We’re doing some design work with an olive oil producer at the moment but sadly our efforts are going to be in vain because their marketing strategy sucks. Actually, that’s a lie, their marketing strategy can’t possibly suck because it doesn’t actually exist. They have a great boutique little product made from premium Queensland olives but they don’t seem to have put much thought into how they’re going to make it stand out from all the other little premium boutique olive oils on the market.

Everyone is getting excited about word of mouth and social media marketing at the moment but they’re forgetting that without the fundamentals in place, you’re just talking about shit. Social media marketing isn’t a digital thing, it’s a product thing.

Being the first vineyard to put a tear-off tab on the back of your wine bottle makes your product remarkable for two reasons:

1. It’s unique; people haven’t seen it before, so they will talk about it.
2. If the wine is good, the tear-off tab makes it really easy to tell your friends about it. “What was the great wine we had the other night?” “Hang on, I’ve got a little tear-off thing in my wallet… It was a Yalumba Viognier.”

If want to run a successful social media campaign in 2008 it’s going to be a lot easier if your product development team were the ones who started it in 2005.

These guys are doing some cool work. They’re called Ammo Marketing. But I’m worried. They do great product launches and they make a big splash and they do all the right things in terms of identifying the right influencers and getting their clients products in front of them, but then what? Giving brand evangelists like musicians, bar tenders and triathletes free premium beer, exotic liquor and fancy sports drinks is going to convert a few people and a few of their friends, possibly even a lot of people and a lot of their friends, but then the impact is slowly going to slip away. Ammo marketing is a great start, but unless brands follow up the initial splash by genuinely engaging their customers over the next few years, they’ll just get dazzled by the next big splash that comes along.

If I can take the analogy quite literally, Ammo marketing is exactly what the CIA did in Afghanistan in the 1970s — they gave a bunch of villagers ammunition (rocket launchers) to shoot down Soviet helicopters. It resulted in a small victory in the Cold War, but the end result was disastrous because the CIA failed to maintain the dialogue with their customers. Giving a bunch of cool bands free beer in the hope that the audience will switch brands as well isn’t any more effective in the long run unless you keep the dialogue going.

This dialogue is called social media marketing. And like most things, America isn’t very good at it.

I know you can read, so I’m going to presume you buy books online from time to time. Where would you rather buy The Catcher in the Rye from?

Your Local Bookstore’s Website

or

Amazon

or

Google Products

Answer: Google Products.

Seriously.

Sit down for a second and look at how good Google’s product search tool is.

If you sell ANYTHING online you are competing with Google.

They have a bigger marketing budget than you. They’re not using their marketing budget yet. But they will.

Make sure you know what you’re doing.

Make sure you’re doing something remarkable.

I was playing around with Wikipedia on behalf of a client this afternoon and was not exactly surprised to see that Tarnya Dunning from Telstra’s public affairs department had been doing the same. Unlike many unscrupulous contributors though (and by god there are many) it was nice to see that she had clearly declared what she was up to and appears to have done so with only the best intentions. Nice one Tarnya. If only Optus were as active and polite in the social media space as you (not to mention Vodafone).

Editing Your Own Wikipedia Article is frowned upon by Wikipedia, but it’s not banned and it can be done well. Social media marketers could do well to follow Tarnya’s lead. If you’re interested in the topic, check out the developing discussion on the rules of engagemen for social media marketers and bloggers here.

I was in a strategy meeting today with the head of online marketing at an accommodation reservations company. They’re kind of a big deal, but for the last two years they’ve been getting at least three complaints a day from members of the public who have tried to use their system and been pissed-off because some of the prices they were initially being quoted weren’t, in fact, the prices they would be paying. (I won’t bore you with details, but basically, they were showing a list of hotel rates from a particular source, but they were often three days out of date).

The head of online marketing is a pretty switched-on guy, and he knew that pissing people off was the best way to ensure they never visited his website ever again (you don’t want to annoy any customer, but you especially don’t want to annoy tech-savvy early-adopters of your product who have the potential to tell hundreds of others). He’d been having trouble convincing the CEO that the system had to change because there was a lot of development cost involved, but finally, after a year of trying, he’d got the change approved and a new system was in place that showed accurate prices. He had been conviced that the change would result in more sales, but he was at a loss because after a few weeks, the conversion rate had barely shifted at all. The GM told him that he’d have to break the news to the tech team that the costly change he’d implemented hadn’t been effective and it had been a bit of a waste; he was disappointed.

“But…” I said.

“I’ll bet your returning visitor numbers are up.”

His eyes lit up: “Hmm?”

“That’s your metric.” I told him. “I’ll bet you any money your returning visitor numbers increase dramatically over the next few months because people are going to be much happier with your product and they’ll want to come back. They’ll probably even tell their friends. And once you get more and more returning visitors, your conversion rates are going to keep going up because they’ll stop shopping around as much.”

This was good news.

Very good news. I think he wanted to hug me…

If there’s one web metric you want to see curve upward, it’s your returning visitor numbers. More new visitors are great, but what you really want to see are more people coming back. 1,000 visitors who come back ten times are worth far more than 10,000 visitors you never see again.

The best way of getting them to come back is figuring out why they’d want to leave in the first place; think about what they’re NOT getting and give it to them. If the solution sounds expensive, think about what a lifelong customer is worth to you, over time, and I’ll bet you’ll change your mind.

Let people stand on a soapbox for long enough and they’ll run out of useful things to say and start whinging instead. It’s human nature, and while it goes without saying that companies should be monitoring what is said about them on the Internet, in reality, the ‘loudest’ customers aren’t neccessarily the ones you should heed.

Peter Moore is a well-respected travel writer (and, I should disclose, a client of ours). He has published more than half a dozen great books, he has a column in the Guardian and keen travellers love reading what he has to say. If an airline company came to me and asked for a list of influentual bloggers they should be trying to reach, he would be near the top of the list. If Peter recommends a destination, an airline, a hotel, or an experience, people listen. By the same token, if he has something negative to say, the implications are far-reaching. Peter rarely whinges about anything, which is why his blog is so good. If he does, it’s well thought out, nicely presented and without the faintest whiff of ‘I’m important so you’d better listen to me’.

The moral to the story?

Companies: Listen to the Peter Moore’s of this world, don’t worry too much about the rest
Bloggers: Be more like Peter Moore

A friend of mine has developed his marketing mantra. It’s quite good and it goes like this:

1. Markets are conversations
2. Conversations happen around social objects
3. Social objects are products or services that are remarkable
4. Remarkable is not just something special, but something worth being remarked about
5. A great product, and even better customer service are the most remarkable things you can offer.

I like it (although I’d change the first point to read “your market is conversing”), and it fits in with pretty much everything I hold to be self-evident: The TV-industrial complex has crumbled and in an age where advertising saturation makes it almost impossible to push your message out, the best way of marketing your product is to get people to talk about it. Social media, as a form of word of mouth marketing, works, but what if you’re not remarkable? What if no-one wants to talk about you?

What if you make brown shoelaces, or you have a brand of aspirin that does the same thing as all the other brands of aspirin? What if you don’t really have a story or you don’t have a chance to really impress your customers with amazing service… What do you do? Do you just give up and start something else?

Nope. You invent a story.

If you make brown shoelaces you get Bear Grylls to explain that if he was stuck on a mountain and needed to create a makeshift parachute, he would only recommend using your brand. You would start a YouTube channel with a series of videos detailing other amazing uses for your brown shoelaces and explain how they are the best. You would find bloggers who talk about running shoes and dress shoes and adventure shoes and you would send them free product samples. It would be so successful that people would start buying your laces to put in their brand new shoes because they would think that shoe manufacturers didn’t know enough about lace technology.

If you make a new brand of aspirin you would create a 1300 number that people could call and whinge to; you’d remove their headaches. This number would be advertised, radio presenters would copy the idea. You would setup a social community where people can talk about their headaches and you would get experts to jump online and give advice.

If you think your product isn’t remarkable, you’re not trying hard enough.

Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft provide solutions to people with video game problems. The trouble was, in 2006, the proportion of people who realised they had a gaming problem in need of a solution was very small in comparison to the population of the earth. Worse still, most people with video game problems needed to get hold of their mom’s (sic) purse first.

Rather then come up with the next fastest/loudest/baddest/blue rayest/most violent/most banned/most wanted new gaming console in the history of the world to date, Nintendo, instead, were smart. Very smart. They created Wii. Kids like it. Mom’s love it, heck, even the Queen of England has one. In fact, Wii sales now account for more than both main competitors combined.

If you’re going to develop a new product, think outside the (X) box. It’ll pay off. Especially if you back it up with customer service people rave about.

Should Your Company Have a Facebook Page?

The answer is YES if:

• Your customers are an active community unto themselves
• You’re not scared of publicly stating that you have few fans
• You have heaps of fans
• People take lots of photos and videos of themselves using your product
• People are already telling their friends about you because you’re awesome
• You’re cool
• People care about you
• You are a band

Case in point: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Scarborough-Australia/Big-Cat-Reality/16608007646

The answer is NO if:

• Your customers don’t have any reason to interact with each other
• You’re doing it because you think you should
• You have less fans than you thought you did
• You’re scared of the world finding out that no-one really cares about your product

Case in point: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Southport-Australia/1029-Hot-Tomato/10956839700

My first proper job was as a reporter for a start-up indie newspaper in the north western suburbs of Sydney. The editor was an awesome guy called Peter Gladwell; he hired me because he had a fire in his eyes and I think he saw a bit of that in me too. He wanted to bring credible, interesting, ballsy journalism back to suburban newspapers and I wanted to write credibe, interesting, ballsy suburban journalism. The paper was called the Northwest Edge and it was brilliant. I think it lasted five issues.

When Fairfax and News Corp got wind of what this little start-up was doing they slashed their advertising rates and undercut the market. A little indie newspaper stood no chance against two giant media corporations and that was that. I looked Peter up on LinkedIn and he now appears to be Chief of Staff at Fairfax, which is kind of ironic. I’m sure he’s getting his own back, one stolen paperclip at a time.

The Northwest Edge is a David and Goliath story. There are lots of them in the media, and sadly, Goliath usually wins. What happens though, when Goliath fights Goliath? Google is the biggest giant standing in the current media landscape and they’ve put numerous companies out of business by not just undercutting the market, but literally giving away products and services other companies were charging a mint for. Imagine if you’d invested millions of dollars into any of the following services in the last decade with the hope of making money from them:

• Maps
• Email
• A Blog Service
• A Website Where People Can Share Videos
• Website Traffic Analytics
• Satellite Imagery

You’ve now either been bought by Google, or you’ve been put out of business (or you will be soon).

Google has avoided producing ‘content’ of it’s own so far, with the exception of mapping data, but before long their share price will level off and investors will start demanding further diversification. The Google search brand is so well established that it won’t be tarnished or have its power diluted by adding more complimentary services. There is absolutely no reason why Google cannot feasibly, tomorrow, muscle in on the real estate, jobs and classifieds markets. There is no reason why they can’t produce their own accommodation search engine. What exactly will RealEstate.com, Seek, CarSales.com.au and Stayz do if when a major player like Google comes along and makes their product free. When was the last time anyone used WhereIs? (A site that just launched a popup ad in my browser, little fuckers). Does anyone really think that MySpace and Facebook are going to remain dominant for more than a few more years?

(Almost) everything online will soon be free. If I was shareholder in of any of those fore-mentioned companies, I’d be cashing out now.