In the golden age of branding, several guests at the party held sway: brand, PR, marketing, external relations (ER), research, and the agencies. On top of that, we had a few occasional attendees, such as consumer affairs, investor relations, and community relations.
Today, in the golden age of consumer empowerment, we have the same party guests, but their sway is being challenged in a very big way by an aggressive, sometimes rude and abrupt new guest at the party: the consumer influencer.
I'm talking about the loudmouths everyone hears and reacts to. These folks really move the needle when it comes consumer generated media creation and spread. They write the power blogs, lead the communities, organize the forums, create the boards, upload the most viewed videos on YouTube, lead mini-revolutions on Facebook, and more.
They may have accrued influence over time or have situational influence (e.g., they were first to try and review the iPhone, hence setting off a broader chain reaction). That influence often spills from the online zone into the offline or vice versa. Indeed, today's uber-influencers are largely platform agnostic, except they tend to have a more quantifiable digital trail of results online. Put another way, if you search their names, you'll find evidence of something they said.
Who manages and converses with these influencers?
Is there a defined person, department, group, or entity within your organisation charged with influencer management? Should there be? Equally important, what are the risks of too many folks going after the same constituency?
Our advice is to engage a partner like shifted pixels to monitor, engage with and report on thesee internet conversations. Engaging a blogger or high profile forum members requires a very different set of techniques than traditional PR. Keen to know more, call us for a quick chat.
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Update: 11 July 2007
Ok so we must confess we have been caught out for copy pasting (see comments) from one of our favourite websites for the majority of this blog post. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and whilst that is true, if your gunna copy other people stuff, you really should to give credit to your source.
We were in the wrong, and we definitely were not practicing what we preach. Sorry readers...
Thanks Richard (http://richardstacy.wordpress.com), sorry bud, sometimes we just get so excited with the ideas out there we cant help but publish them, and its very easy to want to own that idea for yourself.
Every single day, someone, somewhere is discussing something important to your business; your brand, your executives, your competitors, your industry.
Are they hyping-up your company, building buzz for your products? Or, are they criticizing your service, complaining to others about your new product launch?
A great brand can take months, if not years, and millions of dollars to build. It should be the thing you hold most precious. It can be destroyed in hours by a blogger upset with your company.
A new product launch could take hundreds of TV commercials, dozens of newspaper ads, and an expensive ad agency.
It can also spread like a virus with the praise of just one customer, at one message board.
A company can dominate market share, throttle competition and hold the #1 brand in the world.
It can also crash in months if it fails to listen to what its customers want.
By now, you should have an understanding of just how powerful consumer generated media (CGM) is. Your next action could be the difference between your company’s success or failure. Do you click the back button and ignore the conversation, or; do you engage a partner who can help you manage and interact with this new online community?
Shifted Pixels is managing online reputation for some of australia's largest companies, call us for a quick chat to let us know about your online reputation.
Our friend Trevor Cook, a well known blogger and PR guru, has released a fantastic online guide to Social Media.
What is Social Media?
The online communities, technologies and practices that people use to share news, opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives.
The paper includes lots of new stuff on emerging communities such as second life, wiki's, twitter, myspace, facebookaswell as "traditional" social media - blogs, rss, podcasts and more.
Check out this new "Viral" video from a US Crysler Dealership
1. The Video is blatently "selling" the user, using traditional techniques. Same old TV advertising crap. The reason this video sucks is the same reason Tivo rocks.
2. Treading viewers like idiots doesnt work anymore. The best virals have a uniquely human voice, they sound human. This video sounds like ad talk.
3. There is nothing "Viral" about it. What information would viewers want to spread here?
4. There is no stimulation of viewer emotions. Why do i care?
5. No point of view. The most effective virals have a strong (even offensive) point of view. Its really the only way to get noticed in the new "Attention Economy"
6. No one got kicked in the nuts, and no boobs were shown (Lets face it, why do people typically watch YouTube)
Shifted Pixels is working with traditional businesses helping them prepare their existing media content for the new-media environment. Call us for a quick chat if you need more info...
When you think of social networks you probably think of MySpace. But recently, Facebook has been gaining popularity - since it opened up beyond college users, it has enjoyed a flood of new users, boosted further by the launch of Facebook apps. It's time these two social networks fought it out.
The Cluetrain Manifesto is a set of 95 theses organised and put forward as a manifesto, or call to action, for all businesses operating within what is suggested to be a newly-connected marketplace.
The ideas put forward within the manifesto aim to examine the impact of the Internet on both markets (consumers) and organisations.
Markets are conversations.
Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
If you havnt read The Cluetrain Manifesto, we strongly suggest taking a read of it. This declaration was made in 1999, and is widely regarded as the definition of the new post industrialist era that that we are currently exploring.
We have observed several trends in writing effective and compelling copy for websites.
These tips probably dont apply to highly factual or technical websites, but if you are selling or delivering a marketing or brand message then read on...
1. Create Allure
Just like first dates, writing compelling website copy is about not giving away too much information. Its kind of like trying to spark an interesting conversation with your website visitor, and then leaving them with a lingering desire to find out more.
2. Keeping it Simple
Try and only have 1 or 2 concepts per page. If you have a large number of ideas on a page, and the web visitor become even slighly confused, they may be likely to close your website and keep looking.
3. Its not about you!
People don't care about you and your credentials, they care about themselves and their problems.
Instead of writing:
"We are the leading provider of X, and our expertise ensures our position as the number 1 in the Y industry."
You can flip the message on its head:
"Are you looking for a X provider you can trust? You may feel more confortable knowing that all the Y Industry complexities and issues can be managed by the #1 market choice." 4. Short is sweet
Avoid long paragraphs or too much detail.
If you have lots of information, break it into bite size chunks over several small pages with a logical & super easy to use linking strategy.
A technique we use to spice up key points is using a 4 to 5 item bullet point list. Example This technique be used to raise the impact of the key pieces of information you are trying to get across.
5. Search Engine Readiness
Pick a theme of 1 or 2 key phrases for each web page (eg "sydney oven repair" or "how to sell books online"). Try and achieve a "Keyword density" of 3 or 4 for each of your key phrases.
This will also subconsciously reinforce your brand message with the website viewer and increase the perceived relevance of the webpage.
6. Call to Action
Don't just put information on your web pages. You need to tell a story, to create a path.
I remember (vaguely) at University the TV advertising slogan AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action). It might seem that the same applies to web page copy.
Make sure your webpage is leading somewhere, and ensure their is a link at the bottom of each page suggesting to your visitor where they should go next.
The Results: Using these techniques we have been able to improve our average website visit length to our Shifted Pixels site from less than 1 minute to more than 3 Minutes! Chuffed :)
A lot of our clients seem scared or overwhelmed by PPC advertising these days. We find this interesting, but not surprising. They are concerned that keyword costs are rising, there are too many advertisers, and the entire method is becoming cumbersome and overcrowded. Don't be scared! PPC advertising can be very effective and should be considered in your marketing campaign.
Anyone who has followed consumer electronics and online services knows that once a product reaches dominance, it becomes very hard for it to be dethroned (hello, iPod, Google, and Windows). Economists have argued for years regarding the costs involved in finding and adopting alternatives, but the psychologists will point out that familiarity and comfort play major roles in keeping consumers loyal to an incumbent. Research that appears in the Journal of Consumer Research delves into how these factors, collectively termed "Cognitive Lock-in," develop and play out.
The authors of the study point out that previous research has shown that cognitive lock-in is not just an abstract concern, but one comes with real-world costs: "the costs associated with thinking about and using a particular product decrease as a function of the amount of experience a consumer has with it. Thus, repeated consumption or use of an incumbent product results in a (cognitive) switching cost that increases the probability that a consumer will continue to choose the incumbent over competing alternatives." This suggests that, even if a product isn't especially easy to use, familiarity with it may overcome that drawback as, ultimately, its users don't have to think about their actions in order to get things done anymore.
Rupert Murdoch's Myspace still dominates press coverage of social networks as much as it does the web audience, according to an analysis of mentions in the Nexis news database. But Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook, which last month allowed third-party applications to be tightly integrated into users' pages, is on the rise. In May last year, the college social network was namechecked in the headline or start of 109 articles; Myspace, with its much broader appeal, got about ten times the number of mentions. In the latest month? Myspace mentions doubled, but Zuckerberg's upstart got seven times the coverage of a year earlier.
Its been interesting to see the new breed of communities and publishing tools coming out in true web 2.0 style.
Of course Twitter is the darling of this breed of online apps, however there are a number of awesome new lightweight online communities and web publishing apps coming out.
The interesting thing about these new online conversations, is that they are inhabited by many early adopters, high profile bloggers and those who are influencers of influencers.
For example, on twitter, the upper class of web entrepreneurs and tech leaders are posting insights from every moment of their daily lives including:
By making a presence in these communities you have a unique opportunities to hear inside news, and to converse with those who make news happen.
Shifted Pixels is working with brands helping them make presence in these new emerging online communities. Contact us for a quick chat on how we could help your brand online.
We recently came across a 'whitepaper' from Daryl Wilcox of Daryl Wilcox Publishing (associated with Sourcewire etc), which provided a very interesting overview of the future of traditional PR, which began with an interesting conjecture in 2017
However it soon returns to normality, and highlights what many PR organisations are starting to consider, namely whether to adapt to changing trends and behaviours as to how people read and gather news. To quote the whitepaper:
''The worst case scenario for PR, and this is real world and not fantasy, is that PR loses significant ground to an apparently more dynamic and imaginative profession - search marketing. The danger is this new discipline will take a bigger slice of the marketing budget at the expense of search marketing will start to take on communications roles which were previously part of the PR function''.
As the report goes onto state, there is already significant evidence of this. Many traditional offline publishers are now pouring money into online.
Search engines are also the weapon of choice when researching products or services, once the sole domain of offline publishers. Companies are getting wise to this, and the associated spend online is reflective of this trend. Added to this, is the ability of search marketing in order to drive traffic to the site.
Search marketing budgets are often similar to PR budgets nowadays - ranging from retainers for small clients of circa $500 per month to budgets of over circa $50000+ per month. However search marketing has one significant advantage over traditional PR in as far as it can demonstrate return on investment more effectively, easily and objectively. This is particularly important in many companies where every penny is accountable. As a result many search engine marketing companies are offering a range of online PR services such as PR syndication. This impacts PR as many organisations that would never have previously considered PR are now introduced to PR by search marketing agencies.
However the PR industry have been fairly slow in response. The report highlighted the CIPR conference in November 2006, where not one of the 14 sessions had any Online PR bias. As the report puts it - ''The transformation of the media by the Internet was not a revolution, it was a slow burn. Now it as a raging fire''
However we are in danger of singing the whitepapers praises too highly. Whilst we fully agree with much of the report (particularly with my SEM hat firmly on), the reference to PR professionals being potentially better at SEO than search marketeers seems slightly of the mark. SEO is not all about numbers, numbers is merely a part of the fully equation, and it is this attention to the numbers along with the terminology and phrasology, that allows us search marketeers to leverage this ROI from online.
However Daryl's document is written with the PR sector particularly in mind, and as such does an excellent job as such in advising PR of the potential of the Internet, whether or not they choose to utilise that information is another question. To be honest, there is no reason why Search Marketing and PR cannot cohabit side by side.
We am currently working with a well respected PR agency, who are wholly embracing Online PR and the opportunities it can offer, and we are sure they want be the last.
To PR agencies. If you haven’t embraced the Internet, call us for a quick chat.
Color is probably one of the most powerful psychological tools and we are often not even aware of its power. If you didn't know it by now, the industrial psychology has a special field that studies the in-depth psychology of color.
Color is a very important factor in online branding, not solely for logos, but for web graphics in general. A simple shade of red could either send a good, positive message or generate an aggressive state of mind. To put it clear: color drives emotions and emotions are the most important factor in decision-making.
Color psychology is rather hard to define when we consider cultural differences, personal beliefs and subjective meanings. But some general aspects might help you in choosing the right colors for online branding.
First of all for a business website you should avoid dark backgrounds, especially black. It is true that dark backgrounds, when used wisely, might create a 'charmed' atmosphere, but is this the message you want to send? Shouldn’t you be focusing on 'reliability', 'trustworthiness', 'quality' and other such positive values? For a business website, avoid the 'Twilight Zone' look and feel, unless you sell magic potions, books of mystery or other such products.
Light backgrounds are the best choice to create uncluttered layouts. This is also the latest trend in web design. The 'heavy' websites of the past, with their saturated colors, their marble tiles patterns and their stripped backgrounds are passe. Sophisticated designs employ light colors with random dark hue accents, simple layouts and high quality, unique graphics that match the color scheme of the design.
Logos should still employ powerful, recognizable colors, the kind of colors that capture attention and appeal to the senses.
Usually, blue logos don't fail because blue is the favorite color of a clear majority of people. A look at the clear blue sky would help your body produce the chemicals you need to relax. But when it comes to dark blues, too much might cause stress and nervous tension. Commonly logo designers use navy blue for business-to-business logos, for financial logos and for official logos, as this color suggests dependability and straightforwardness, precisely the values needed for such affairs.
Green, in its various shades, is perfect for the hospitality industry, food industry (especially for BIO products) cosmetic (if we consider Yves Rocher and Garnier) and ecology.
Although each color has its audience and its industry, there are cases when one color might be successfully employed for atypical applications. It’s just a matter of 'how to' design using that color and other hues to create the best color combination.
Reds and orange are not so easy to deal with, especially online. But they do have their fans (Ferrari, Coca-Cola, etc) and with a good design they will reach the targeted audience faster than other colors. That's because red is the color of energy, movement and excitement.
For more information on Corporate Branding and Website Useability and Psychology, Contact Shifted Pixels.
Once you've optimised your website copy, you'll find that the most important part of optimisation happens off the page - where links from external sites back to yours play a vital role in telling Google and other search engines how important your site really is.
Link building works best when you have a one-way link from another quality site to your own. You can try all sorts of tricks to build up the number of links you have, but to maximise your results concentrate on obtaining links from quality sites.
Of course quality links are not that easy to get! But many companies have an under-used resource that could generate hundreds if not thousands of quality links. That resource is public relations.
Good public relations and the online practice of link building are natural bedfellows. First, because the dynamics of each is remarkably similar and second, because when used in tandem with important keywords in mind, they can produce spectacular results:
Public relations is the process of building a company's reputation, largely through the use of positive media coverage.
Link building is the process of building a web site's 'reputation' by getting links from relevant and respected web sites.
The processes share some important features:
Success cannot be guaranteed
Relationships and industry knowledge are important
Basically, reputation management (online) is the business of monitoring what the marketplace is saying about your brand. It also means responding to situations before they run out of control. Venues include blogs, discussion threads, forums and social networking sites. A simplistic forumla is to allocate a proportion of resources to reputation management in relation to how important your brand is to your overall business.
Monitoring how consumers talk about your brand can provide early warning signs for product or service issues as well as promotion opportunities that can be leveraged. Companies can start by subscribing to RSS feeds of search results on their company name from blog and news search engines, set up a Google Alerts account or use Conversation Trackers.
Shifted Pixels offers Online Reputation Management, Contact us for more information
Basically, online PR invlolves activities geared towards influencing media, communities and audiences that exist solely on the Internet using online channles. That includes search engines, blogs, news search, forums, discussion threads, social networks and other online communication tools. Brand reputation monitoring and management is also a focus area for online PR.
Offline PR deals with the same things except with print, radio TV, conferences/events and other "real life" venues. One difference between online and offline PR is in pitching. For example, before pitching a print journalist, the publication's editorial calendar is researched to see if there are any planned story opportunities. The subsequent pitch is specific to the upcoming story.
Popular blogs can be as influential as many print publications, but pitching a blogger requires a careful approach. There is no editorial calendar for blogs so it is important to read previous posts and become very familiar with the subject matter covered. When pitching a blogger it is better not to include the press release in the pitch, since most bloggers don't write stories based on press releases, they point links to a release and write their own commentary.
When you pitch a blogger poorly, they may post your pitch to their blog for all to see. A print journalist will just hang up on you.
Among people who publish what is rather deprecatingly called 'content' on the Internet, there has been an oft repeated refrain which runs thusly:
'Users will eventually pay for content.'
or sometimes, more petulantly,
'Users will eventually have to pay for content.'
It seems worth noting that the people who think this are wrong.
The price of information has not only gone into free fall in the last few years, it is still in free fall now, it will continue to fall long before it hits bottom, and when it does whole categories of currently lucrative businesses will be either transfigured unrecognizably or completely wiped out, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
Internet Advertising