a prospects, or targets, or even users or consumers. Seth Godin suggests that this is no longer appropriate and we need a new term:

Citizen recognized the power of this individual. Citizens are no longer the weak, isolated pre-consumers in front of a TV set in 1971, with few options. Now, citizens appear to be holding all the cards. It sounds a bit pretentious, but then, so do most terms marketers use.

He suggests that using this terminology makes for a change in thinking that is more respectful. I like this idea, I think it makes a lot of sense.

It is no secret in my home and office that I hate mail. When you are the owner of a business you go on the publicly available Companies Office register you end up in numerous databases and become a target for an untoward amount of "personalised" direct mail. I also hate the other mail as well as this is mainly bills and stuff from the tax man. Let me count the ways:

Personalisation

This is a joke. Most marketing departments have terrible data which is invariably out of date because they or their agencies insist on creating copies of their customer database. Examples I can personally attest to include:

• Being asked to join a Kiwi Saver superannuation scheme….one month after I had already done so. What, you want me to join it twice??
• My three year old daughter receiving a special offer to join a rental car company’s priority membership scheme!!
• Various letters from web design companies offering me a special deal - Why would I want to pay you for something that has been one of the main ways I make a living for over 10 years now?

Carbon Credits

Forget about air travel, think about how much natural resources are consumed and carbon is generated with the creation and delivery of direct mail. What makes it even worse is that they usually use those window envelopes with a bit of clear plastic to show the address at the top of the letter so you can’t even recycle them. Send email or better yet, set up a blog with an RSS feed, and save some trees people.

It Costs Me Money

We have to pay for a post box redirect, plus a courier to clear the post box and deliver it to our office. Some days all we get is direct mail.

How to deal with it

Okay, rant over, you get my point.

So imagine my delight to see this link on Katie’s blog to a letter carefully written by someone just like me in Australia which he posted back to the marketing department of some unfortunate company as well as obviously sharing it with the world via the power of the blogosphere. As Katie points out, how many recipients of their DM campaign did not bother to respond with a witty complaint letter.

I know people go on about spam, but this is far less intrusive and easy to deal with. Marketers also talk about permission marketing and the recent flurry of activity around getting permission for email marketing databases in September 2006 with the new legislation in New Zealand. When has a company ever given you a clear opt out option in a direct mail piece. A simple website you can go to where you can tell the company that you no longer wish to receive direct mail please. You can go to this website and have your name removed from all databases in theory, however, it is up to the individual marketers to keep their database up to date with those that have asked to be removed. I’ll let you know if I notice any difference in a few months.

Am I just being overly cynical? Does anyone out there like getting direct mail?

I am at the Search Engine Room search marketing conference today at The Hyatt in Auckland, New Zealand.

Especially, looking forward to the panel discussion I’ve been invited to be on this afternoon.

I’ll be posting up summaries of the presentations on the Marker Blog.

Technorati Tags: searchengineroom, search

I recently gave a presentation at the yMedia Challenge event and they have sent me through some feedback from some of the people that attended.

"Really interesting - would like to talk to him some more."

"A key point in his presentation that stood out for me was building a community rather than marketing/advertising. Also his advice on avoiding CPM advertising and on using "geek marketing" like pay per click tools."

"I hung onto every word and realised that I had heard some of these words before but did not understand them. I learnt so much from Jon. Jon started a journey for me which will take me deeper into the world of computers."

"I enjoyed Jon’s presentation, but I felt he didn’t make enough allowance for the wide range of previous experience in the audience. Some of what he said was too technical for many in the room, especially many people from the not for profits who are not engaged with the topic. His examples were all interesting, but felt out of reach. On the other hand, his five things to do next week seemed very relevant."

"A very useful presentation, but sometimes Jon assumed too much prior knowledge and experience. However, of all the speakers I think his overall presentation was the most useful in a practical sense, once someone had translated the jargon etc."

"Great content about social- media, networking, capital. Loved the ‘Will it Blend’ vid."

"Engaging and enjoyable. the valuable message i took away from his presentation was to go where your audience already are rather than trying to drag them to you - particularly relevant when your audience are young people. "web

I thought that the presentation was aimed at an introductory level, but based on some of the comments I clearly need to re-look at this. Great to get this sort of feedback though.

I’m very excited to be invited by SaaS accounting system provider Xero to do a presentation to their customers and partners.

Xero is an amazing New Zealand company and if you haven’t already you should demo their product. Currently only available in New Zealand, but will be coming to the UK and Australia very soon.

Here are the details if you would like to attend:

The advent of social media, the increased uptake of broadband worldwide and the growing choice of communication tools have changed marketing forever - to a new era of customer participation.

Xero, along with interactive agency Marker, invites you to attend a breakfast to discuss this new participatory era and the impact for New Zealand businesses like yours.

Date: Friday 16 November 2007

Time: 7:30 am

Place: Xero, Level 1, Old Bank, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington, New Zealand

Register to: Lucy Hempseed lucy.hempseed@xero.com or phone: (04) 819 4837

Technorati Tags: saas, web 2.0 events, xero

I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the Uber:savvy event this morning to kick off the yMedia Challenge.

"the yMedia Challenge is a 2 week competition designed to connect media students with not-for-profit organisations."

I think my presentation went down okay, I got lots of questions at the end, but they did offer small bottles of 42 Below Vodka to anyone who asked one, so that might not be a fair reflection of interest from the audience!

I met some interesting people though:

Mike Brown who is the organiser of Webstock, easily the essential local event for the web community which is coming to Wellington in February. Very much looking forward to that one. Mike was the first speaker and did a fascinating intro into how people really drive web 2.0, not the technology.

Nigel Parker from Microsoft who gave an excellent overview of the emerging ways in which digital media can be consumed. This included demos of some of the latest Microsoft technologies including Siverlight, PhotoSynth and Microsoft Home Server. You can not understate the amount of investment Microsoft puts into research and development as well as the developer community.

I didn’t get a change to meet her personally, but Janet Mazenier, Programme Director, for the government’s Digital Strategy gave a speech. She admitted it was very hard to activate progress web projects, even within the organisation that is supposed to be leading the country. Three months to get a blog live. I can’t actually find the blog though. I think this organisation can make a real difference, if they can provide direction for government departments and state owned enterprises around blog policies. Tell the public sector that having a blog where people might make a comment that disagrees with your view is okay. This is still a democracy isn’t it?

It was well worth giving up a Saturday morning for this, everyone I met had something interesting to say and the organisers Pamela, Adele and Jade at yMedia are all exceptionally friendly people to deal with…plus they gave me Vodka as a thank you.

Technorati Tags: ymedia

It is so appropriate that the only industry with an acronym for a name, FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods), should be so dominated with jargon. I have only worked with clients in this industry in the last 18 months and I have to say I find it quite fascinating.

They do, however, speak a different language. Here is a quick guide to get you started:

Oils

This refers to the petrol stations owned by the major oil corporations. E.g. Shell, BP, Caltex etc. There is far great margin on chocolate bars and soft drinks sold in the shop, than the petrol on the forecourt. Due to the consolidated nature of the industry, the "oils" are an extremely lucrative trade partner for FMCG marketers, whilst at the same time having enormous purchasing power. They can literally make or break your brand in some cases.

Route

These are the diaries and small convenience stores. Much smaller customers, but important due to the large volume and the ability to get your products into as many neighbourhoods as possible.

Grocery

This is more obvious, the supermarkets.

BIB

Bag in Box - in the soft drink business this is the product you sell to fast food restaurants. Large plastic bags filled with concentrate which the restaurants can put into their machines and mix with carbonated water.

Flavour Flow Planogram

No, this has nothing to do with aging rap legend turned reality show star. A planogram is how products are presented in a glass fronted fridge or on a shelf in a shop or supermarket. A Flavour Flow Planogram is where products are arranged in order of flavours, so all the cola drinks, then all the water drinks, then all the lemon flavoured drinks etc.

Larger brand conglomerates like Coca-Cola obviously don’t want this. They want to be at the top of the aisle with all their products grouped together, so that you get all your different flavour products from their range and so by the time you get to the competitors, you already have everything you need for the week in your shopping trolley.

Carbonated Footprint

This is my favourite, refers to when a consumer will choose to buy a diet/sugar free soft drink when purchasing fast food so they can reduce their "Carbonated Footprint" and justify that extra burger/slice of pizza/fried chicken wing.

This is by no means an exhaustive list but I’ll add to it over time for my own reference more than anything.

Technorati Tags: fmcg

Google Analytics is going to get even more features soon.

"First, you’ll be able to use Google Analytics to track site search activity. Simply edit any of your Google Analytics profiles to enable “Site Search” and you can find out what people search for on your site and where these searches lead.

We’ll begin a limited beta test of the new Google Analytics Event Tracking capability. These new reports are designed to help you understand how people use and interact with Ajax, Flash and multimedia on your site without artificially increasing your pageview metrics.

We’ll also initiate a limited beta test in the coming weeks of our new Outbound Link Tracking feature.

Finally, Brett announced the Urchin Software from Google limited beta. Urchin is a software product that you run on your own servers. "

Since Urchin was acquired by Google, they have clearly invested substantial resource in the the product development and in my opinion, have definitely scooped the entire category. The ability to track internal search easily and also handle the complexity of AJAX and Flash applications, which have traditionally been very hard to do with other analytics packages, is a huge advancement. This type of product/service requires continual re-investment in both product development and hosting capacity, and Google obviously have deep enough pockets to do both.

There are still some ongoing questions around the accuracy of the data, but to be honest, every analytics solution I have seen (pretty much all the major ones) in the last 10 years in this industry have had this. It is more that the data is consistent rather than the absolute numbers as really it is about trend analysis.

The other major question is will Google ever start charging for the service? Joel and Tim from our team met with the Analytics guy from Google this morning and he said they have no plans to charge for it, as it is great for them to sell more AdWords.

Technorati Tags: google, googleanalytics, webanalytics

I had posted about PayPerPost.com after I saw a presentation from their founder in New York earlier in the year. It seems they signed up TiVo for a campaign which was subsequently pulled.

PayPerPost is a marketplace where advertisers can pay bloggers to post up content allowing a marketer to seed a viral campaign. Bloggers who are paid to post must disclose that it is paid content, however, there is no shortage of critics who believe the concept of paid content will destroy the largely forthright nature of blogs in general.

It appears this is a similar issue to that which Microsoft faced when they gave Ferrari Acer laptops to bloggers when they launched Windows Vista. In that case, Microsoft was not very clear on what was expected of the blogger. It appeared to be a bribe when in fact all they really wanted to do was make it easy for bloggers to experience Vista without having to upgrade their own computer. They issued a statement later clarifying their position, but it was too late

TiVo paid for video clips to be posted on PayPerPost, but they didn’t make it explicit that this was essentially an ad.

The lesson for marketers is this:

You can not be disingenuous because you will get found out. If you are doing an advertising campaign, don’t try and dress it up as a consumer generated viral campaign, just be up front. Better yet, forget about trying to advertise and think about how you can truly engage with your customers in a conversation, not a campaign. That is the real opportunity online, not video ads.

For more on paid content read out Chad’s post “Why paid blogs will kill the blogosphere”

Technorati Tags: payperpost, tivo