However, the world also gathered around the telly for two of the year’s most watched spectacles – the Royal Wedding and the Rugby World Cup (the Royal Wedding being the Rugby World Cup final for chicks, as one marketing mogul described it). And with great events come great viral campaigns. Remember the T-Mobile Royal Wedding video that was based this viral wedding video?  Social media magic. Vodacom’s RWC campaign by Riverstone Films also went viral to gain support for our boys in the green and gold. Unfortunately, we got Bryced.

Nevertheless, in the spirit of making ‘best of’ lists, here’s our very subjective list of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of 2011

The Good

-       We said it before, and we’ll say it again. We are in love with Yuppiechef and the way they operate. They recently launched a very cool publication that is send out with every delivery.  Marketing and branding at its best.

-       The ‘Moer hulle Bokke’ ad for kykNET by tbsp///beyond the line  (just because nobody expected it)

-       Nando’s quirky and on-the-spot response to current affairs as well as their interpretation of African politics (uhem, yes, we’re referring to that ad). And of course, loads of fun was had in the Medios office with their Kota Bun campaign.

www.dailybun.co.za

-       We would also like to take this opportunity to applaud the Mr Delivery “Fire the Chef” social media campaign by M&C Saatchi Abel.  Unfortunately, the Loeries beat us to it. The team behind this genius piece of work received the first gold Loerie award for a PR Communications Campaign at the 2011 Loerie Awards.

-       @helenzille and her sense of humour on Twitter. And also @DeepFriedMan who made #askhelenzille go viral.

-       Infographics coming into their own.

The Bad

-       The ASA’s ruling against the Axe Angles ad. We are still a bit sour about it.

-       The Shoe City fiasco concerning a dead cat and retail therapy – we see the connection, but we are pretty sure South Africans will be offended (see The Bad #1)

-       The singing hippo and Steve from FNB. Repetition repetition repetition is not necessarily a good thing.

-       Blackberry bumbling their way through the social media universe. Conflicting statements + a CEO that isn’t PR savvy = disaster

The Ugly

-       The Durex Twitter campaign. A prime example of how a social media endeavour can go seriously wrong. And no, in this case any publicity isn’t good publicity. Sies man!

-       The Protection of Information Bill.

In short the principle of guerrilla marketing encourages us to be innovative. Looking at the examples in the post, I realised that most of us continue to fall into the same groove that leads us to produce mundane advertising and marketing.

The 15 ideas posted vary in budget and goal, but they all have one thing in common; a simple message. Which gets me to the point of this blog. Innovation is about making things easier and not more complex. I think this theme is especially appropriate at a time when the world is singing the praises of the late Steve Jobs. For all that he gets credit for, his greatest gift to humanity was making technology easier to use.

 This Greenpeace ad is powerful and ironic. It depicts how bad print media is by adding an extra page to a magazine. The message is however clear as daylight and simple.

This is not an ad, simply a funny greeting card. The message is funny and super simple.

This one is my favourite. Who can doubt that the owner of this business card is a plastic surgeon? Sheer brilliance.

Note the little “buy” and “sell” on either side of this card. Not bad for an stockbroker.

This last effort proves that a good idea beats any budget. A perfect strategy for what is undoubtedly a low budget business.

I have not posted all the images provided by Bored Panda. Follow the link at the beginning of the blog to see the rest.

Go to Tom Fishburn.com for excellent marketing cartoons.

“What people want is to … “ If another pseudo marketing expert starts a sentence like that I am going to punch them. The most recent candidate for a clobbering was the new sales rep of a client. I had heard the story before from all the other reps I deal with at one time or another.

The problem with the sentence that starts with your declaration of what you know to be true is that it is exactly that. A declaration of what you know. We all tend to focus on our own frame of reference rather than facts at hand.

In this particular case the genius giving me his sage advice is adamant about which sports I should sponsor and how the kids eat up everything that these sports stars wear. The facts that he were ignorant of are;

• That the client does not view the particular brand as key to its strategy.
• The client has a limited budget
• The sports that he wants to see sponsored has little exposure to the key audience
• Sponsorship on its own is ineffective, you need back-up from social media, branding, events etc
• His knowledge of how the kids communicate is out of date
• The kids in question are more savvy then he gives them credit for
• Many of the brand’s competitors followed the same strategy with little success

Truth is few of us, experts included, know what people want. People themselves don’t know what they want. It is the nature of the zeitgeist. Viral and popular cannot be manufactured. It like the Beatles said, “Can’t buy me love.” Except in this case can’t buy me love for the brand.

Branding is the same. You have to ply your wares, present your offering and make sure there is something in it. Be clear and honest and then rely on those who have benefited from your product to tell their friends.

Of course you can’t just put it out there and hope someone does the work for you. You have to use the platforms, ask the market, punt when you can punt, be respectful when you can’t. You have to see the opportunities, add the value where possible.

It all comes back to the opening statement. To know what the market wants you have to ask them. Engage.

So pretty please with sugar on top, don’t say you know what the market wants.

First, I think it’s important to mention that the social media uptake in South Africa differs from that of the Western world. A large part of the population has limited or no access to the Internet. A staggering 63% of South Africans still use dumb phones, with the Nokia Dinosaur at the top of the consumer list.

Speaking of dinosaurs, it’s a sad and shocking fact that most CEOs and other members of upper management in South Africa are predominately white, predominately male and predominately old.

Mr. CEO?

When my grandmother was a child, the most amazing technological advancement of her day was electricity. Being able to turn on a light was something magical. Compare this to the technological advancements of my mother’s day. While electric light and refrigeration didn’t exactly shock her, South Africa only got television in 1976. She was already married by the time the National Party decided that we’re also allowed to mindlessly stare at boxes like the rest of the world.

I was born in the eighties. By the time I was out of diapers I could use a tape player, a video machine and a microwave. I even got to mess around with LP players for a while before my parents replaced it with the infinitely magical and glorious CD player. I was still in primary school when my parents got our first PC – one of those big, white ones with the floppy drive. Oh, man! The Tetris I played!

I had a cellular phone by eleventh grade, which was a lot later than most of my peers. In the nine years since I left school (oh god! oh god! oh god!) I’ve had more phones than I care to remember. I have an iPod, an iPhone, a MacBook, an iPod docking station among other technological wonders. If there’s a new technological advancement, I want it. If there’s a new app, I want to know about it. One of my very own apps might even be in the making. (Watch this space.) Technology doesn’t scare me.

Now, let’s consider the differences in communication.

In my gran’s age, long-distance communication consisted of letters, telegraphs and phone calls through a central operating room. When my mom was my age, they had thankfully figured out how to make calls without involving the neighbourhood snoop. By the time I was four years old South Africa had Internet access. Sure, it took a while before it would be available to households, but by the time I got to high school I could send an email. I started using Facebook in my second year at varsity, I text, I MMS, I email. I have more social media accounts than anyone should have. I only ever write my gran, who lives in Schweizer-Reneke and can’t hear all that well. I’m not even too fond of phone calls.

My gran was convinced her electric blanket will be the death of her, my mother struggles with the concept of social media, my dad (who’s slightly older than my mom) only just figured out how to use email. If we consider that most people in upper management in South Africa share a socioeconomic history with my parents (which, let’s face it, they do), it’s not surprising that a lot of otherwise forward-thinking suits still haven’t caught on to the fact that social media can’t be ignored.

How to bridge the gap

This brings us to the difficult part of this somewhat longwinded blog. How do we convince terrified CEOs that social media is replacing email, just like emailed replaced faxes, just like faxes replaced letters, just like letters replaced carrier pigeons, just like carrier pigeons replaced smokes signals? Okay, I’ll stop now.

Sadly, I don’t think we do. I think it’s a waiting game that will end up doing a lot more harm than we anticipate. Employees will find a way to participate in social media. The nature of technology means Mr. CEO can control which websites his employees visit from the company network, but not from cellular phones and other nifty devices. Maybe someone should tell him his employees are blogging about the tedious status meeting and his horrible tie while he’s in the room. He’s the only one who’s not in on the joke.

His competition, his customers, his friends, his employees and their friends are all talking about his company, and he has no control over what they’re saying. It comes down to simple public relations. If there’s an issue, which you’re not addressing it will become a problem. The fact that you don’t understand social media won’t get you a pardon.

By the time the old guard kicks it, the damage would have been done. I’m not sure how easy it will be to recover from it.

Peace,

Kris

I couldn’t agree more! I am looking for people who fit that description. Fortunately the job is much easier these days. For one, the quality and complexity of the tools required to produce the content is much improved and much reduced respectively. Many of the outlets where you need to post make the process much easier. In the fast-passed content world, the technical quality of the content you require is far lower. Look at successful series like the In Plain Englishvideos. These are not quite with a Handycam standard but not quite Hollywood either.

In Plain English

The technical issues are therefore minimal. What is key however, is the communication skills that have to back these technical skills. Plain English, the Old Spice man and many others have one thing in common – a clear message. Understanding the message and translating it into the four mediums is the difficult part. I should know, I have been struggling with a simple video for over three weeks now.

The shift in skills illustrates two macro issues perfectly. The first is that easy-to- obtain skills are being outsourced. The web, China, India wherever the skills are. They are cheaper and faster than you anyway. The winning formula is to be the message originator, the content maestro, the innovator. Seth Godin alludes to this in his book Poke the Box. (read a short review on my LinkedIn profile reading list)

The other macro issue that that fields of expertise are converging. There is a (stupid) debate about the survivability of the PR industry in some quarters. What the change in required skill sets indicate is not so much that PR is dying but that it is evolving and merging with social media. PR has always been about communicating. Now it is about communicating with a far larger megaphone.

The problem is that these experts contradict each other. It makes it difficult to gain insight into the issue in which you seek the expert advice in the first place. It also makes it obvious that the expert is dispensing advice not in pursuit of the truth or knowledge but rather in pursuit of their own agenda.

Take global warming. We follow the debate quite closely because we have a client to whom it is relevant. On the one side we have the humans-are-burning-too-much-carbon-and-causing-a-greenhouse-effect camp and on the other side you have the its-all-part-of-the-earth’s-natural-cycle-and-anyway-volcanoes-do-more-damage camp.

Both point to the other camp’s motives for optimising their findings. Finger-pointing and the reasons for adapting the results or doing the type of research that will give the results they seek is not relevant to this blog. Suffice it to say that neither side is untarnished.

At least there are still some barriers to entry for scientists. They need some academic credentials. Not so for social media, marketing, business, human nature, relationship, pet psychology and a host of other experts. For many of them the barrier to entry is setting up a blog and a Twitter account. I promote myself as an expert. All I have to back up my claim is four years of study and 15 hard years in the trenches, some awesome mentors and a few clients who have benefitted from my advice.

We live in the reality TV version of experts. People are famous for being famous. Similarly we have experts who are experts on being experts. The bar for entertainment is so low that we will people clean other people’s houses. Similarly, the bar for expert advice is low. We are taking advice from anybody that can critique the status quo in a harsh enough voice and generalise the problems of one industry so it sounds like a global business catastrophe.

Many of the experts I see giving business advice on how social media will double your business have not been in business long enough to know the true meaning of a customer’s need.

So where to from here? The fact is that we do need experts. The level of specialisation required to function dictates that we cannot be expert at everything. We need input from people who have more experience in fields that we are less familiar with.

To me the only way to get reliable advice is to get it from many sources, understand the basis of the advice and to measure it based on the experience of others who have used the same resource. Fortunately the web and social media means that everybody can be compared, measured, reviewed and analysed. The disadvantage is that there are so many different points-of-view that it can be hard to tell who is right and who is wrong.

As always the solution is customised. Here is a four-step plan to choosing your expert.

Step one: Choose an expert whose advice relates to problems you personally experience. The expert’s advice and experience must mirror your needs. I run a smaller business. For me to take Tom Peters’ advice as gospel is useless. His clients are multi-billion dollar global enterprises.

Step two: Each expert will have detractors and fans. Look at who they are. See if you can determine the balance of opinion. Look at who more closely resembles you – the detractors or the promoters.

Step three: Follow your gut. If the advice makes sense, follow it.

Step four: Be a cynic. Pay for the advice on a benefit to your organisation-basis rather than on a per hour basis. Check the research they quote and always, always have them commit to timeframes and ROI.

So there you have expert advice on how to choose an expert to give you advice. Whether you should trust my advice or not I will leave up to you.

Greenpeace recently challenged the two biggest sportswear companies in the world to commit to more responsible manufacturing processes after an investigation revealed that major clothing manufacturers like Nike, adidas and PUMA are releasing toxic chemicals into the water in China. The Detox Challenge addressed the manufacturing giants directly to take a “precautionary approach to chemical management”. Consumers suddenly took notice of these two manufacturers for all the wrong reasons.

Following the public challenge, PUMA let go of the sport scene hind tit, stepped up to the challenge and publically committed to “eliminate all releases of hazardous chemicals from its entire product lifecycle and across its whole supply chain by 2020″. The company launched the PUMA.Peace programme in which it outlines its plans for safer manufacturing processes.

In response, Greenpeace released an article commending the sportswear manufacturer for its boldness in environmental change and PUMA received the award for best Corporate Social Responsibility at the Peace and Sport awards. I can almost guarantee that every consumer with vague notions of environmental awareness will at least consider this incident the next time they’re in the market for a pair of trainers.

Here’s why PUMA wins:
• They responded to a challenge that didn’t even involve them
• They responded quickly
• They took responsibility
• They owned up to their faults publically
• They offered a solution publically
• They were bold

PUMA recognized an opportunity for wonderful, positive publicity, while Nike and adidas simply acknowledged the existence of the Greenpeace Dirty Laundry Report. Remember that the next time there’s a shake-up in your industry.

If you have a few moments (I know you do), have a look at this Greenpeace campaign at adidas and Nike stores across the globe. It contains partial nudity, so turn your monitor away from your boss and that zealot next to you.

Peace!
Kris

What is the goal?

In many cases Medios’ clients want improved sales. This is a good starting point. Most media coverage is measurable and has averaged ratios. This is especially true of social media.

QBCon, a business solution developer and Medios client, uses ratios and sales cycles extensively during the sales process. This enables them to determine the real cost of each sale, which makes the Medios service easy to cost.

Lets take a hypothetical example:

Assume that QBCon, using their current sales technique has to cold call 500 companies to gain 50 appointments. Of those 50 prospects 5 will have B.A.N.T (budget-authority-need-timing) and enter the negotiating phase. Of these five QBCon typically makes one sale.

Let’s assume that the process takes about 18 months. The company can calculate the opportunity cost of this sale. The amount of time a salesperson spent with the prospect, the overhead allocated to the sales process, etc. QBCon can easily determine the exact cost of a sale.

How much can Medios charge?

In order for Medios to sell its service to QBCon, it must demonstrate that it can make the process cheaper. We can do this by improving the ratio from 500 to 250 calls for a net result of 50 prospects. Such a saving is easy to value for a client. They simply have to compare the opportunity cost of making the additional 250 calls.

The second benefit that Medios can deliver is shortening the sales cycle. Once again the cost benefit is easy to calculate. A shorter sales cycle implies less time required from the sales team, fewer miles driven and similar expenses.

The Medios value proposition then simply comes down to explaining to the customer how we will address the company’s needs and reduce its costs. Working out by how much we will reduce those costs determines the maximum fee we can charge.

Because we always aim for a win-win result, Medios charges less than the customer will save. That way there is an incentive for the customer to retain Medios.

This blog is a simple example where the costing is based on the need for a lower cost of sale, also known as the quest for better leads. In subsequent blogs I will illustrate the costing for brand awareness, reputation management and improved sales volumes.

The movie theatre in question, the Alamo Drafthouse, received a voicemail from the irate customer. They recognised that her compliant demonstrated their unique selling proposition and decided to use it to their advantage. The key to the success of the ad is that the Alamo Drafthouse understands that it can’t please everybody. They also realise that the complainant is the kind of moviegoer that dissuades other film lovers from going to the theatre.

In a presentation by Nikki Cockcroft, CEO of Primedia Online at the recent Integrated Marketing Communication Conference (IMCC) she mentioned a tweet she sent from Heathrow airport. She had tweeted that her flight was delayed. Within minutes they had DMed her with updates. The net result is that an unhappy customer told a packed auditorium how good Heathrow is. Was she less inconvenienced? Did she get anything from Heathrow (other than info)? No. Yet she was willing to praise them.

Not every business has the opportunity to use a customer complaint on such a dramatic scale. There are nevertheless endless opportunities to be derived from unhappy customers.

Solar water heater supplier and Solahart distributor, Selected Energy, noticed a hellopeter.com complaint from a customer. The customer was upset that a salesman had not honoured an appointment. Selected Energy immediately contacted the customer and sent another salesman. The customer will have at least two additional interactions with Selected Energy, giving them an advantage over their competitors.

In addition Selected Energy was open and honest about the mistake and published the event on their Twitter feed (@SelectedEnergy) and on Hellopeter, demonstrating their ethos and willingness to accept responsibility.

In all three cases the service supplier failed a customer. In all three cases the supplier made amends in different was ways – not by solving the problem so much as by communicating about it.

Irate Alamo customer

Usually the divorce is initiated from the client’s side, and usually it is about the agency not meeting the client’s need. Generally speaking agencies want the business so they are willing to take a little more abuse, willing to go the extra mile. Agencies usually need the money so they seldom end relationships with clients.

Medios has on two occasions resigned client accounts. The reason was the same in both cases. The client did not understand the value of marketing. The first time was 5 years ago. The agency was servicing a number of very small accounts. Every day was spent arguing about or justifying fees. The smaller clients were much less interested in extracting than in getting work done for free. Before this point I was naïve and inexperienced and tried to retain these clients at all cost. When it dawned on me that there was not a win-win situation I resigned all small clients with whom I did not see a future.

Since then Medios has focussed on gaining larger accounts and will only consider a smaller account if the clients displays a clear understanding of their own need. Two years ago I accepted a small account (from a very big company) because I believed that it would grow into profitable account. I thought they understood their need. Turns out they did not. I did, but they did not.

Now I am a good salesman and a pretty persuasive guy, but try as I may I was unable to get them to see the value. The client had no interest in reaching its goals. In fact, the client had no goals for marketing. I designed goals for them and implemented measurables, but try as I might I could not make them understand the value.

This made for very difficult meetings. Animosity marked every meeting. They paid late, fought me on inconsequential matters, wasted time, sabotaged their own process and always wanted to reduce my fee.

When I eventually called halt, the client was shocked and surprised. To some extent they saw value in our service. It was just not the value I thought they should be seeing. They wanted to buy a service I didn’t want to sell.

The difference meant that we were always fighting. The cost in staff morale and the erosion of the Medios vision of its value proposition was a price too high to pay. Losing the client will hurt financially. They were a large account for Medios. Not compromising on our desire to make a difference to the bottom line is far more valuable.