The Best Digital Campaign of 2011

It’s that time of the year when the “best of” lists start coming out, so here’s another one to add to the group.  While I’m no authority on all things digital, working at an Agency provides me more exposure to campaigns than most folks.

The opinion for best digital campaign is my own and based on what I have seen this past year. I’m sure that I’ve missed a few, so please feel free to suggest your favorite in the comment section.   There is no “science” to the process.   The criteria for selection came down to four key components:

•  Boldness – How big was the objective of the campaign?  How significant was the insight?
• Innovation – How unique or innovative was the application of the technology
•  Value Proposition – How compelling?
•  Impact – Was it significant?  A Game changing?  Will it have a lasting impact on the industry, consumer and marketers? 

Overall, 2011 was good year. We saw companies becoming more humanly relevant with their messaging, like the Microsoft ad in my last post.  And the use of new digital technology was everywhere; Adidas and Hyundai wowed us with the use of 3D Building Projection Mapping. 

Intel launched their new Core i5 chip through a well-crafted video experience in the form of a short film highlighting the chip’s power for gaming and social media use.  And integrated social media campaigns, such as Volkswagen and Heineken became commonplace.

However, based on the criteria above, my vote for the digital campaign of the year goes to Tesco for a campaign executed in South Korea.  It had a big, bold and aspirational objective -- takeover the leadership position in the market from the domestic competitor with more retail stores.  And in its wake, left the retail industry rethinking the shopping experience.

But the part of the campaign that truly separated it from the competition was the compelling value proposition.  Using technology platforms to improve what I’ll call the “utility of time.”   For marketers, this is an unexplored gold mine of opportunity.  Finding and exploiting “unused or wasted” time by giving it purpose or utility, and going beyond just putting an ad in front of eyeballs to engaging consumers in a meaningful way. 

Home Life (Tesco) customers are, well, busy. South Korean productivity is near the highest in the world, so “freeing up time for them” is a true value-add. Tesco took commuters wait time for a train, and turned it into something useful…shopping for groceries; a task that is viewed as a chore and conducted during a consumer’s precious weekend time. 

Tesco creates the opportunity for commuters to use “low value” wait time, for what they believe to be a “low value” task, in the process freeing up “high valued” personal time to be used at their discretion. 

Earlier this month, Pew Research Center released the results of a study that tracked young adults online behavior over the last 11 years.   In 2000, 16 percent of young adults went online for amusement or to “pass the time.” 

On any given day in 2011, 53% of young adults, and a third of adults, said that they went online for “no particular reason, just for fun or to pass the time.”  The takeaway for marketers is that people are looking to fill their time, so give them something useful and meaningful to do with it.

And don’t settle for the safe and small next year; push your teams to go beyond Facebook “likes” as a metric.  Aim high, go after what might seem unattainable, and dream big.  Dare to change your industry, redefine the buyer journey, and/or challenge the conventional wisdom.  

Have a great holiday season and go BIG in 2012! 

Guest Article: Using Search and Social to Win Business

The following post is written by gyro client Jeff Vail of Siemens Enterprise Communication.  

When I started at Siemens Enterprise Communications, we took broad-brush strokes with search and social advertising for “impression” purposes. This approach tended to align with the traditional view of search and social marketing that served as an awareness and consideration builder for top-of-the-funnel activities. However, as a field marketer who owns search, I was interested in using it for more tangible results.

To put this idea into action, Siemens Enterprise Communications turned to the experts at gyro to develop and execute the plan to push search and social “down the funnel” and align it against supporting an identified opportunity. Instead of focusing on getting in the consideration set, we set our sights on developing a program to help influence decision-makers at the point of purchase.

Driving Search Down the Funnel

Click here to continue.

Microsoft Finally Kinects with its Audience

With the Christmas shopping season fully upon us, Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing game device is expected to be at the top of the gift list for many consumers. Last year, Microsoft sold 1 million Kinect devices for its Xbox 360 in 10 days, and in a recent poll it was at the top of the wish list for children 13 and older. But what you might not expect is that some of those orders are going to be coming from businesses.

Early this month, Microsoft launched Kinect for Windows SDK with a brilliant, new ad called “Kinect Effect.”

Microsoft is pushing Kinect hardware for Windows SDK for business applications.  As staff writer Jason Kennedy fromPCWorld states: “SDK will make it possible for programmers and dreamers from the world over to tinker with the system and make it do things Microsoft hadn’t thought of, and push the development of NUI [natural user interfaces] to the next level.”

What is noteworthy about the Kinect Effect ad is what it took for Microsoft to make it. Six years ago, in an interview with CMO magazine, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer confessed to a problem long known by many consumers of Microsoft products:

"During Microsoft’s climb to the top of the software industry, rapid-fire product cycles often happened without much front-end input from the folks in marketing. Engineers would develop new software, pack it with bells and whistles, decide on an acceptable number of bugs and toss it over to marketing for a press release and a launch event."

At the time, Microsoft had set out to change that course through an expansive and expensive relationship marketing initiative. Internally, it aligned marketing with product groups, created a "mea culpa" marketing campaign to reach out to past customers, and targeted loyalists hoping to turn them into advocates.

But because of its past transgressions, and a perception that many of its products were “necessaries” with little to pique the desire of consumers, Microsoft struggled with finding an ignition point, or something to connect customers with the brand and ignite their passions.

Well, those days appear to be over. With the Kinect Effect, the tech titan proves that it can be relevant, even desirable, with a campaign that is expansive, inspiring and incredibly human. The campaign asks audiences to dream about how they might use Kinect by inspiring them with images of people playing air instruments, a doctor flipping through X-rays, and a student deconstructing DNA with only hand motions.

The expansiveness of the idea allows Microsoft to successful reach, and hopefully inspire, all three of its targeted audiences, including consumers/users, businesses and developers.  Any one group can have the dream, but all three are needed for it to become reality.

Perhaps the most significant point of the ad is that it is evidence that the relationship marketing effort was worth it, Microsoft now understands the strategic importance of the "front end" as Ballmer calls it.  The appeal of the ad is not the "bells and whistles" of Kinect but rather what Kinect can enable, which is virtually unlimited as long as there are dreamers.

If Microsoft can continue this connection with the customer while retail store openings continue into 2012, it could transition itself from the company that makes the “have to have” product to the company that is the “want to have” brand.

Click Here for a Social Media ROI

Everybody knows – or thinks they know intuitively – that social elements add value to marketing. But just how, exactly?

Like anything in business, it comes down to return on investment. Social media is not a strategy and it’s not an end in itself. Unless your business objective (and I’d check with your shareholders on this) is only about gaining page views and follows, marketers need to understand how social adds value to everything else in your toolkit.

So how do you find the “sweetspot” for developing an ROI for social media?  Well, start by viewing the tools at their most basic level, as vehicles for sharing; photo’s, thoughts, content, etc.  Consider them “levers” for improving the performance of known activities that have produced a ROI. 

Years ago, we assessed the effectiveness of demand generation campaigns for a client.  Because the firm was in the hi-tech industry they had a heavily reliance on content marketing for their campaigns.  They spent months designing and building them, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in execution only to see diminishing results. 

The audit revealed that their campaign effectiveness (related to lead production) lasted roughly 36 hours after launch (see below).  Meaning that the majority of the leads were being created within the first three days of launch, regardless of how long they left the campaign in the market (this is not uncommon). 

Today, social media has the potential to create a long tail effect, extending the life of expensive campaigns, ultimately improving ROI, and along the way creating and deepening the relationship with the audience. 

I’ll use myself as an example: A blog post of mine titled, The End of Blogs (and Websites) as We Know Them recently ran on Forbes CMO Network (see below).  It received no special promotion; in fact, you could say the deck was stacked against it.  Posted on a Friday, the slowest traffic day of the workweek, at midnight (EST) when most of the blog readers at home or are in bed.  By prime blog viewing time (10 am) it had almost dipped below the fold.

But on the following Monday it took off, almost doubling the views of Friday, and continued to build momentum ending the week as the 3^rd most popular post of the day.  The following week it was the most popular post on Wednesday.  So what happened? 

Social took over. Without a significant additional investment in promoting it, social sharing accelerated and extended the life of the post, even as it fell off the first, second and third page of the site.  Readers engaged and went from passive viewers to active promoters.

Readers were tweeting their own thoughts and comments about their insights, not just retweeting the post title.  They placed it into Linkedin groups and added their comments on the impact of the technology (the topic of the post) to their particular area of interest or role.  They were actively engaging in sharing their “discover” with others. 

That is the power and the value of social media for content marketing.  

The post no longer needed to be pushed because it was being endorsed, and in some ways validated by readers -- the most trusted source of information.  

The potential of social media is intriguing, but to determine its true value, companies will need to experiment.  Using social media to support your content marketing efforts is a prudent choice, but keep this in mind: It will only be effective if the audience/community finds value in the content and part of that value is defined by those who pass it along. 

This post appears today on the Forbes CMO Network.  

The End of Blogs (and Maybe Websites) as We Know It

I started this blog five years ago as an experiment.  Over the years, I built a decent following, got listed on a few “best of’s”, and built up a solid bank of content.  I never wrote a post for money or allowed advertising; I was in full control of the site and the content.

That changed last week when Blogger rolled out its new Dynamic Views template. Almost instantly, I saw the future and it was an eye opener.  The new technology is a “game changer” and has the potential for causing a SIGNIFICANT “rethink” for marketers.  There are two features in particular that make this innovation noteworthy. 

The first is that you, the reader, can change the layout of the site.  Although dynamic content and websites have been around for years, this is the first tool that I’ve seen that has the potential to turn complete control of the user experience to the visitor.   It allows readers to organize the blog in seven different layouts (click on the tabs above).

The second, and most concerning, is the “Flipcard” view (click that tab).  In a sense, it allows you to “flatten” my website.  Suddenly, the majority of my content (good and bad) is visible above the fold and can be scanned in about 8 seconds (the average time spent to view a web page).  Readers can quickly sort through thumbnail images or blog titles searching for relevant content. 

This new disruptive innovation arrives at a time when corporations are just now beginning to appreciate and understand the value of content marketing and blogging.

According to Hubspot’s State of Inbound Marketing report, nearly 40% of US companies are now using blogs for marketing purposes.  And for good reason, B2B companies that blog generate 55% more traffic, and 67% more leads per month than those who do not.

Those blogs are reaching an ever-growing population of readers.  The global population of readers grew 65% last year, according to Hubspot.   And they are consuming more, 46% said that they were reading blogs more than one a day. 

To keep pace, more content is being produced.  Emarketer reports that there are 31% more bloggers today than there were three years ago, creating an estimated 160 million blogs on the Internet at the end of 2010. 

What does this mean for the content marketer?

The speed at which audiences move around online will get faster.  They will be more difficult to connect with, engage and keep.  Further we are going to have to be prepared to give control to readers in order to be successful.  Based on my experience, here are a few things marketers need to consider:

• Flag post  – An average reader spends 86 seconds on a blog.  To “stop” a visitor who is on the express train to “contentville,” we will have to rethink the titles and images used in posts, and we’ll probably have to live with higher bounce rates.  Suddenly, getting the reader’s attention is just as important as getting them to engage.  
• Relevancy - Turning control of the site over to the visitor also comes with the reality that we are now writing content the visitor wants to read and not, necessarily, just espousing our opinions or services.  Communicating the company point of view is still important, but now it has to be done using the audience’s language.
• Understanding the reader - Google Analytics gives us the demographics but that longer will be enough.   We’ll need to understand what appeals to the reader by monitoring comments, how they’re sharing links, and where they’ve come from, and where they are headed.  We’re merely a morning stop along the way and to get to engage we have to know how to get their attention. 
• Content production – Producing good quality content has long been a challenge.  Now with the ability to flatten sites the lack of content will be visible in an instant. Marketers will have to create a content calendar and rely on trustworthy sources for output. 
• Timing – According to Hubspot research, link-sharing among blog readers reaches a peak at 7 am.   Comments on blogs top out at 8 am, and by 10 am blog reading begins to decline.  As the data suggest, when content is posted and distributed matters.  New internal processes will have to catch up with external audience preferences. 

The real “game changer” is that this technology will quickly make its way into corporate website design.   And for years we have tried to figure out the “user experience.” Visitors can now create their own unique experience, actually seven of them, and do it in real time.  It is a great opportunity, as well as a great challenge, and it’s one that Marketers can’t afford to miss.

This post appears today on Forbes.com.