In The Following...

Before taking the course "Digital Marketing", honestly, I did not expect to learn so much. I thought that the course would include subjective ideas but no concrete content. However, I then found that I have learned both personal experience from the Professor and guess speakers, and I also have understood more theories. Though some of the theories are still being constructed, I believe that is the trait of digital marketing stuff - never stop evolving.

Now I am confident of delivering strong digital strategy/campaign for my future clients. Five essentials will be taken care in all of my proposals.

1) Storytelling:
Story is the core of every business. A brand should have its own story triggering its business. That can be an incident, a memory or even a tale. No matter what the forms are, the stories are based in "beliefs" which express the brand's philosophy. Therefore, storytelling is the best way to communicate because it can tell your customers who you are. Besides, people love to hear stories so they have weaker defense against stories rather than information. Meaningful stories can arouse consumers' interests and enter their minds to build strong connection with them.

2) Content Marketing:
Compared to storytelling's "who are you", content marketing represents "what can you do for them." Many brands are eager to show customers their products or services. Nevertheless, not all the information is relevant to customers. David Meerman Scott talked about an important idea "Nobody cares about your products (except you)" in his book World Wide Rave, so providing useful information for your customers to access is important for content marketing. Today people use a lot of social media, but that does not mean that brands can always take advantage when they use social media to share information. Sharing relevant information is better than using social media heavily. We can think of what Jay Baer's said, "Content is fire, and social media is gasoline."

3) UX:
User experience is another issue needed to be addressed. The idea can also be divided into 2 parts. a) The interface of website: how do customers feel when they visit or shop on the official websites? Is the interface friendly? Brands should simulate consumers' experience by visiting the websites and testing all the functions to improve user experience. b) The tools consumers use for surfing on the Internet: everything changes fast in digital world. A good brand has strong sense on the society trends. For example, if you want to target young generation, you should have known how mobile is important for them. "Mobile phones are teen's lifelines. It's not that they don't watch TV. But mobile is their first screen." said Pio Schunker, SVP, Integrated Marketing Communications, Coca Cola, NA.

4) Newsjacking:
To attract consumers' attention, brands are faced with severe competition not only from competitors but also from other media. For efficient purpose, consumers tend to select important information to process. Therefore, watching out important news and embedding messages in the news help brands expose in the spotlight. If products' attributes can be combines with similar news, that will bring the best effect since your consumers are focused.

5) KPIs:
About a century ago, John Wanamaker said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." The famous saying illustrates how difficult it was to reach target by using traditional advertising. The good news is that we can easily track the advertising effects by digital marketing tools if we design the digital campaign well. The question is what we can measure and why. For a new brand, people's awareness may be more meaningful than sales so sign-ups can be a primary KPI. On the contrary, an existing brand may focus on its sales so how to achieve the highest conversion rate by various offers is an issue.  

I believe that examining the 5 points above is necessary for successful digital strategies/campaigns, but that is not enough. The number of digital media keeps growing in an unprecedented speed and the situation of digital world changes dramatically, so I remind myself of being involved in the digital world and never stop thinking better solutions. Only by doing these, I can be an excellent digital marketer.

We Are Small In The Universe, Also In The Internet.

I am a cautious person. I often check the details of everything. When I plan to travel, I search for all the information including accommodation, transportation and set a very fixed schedule for sightseeing. When I implement a project, I track the history of similar cases and make sure I would not miss anything required. I always try my best to avoid mistakes, but I am a human-being so sometimes I still go wrong. I was easily mad when I made a mistakes or when things did not go in the way as I expected.

One day, I read a small paragraph which influenced me, "Life is a continuous process and long-term accumulation. People should neither be destructed by a single failure or be saved by a coincident success." It was a time that one of my best friends just passed away in his age 24 because of a car accident. The paragraph soothed me and encouraged me to move on. I had cared about everything too much, but I started to realize that life was full of different experiences. Sometimes came happiness but sometimes came sorrow, that's it. So when I saw this film Powers of Ten, I got very similar reaction that I had 8 years ago. We humans are so small in the universe and our lives are so short in the whole history. What we think seriously important is just one of millions of incidents in an instant. Keep the faith, then I would never be worried about the predicaments.

We are so tiny in the universe. 

But a tiny thing can also be another fragile universe.

When I started to work as a sales representative, I kept asking myself, "what are my professional skills and where is my position?" I envied some people who chose the right majors such as engineering or medicine, which I thought that they did not need to worry about what they should do. However, in the past 7 years I met many people and listened to their work experience. Surprisingly, I found that the correlation between majors and achievements was not always positive. First, what we learn at schools is very different from what we need at our careers. We learn knowledge and develop sense in schools, but we still have to learn a lot of operation in different companies and adapt ourselves in different cultures. Second, people succeed mostly because they have strong networking skills rather than professional knowledge. 

I think this rule can also apply to digital marketing. People can search for specific information easily on the Internet, so it is never easy to use tricky language to persuade your target to buy your products. All brands should broaden its connections to different areas and attract various of people for "digital dialogue". The Internet is a public arena where everyone can talk, it is also a public medium which everyone can access. Brands were dominant in traditional media, but today they should focus on effective communications with their consumers. David Meerman Scott proposed the idea of World Wide Rave and explained it. Some of the rules really interest me, such as "Nobody cares about your products (except you)," "No coercion required" and "Lose control." If marketers still choose to believe "bullet theory" popular from 1920 to 1940 and invest a lot of budget for one-way persuasion, that will be a catastrophe. We should keep asking ourselves what kind of interesting content we can deliver to build relationship with our target in this decentralized sphere, the Internet.

We Need News, Not Newspapers.

Today, when I visited a Starbucks' shop something caught my eyes. It was a package called "Coffee Weekender".

http://www.starbucksstore.com/coffee-weekender/011029291,default,pd.html?&srule=Featured&start=0&sz=20&q=times&navid=search
I was curious about it so I checked and then I found inside the package were a coffee press, a bag of coffee beans and, a card for access to The New York Times digital version. You may wonder when we need to pay to read articles on The New York Times.

From Mar, 2011 The New York Times began to charge its readers for digital content. Visitors can read 20 articles for free on The New York Times' website every month, but they will need to pay when it exceeds the limit. Besides, some restrictions apply for their smartphone or tablet. If you want to have complete access to its website by all your digital stuff including laptop, smartphone and tablet, you have to pay $8.5/week. Even though The New York Times had earned 390,000 subscribers within 10 months, the concern was the potential drop in The New York Times' website traffic when referring to The Times of London's 66% drop within 17 days after lunching a paywall. (http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=41513)

Did The New York Times make a good decision? Let's think about a question. Why do people like to read news? Because we want to know what we are concerned in the shortest time. In history, newspaper was the first kind of carrier of news. Although radio and TV joined to broadcast breaking news, newspaper was still dominant. Because radio and TV can only summarize news, but newspaper was the only medium being able to describe the details. However, things changed after the Internet was invented. It can deliver the same content as newspaper, but its speed is much faster than newspaper. So people still need news, but it just does not need to be only on newspapers. Making content digital is an inevitable trend to make news industry survive. Therefore, charging for digital news would become a necessary business model.

Advertisers may be worried about the traffic, but the subscribers are a more effective target audience for 2 reasons: first, they are more engaged in The New York Times than occasional visitors; second, the advertising message can be delivered more precisely according to subscribers' data base. The other thing is that people may resist the paywall when it is just launched but they will probably come back when they cannot find out alternatives to read free news from credible sources. If the access to The New York Times is overpriced, it will be finally adjusted by market mechanism.

I just think of another successful example of MLB. In the past, fans can only watch selected games on TV. However, by well improved and highly penetrated Internet, now baseball fans can watch all the games online if they are willing to pay the annual fee for "instant convenience". Another example is not exactly about paywall but is also about "instant convenience". It is Amazon's Kindle and e-books. When Amazon started to promote its Kindle and e-books in 2008, not all the analysts were optimistic about the outcome. Nevertheless, if you see the following chart I bet you would think Jeff Bezos a man of foresight. Maybe that also can explain why he decided to buy the Washington Post. Will he use the same strategy for the Washington Post? I don't know. But I guess that he did not think he bought a newspaper. What he bought should be a news brand, which was trusted as a newspaper and will still be trusted in other forms.

Source: http://www.splatf.com/2012/09/kindle-growth-chart-2012/

    

A New Way to Compete for The Spot - Newsjacking

Marketers realize that consumer's attention is a kind of "limited resources", so they try their best to get win it. In addition to delivering general message and personalized offer, earning media to build brand image becomes a critical task. Compared to PR, Newsjacking does not only has a similar trait but also but also owns different attributes. David Meerman Scott defines "Newsjacking" as "the act of redirecting the momentum from breaking news into your company’s favor by injecting a fresh perspective … in real time." Besides, it is more focused and brisk than PR (http://blog.eloqua.com/what-is-newsjacking/).

By Oreo's case in 2012 Super Bowl (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw9RSXaTFhA) and what Oakley did for 33 Chileanin miners in 2010 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/13/chile-miners-rescue_n_761259.html), I would like to extend the definition of "Newsjacking". Today marketers often emphasize on "customized" messages in real-time marketing, but Newsjacking makes message back to be unified. It is highly relevant to what people are concerned about - news. If we say customized message focus on "consumer's personality", then Newsjacking would focus on "news' content". Consumers pay a lot of attention on news because the information is very important to them. Therefore, Newsjacking is supposed to be effective when people perceive and process the message with high involvement. 

Traditional PR costs a lot of labors and money but usually leads great news coverage if brands can combine its products with events successfully. For example, Tide provided free laundry service in New Orleans after the invading of hurricane Katrina (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K-yjsRFW9Y). Newsjacking is usually executed by digital marketing tools especially social media. M&M's updates its Facebook page with what is happening. It connects with news by different characters (candy shells). Because chocolate is not a kind of necessity likes detergents, M&M's usually adds some fun in newsjacks. In the opening of the World Series this year, M&M's characters had baseball hats and fans equipment to remind baseball fans the starting of the World Series. Also, it stated "baseball is better with M" to remind fans to carry M&M's while watching the games. (Luckily colors of the two teams were both "red" then M&M's did not need to figure out how to be fair. https://www.facebook.com/mms) Therefore, when fans focused on the World Series they would also spare a little attention on what M&M's said and join the discussion. Another example, Godiva produced special truffle pops with different party logos for the United States Presidential Election in 2012, then consumers could buy them to support their party. (I bet that Godiva did not reveal how many pops they produced for each party since it did not want to irritate any consumer. http://magazine.foxnews.com/at-home/products-your-election-night-party) 

No mater how creative they were, the effects should always be examined. I tried to search for related news for the two examples of chocolate brands, unfortunately, I could not find out any news. I believe that's because there have been too many brands taking advantages by putting the idea of "competition" into their special products. So can we conclude that they failed? I would rather to think of the bright side. We may not see what has been better but we can see nothing has been worse. It is like that many people wonder why Coca Cola keeps advertising itself in Olympic Games while it has been a well-known brand. But it will just be weird if it stops advertising, also, it does not forget that Pepsi keeps doing the same thing. 

Finally, I want to emphasize that Newsjacking is not the privileges of big brands. A small brand or even a small coffee shop can do the same thing to have fun with its customers and get feedback directly. 

Talk To Your Customers By Humans' Language

When I was in Taiwan, I used to purchase laptop in Nova, a huge mall which was consisted of many stores offering various computer brands. In the mall, there were always some professional shoppers knowing everything about computers. Some others like me had basic understanding about computers but we needed to do some research before going there. However, there was still a group - I think it took about 40% of people - they did not know anything and they just went there to buy a laptop for themselves or others. What impressed me was their conversation with the staff in the mall. "Hi, I want to buy a laptop for my daughter." "OK, what are your requirements of the specifications?" "Specifications?" "Yes, I mean what kind of CPU, HDD, MB you are looking for and do you want an independent VGA?" "CPU? HDD?" "CPU means how fast the laptop processes information, we offer following choices..." "Sorry, I have no idea about computers. Can you just recommend me a good laptop?" "All laptops I sell are good, actually. Or why don't you tell me what she usually does on her laptop then I can advise?" "This will be her first laptop. Well, I heard of Acer before, how about Acer?"

In Harvard Business Review (May 2012): “To Keep Your Customers, Keep It Simple,” Patrick Spenner and Karen Freeman discusses how to make your customers "sticky" with your brand.  The most thing to customers is assistance to help decision making not information for relationship building, which marketers are working on. Partly I agree with the view point, especially that some customers like or become fans of brands' social media just because they want discounts. Many marketers assess their brand value by likings of Facebook page and this may be misleading. However, on the other hand, I really don't think that building relationship is not required. The problem is not about "building relationship". The problem is about tactics - marketers should not try to connect with customers by a lot of "hard information". 

In New York Times: "Riding the Hashtag in Social Media," David Segal provides effective examples on how Gary Vaynerchuk interacts with his followers on Twitter. Very often, he just starts from a casual question, "Is there anything I can do for you?" Taking care of all the "jabs", anything of value in Vaynerchuk’s definition, he does not only tell but also creates stories with his fans together and finally, drives sales. This makes me think of one of my best friends is a car sales representative. He earned the annual honor of "best sales" 7 times in the past 10 years in his company. I asked him how he could do that, he just said, "Well, that's because I never try to sell cars to my clients." "What do you mean?" "You know, people may just purchase 2-3 times of cars in their whole lives so that does not help to keep promoting your products all the time. You only can help in the right time, or they will keep you away." "How do you know the right time?" "I don't, actually. I just make friends with them. We go to see ball games or have good food together and I never talks about car things unless they want to consult. Sometimes they have some problems with their old cars, if I can I would provide free service. But I do not persuade them to buy new cars. Then one day when the right time comes, I will get a phone call to ask me to bring a catalog and a sales contract there. That's it."
   
Let's go with academic stuff. (I don't like to talk about much academic stuff in my blog, but this is really something I feel useful.) Here is a classic approach: Elaboration Likelihood Model, which was developed by Richard E. Petty and John Cacioppo in the early 1980s. It explains how a message be processed and how to built persuasiveness. Sometimes people process a message in "central route", which means they prefer to think about the message deeply and logically. On the contrary, when people process a message in "peripheral route", they just use some simple clues to evaluate the message and think more emotionally. "Ability" and "motivation" are two key factors leading people's different thinking. Some parents have limited knowledge about computers, so we can say their "ability" is low in understanding information stuff. We should not talk to them with professional terms. Try to use simple language to build effective communications since they are processing the message in "peripheral route". Customers do not want to buy cars all the time, so they do not always have "motivation" to receive the information. But if we keep interacting with them, they will think of us if one day they have strong motivation to look for a car and need some advice. 

Finally, if you are interested in how some companies build their brand image by story telling through "peripheral route", you can watch the following 2 videos. (Don't worry, they both have English sound track or subtitles.)

This is about how a brand builds a connection between its products and the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTRyYdUHtK0

Some volunteers made this film based on a true story in one of the telecommunication companies in Taiwan. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShbrGBOq4ow&sns=em

Find Out Big Elephants From Big Data?

When I was a child, I lived in the countryside. It was a time when people just had very little understanding about computer and the operating system was DOS. My aunt had a grocery store and I wandered there everyday. One thing impressed me was that my aunt seemed always to know what her customers looked for.

One day, a young lady came in the shop and my aunt talked to her "Ms. Lin, I think you are coming to buy rice." The lady smiled, "yes, what do you have?" "Yesterday we just imported some fresh rice from Ping-dong, I believe you will like it," said my aunt. "Good, please weigh me a kilogram." The other day, a man rushed to the shop and said, "Ms. Chen, my wife is cooking and she runs out of soy sauce and asks me to buy it, but I don't know which brand she buys." "No problem, one moment." After 30 seconds, my aunt brought a bottle of soy sauce to the man, "she always picked this one." I was curious and asked my aunt why she always knew what customers needed, she just said "it's magic" and then showed me one thing. That's an account book. She recorded every transaction in the book, so she knew what people usually bought and she could expect when they would probably buy it again.

After 25 years, "big data" becomes a trending idea for marketers. Marketers use it for the same purpose as my aunt's, predicting customers' behavior by past records. Of course I know an account book never equals to big data. However, what I want to say is that they both go the same way. My aunt dealt with hundreds of residents in the small town and today's markets interact with millions of customers in the market. They both try to figure out the "personalized behavior patterns" to improve their business. Just we can say, looking for customers' personalized patterns becomes more important than ever because people can shop online other than shopping at stores. Besides, in the past decades, marketers persuaded customers to buy their products by standard messages and customers were thought as "mass" in the context. However, they access abundant information today so they are not persuaded easily anymore. Big data can help tailor personalized messages according to their purchase history.

However, big data is useful but not almighty. In the following article, it discusses that big data can provide us validated information but cannot tell us what to do or where to go. Some other problems such as privacy, is also an obstacle for marketers.
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/34461.asp#singleview
Big data is an effective tool, but I think marketers' analyzing ability is more important than the tool. Not only being equipped with firearms but also having smart strategies can help us win in every battle.  

In addition, I also want to address another limitation. Customer's expected reactions are based on their past behavior. How can we do if we have nothing about them? How to find out the leads? How can we know what the potential customers are thinking? It is always painful to spend a lot of money to accumulate enough data until we can analyze their preference and provide them corresponded offers. Marketers take the process of "acquiring new customers" for granted. But the results often become reliable only after repeated tests. In digital world, customers are savvy. What they behave in a campaign cannot represent their profiles completely. Is it worthy it to spend a lot to build databases by repeated tests when we have nothing in the beginning? We may need to think about the balance between finding out big elephants and keeping company profits.

  

Put Yourself In The Customer's Shoes And Make A Normal Business Fun

When we promote our products, the first channel we usually think of is a website. Because most people think of it, how to compete with others to attract customers becomes an important issue. To be prominent among competitors, a brand should consider about UX (user experience) when building their websites.

Hershey's, a well-known chocolate brand with long history, faces severe competition since chocolate is not a kind of product requiring high technology to mass production. Compared to Godiva or Ferrero, having exotic tasting and romantic atmosphere, Hershey's is deemed a family-friendly brand. So how does Hershey's website communicate with its customers? 

Like other big chocolate brands, Hershey's has many products to introduce on their website. Through its website map, customers can also access its family brands such as Reese's and Twizzlers. You can understand Hershey's more by looking at "Videos" and "Our Story".

Understanding why customers visit your website is critical. People do not visit a traditional chocolate brand's website for the general information, because they can purchase Hershey's chocolate at supermarkets and they are not curious about Hershey's. Therefore, "Recipes" becomes a drive for customers to visit Hershey's website. When they want to make some special desserts, they may visit Hershey's website to look for special recipes and recommended materials. They also can place orders for special chocolate, such as personalized chocolate bars on the website through "Shop".

A good website does not only show the functions but also creates the personality of the brand. Customers probably know Hershey's is the largest chocolate brand in the USA, but they may not know that they can have a great tour at Hershey's chocolate world. By talking about the attractions on "Visit Us", Hershey's enhances the connection with its fans. Besides, "Crafts" provides some creative ideas to enrich customers' lives. Recently, several ways for celebrating the Halloween are shown on the website.

Finally, the theme color of this website is the same as Hershey's classic milk chocolate and that can be a strong identified signal for customers. Overall, this website fulfills customers' needs well and makes user experience fun. 

Smartphone users are a group which should not be ignored. Due to the small display, most brands have special interfaces for smartphone users. So how does Hershey's website make smartphone users feel? What are the differences?

Let's see the front page first. 4 buttons are shown with Hershey's milk chocolate and its brown color. It is easy to understand why Hershey's still keeps "Visit Us". Also, it is a good choice to eliminate "Our Story" and "Video" since they are the least parts mobile users access. However, the aesthetic design should be improved because the interface doesn't seem to arouse any curiosity for people to keep surfing.

"Recipes" is still important. The button for visitors to email the recipe is much larger than that on the website laptop users see. This is cool. Mobile users normally do not review the information for very long time on their smartphone, because they may keep moving or the screens are just too small. But if they can email something interesting then they can keep reviewing it after going home.

But I am not sure if it is smart to keep "Shop". I mean that doesn't matter if there is no other choice and there is still some room available. However, "Promotion" has been removed. Here is a question, are mobile users interested in reading promotion news or placing orders when they commute? Think more about users' motives and behavior, then we can figure out the answer.