Influential Marketing Blog

Poken And The Evolution Of The Digital Business Card

The digital business card is not really a new idea. Over the past several years, it has evolved from the basic level of people including a URL on their physical business cards, to services now like Dropcard where you can send your details automatically by email, to sms based services like Contxts where you can just tell someone to sms your name to a shortcode and get your details (send a text message to 50500 with the word "rohit" to see how it works).

Earlier this month at the TechCrunch Europe Awards, a new social networking service won top honors for a new model that may just reinvent how digital business cards work. The company, called Poken, makes small USB devices that carry your personal social network information and exchange it with others through simply touching the devices together (called a "high four" due to the shape of the hand and four fingers instead of five). The device has been a hit in Europe and Japan and is starting to generate some buzz here in the US - having recently been spotlighted at the SXSW show a few months back.

To me, the most powerful part of Poken is that rather than blindly sharing your email and phone number with every person you meet, you can essentially collect their names and social networking profiles through the device (and share yours back) and then decide later if you want to connect with them or accept their contact. If you think about it, this is essentially what people have always done with business cards from events ... collected them in a pile and tossed the ones they didn't want afterwards. Now you can do that digitally.

The real trick for Poken will be to get enough people to buy the devices to get them to make it viable as a way for people to connect. Their team blog offers some insight on how they might be able to actually do it, with a World Tour in the works and a growing stable of fans of the service. Not to mention, a singing pitch for the device from one of their company bloggers (below). If they can, the Poken may mean you never need to write down a fake phone number or pretend to run out of business cards again.

Forget Eating Your Own Dog Food – Just Try Buying It …

Have you ever heard the expression – “to eat your own dog food?” It’s a rather crude cliché to make the point that sometimes the best way to understand your customer is to experience your product the way that they do. In the automotive industry, this was often cited as the principal behind giving people company cars.  After all, if you work for GM (for example) – not only should you drive a GM car, but having one personally will help you to understand your customers, right? 

To a point, this logic works. The problem is, in the GM example, the employee who has the car didn’t have to buy it in the first place. So while a GM exec (or one from any other car company for that matter – not to pick on GM) may drive the same car as his or her customer, they have had a far different experience in getting it. They didn’t research the car online. They didn’t shop around and talk to several dealers about it. They didn’t have to trade off something else in their budget to afford the car and figure out how to finance it.  And now that they have it, they don’t have to worry about things like maintenance or even filling gas into the car.  All of that was taken care of. 

Eating your own dog food (ie – experiencing your own product) isn’t enough.  You need to experience the entire process around buying it to really understand your customers. That means you need to shop around. You need to go into a retail store to try and purchase, or buy it online and see how long it takes to arrive. What did the box it came in look like? What was the condition of it?  Did you get any follow up from anyone after you bought it.

All of these are the questions you can get answers to in the simplest of ways – by buying your own product.  I have purchased a copy of my own book from just about every vendor that sells it – just to see how the experience is. That way, I know where to send people and what they can expect if they buy it online and get it shipped to them. Doing the same for your product or service can help you spot the holes in your process and fix them before they cause you to lose sales. And f your product happens to actually be dog food, I'm sure you'd much rather buy it than eat it anyway.

How Carnival Cruises Uses Marketing Inspired By Seinfeld

What made Seinfeld one of the best television shows ever? A big part of it was his ability to based an entire episode on an everyday observation.  Over the run of the show, this method gave viewers such memorable moments as double dipping (taking a bite and then redipping the chip into the dip) and Festivus (a made up holiday for the non-religious to celebrate during the “holiday season”). Seinfeld stood out because every episode expanded on some quirky truth about life we already knew but never thought about.

How effective could your marketing message be if you managed to relate it to an observation like those on Seinfeld?  There was a perfect example I saw on television last week for an unlikely brand.  The ad featured a guy in a red, white and blue sweatsuit sniffing various objects happily.  It starts with obscure things like carpets and curtains – and eventually you get the sense that he’s on a cruise ship when he looks over the side and sniffs the uniform of the Captain.  At the very end, he utters just one line – “mmmm … new ship smell.” And you see the logo of Carnival Cruise Lines.

How many other cruise lines could have run the same ad?  Probably any one. Most of them have some new ships.  But this ad delivers a powerful message based on a truth that we all intuitively know (that new car smell).  The message is simple: we have ships so new they still smell new.  And if you’re going cruising, of course you want a new ship.You can see the full ad below.  After you watch it, think about what quirky truth your customers all know that you could focus your marketing on.  Sometimes you might find your best marketing idea inspired by a show about nothing.

Newsflash: No One Cares About Your Blog

Many brands like to treat social media like a big party at the cool kids house. Everybody's invited, and having a great time. The conversation is flowing and it's the place that everyone wants to be. Eventually, you realize that your brand is not there yet, and someone (usually someone with a big title) decides that your brand should be. So you put on your best party clothes, show up at the door and loudly announce your arrival. The only problem is, the party is already in full swing, people already have their drinks, and no one was waiting for you to show up in the first place.

Sound cynical? Unfortunately, for many brands that's the welcome they can expect as they finally start to turn to social media as a part of their marketing and communications strategy. Launching a blog, or a Facebook page, or Twitter account isn't hard to do--the hard part is deciding how to use these tools. Ironically, the thing that most brands have to worry about isn't negativity (as they often fear), it is indifference. The most common "backlash" against company sponsored social media initiatives are the embarrassing sounds of crickets. No one visits and no one cares.

It doesn't have to be this way. The one thing people respond to is other people. So instead of focusing on your shiny new blog or cool new Facebook app--the place to start is to figure out who will be the people behind it. Find the individuals who will be interacting on behalf of your brand in social media, and then give them the tools and support to do it well. All the companies that get credit today for doing social media well--Zappos, Dell, Comcast--have all become comfortable with letting individuals from their company become the faces for their brand. These are the voices that I often call "accidental spokespeople." Within them is the real secret to using social media to be a brand that actually matters: offering a real human connection.

This post was originally written as a guest contribution for FastCompany.com and is republished here.

6 Lessons From the Best Marketing Campaign Ever

Last month an unlikely underdog stunned the marketing world at the International Cannes Advertising Festival. At the show, a single marketing campaign took home a Grand Prix award in three categories simultaneously--direct, cyber and PR-- something that had never happened before in the 50+ year history of the show. Contrary to what you might expect, the unanimous winner of this unprecedented victory was not a Fortune50 brand with an advertising budget of millions, but a small Tourism board promoting a little known island off the Great Barrier Reef.

The winning campaign was called the "Best Job in the World" and was essentially a big online job search conducted through social media for a new "caretaker" for Hamilton Island in Queensland, Australia. Done on a comparatively paltry marketing budget of just $1.7 million dollars and reliant on fortuitous PR and word of mouth, the campaign achieved stunning results, including over 34,000 video entries from applicants in 200 countries, and more than 7 million visitors to the site who generated nearly 500,000 votes.

Just two weeks ago on July 1, the winner of the competition--a 34-year-old British man named Ben Southall started blogging and touring around Queensland, finally bringing the competition to a close. For the next six months, he will be touring around Queensland, sharing his adventures through a video blog, writing, Twitter account and Flickr photos-- generating even more interest in Hamilton Island and all of Queensland in the process. The tangible results for the island are rolling in as well: Amway Australia chose it as the site of their upcoming annual conference, and domestic Aussie airline Virgin Blue just started flying a direct flight between Sydney and Hamilton Island, due to the rise in demand from travelers wanting to get to the island.

I realize that tourism and the travel industry may seem far removed from your business. Unfortunately, we don't all have the natural beauty of Hamilton Island to fall back on when starting our marketing campaigns. Still, a big part of the reason for the amazing success of this campaign was not what they were marketing, but how they used social media to do it. In that, there are some lessons anyone trying to promote a product or service could use:

1. Make it believable. Many marketing groups would never make a claim if they can't provide substantial evidence. How might Tourism Queensland prove that their job is the best in the world? They can't. But it is believable because it is a beautiful place and fits what many people's definition of a dream job might be.
2. It's not about how much you spend. One of the major benefits of smart public relations and social media is that it scales in a way that advertising typically doesn't. In other words, you don't have to pay more to get more. The real trick is to have something worthwhile to say that people can't help talking about. You need a good story.
3. Focus on content, not traffic. The typical marketing campaign focuses on traffic to some kind of site. For Tourism Queensland, the biggest payoff of this campaign was having over 34,000 videos on YouTube from people around the world talking about how much they love Queensland. Aggregate the views of all those videos, and multiply them over the long term and you'll start to understand the true impact of their campaign.
4. Create an inherent reason for people to share. Another element of this campaign that worked extremely well was the fact that there was voting enabled on the videos. What this meant was that after someone submitted their video, they had an incentive to share it with everyone in their social network online to try and get more votes.
5. Don't underestimate the power of content creators Most recent statistics point to some number between 1% and 10% of the user base of any social network are the active content creators. Though these percentages may seem small, the potential impact of some of these individuals are vast online. It could easily become the secret weapon for your next marketing campaign.
6. Give your promotion a shelf life. The best thing about this campaign may just be the content yet to come. Ben, the winner, just started blogging and sharing videos and photos, but the content is already engaging, high quality and inspires you to dream of making it to Queensland yourself. Over the next six months, his itinerary will take him across the state of Queensland and unlock many other unique opportunities. Best of all, this content will live on far beyond the time span of the campaign.

NOTE: This entry is republished from my guest blog post on FastCompany.com today.

10 Stunning (And Useful) Stats About Twitter

UPDATE: Follow me at @rohitbhargava if you liked this post!

Last month a social media analytics provider named Sysomos released a comprehensive report on Twitter usage. The problem with most analysis on Twitter, though, is that it is limited by the minimal amount of data that Twitter collects. So, to fill the gaps, most reports do things like guessing gender based on real names or pulling data from keywords in people's biographic information. This often yields some questionable results - and the Sysomos report is not immune to this (for example, they find that 65% of Twitter users are under the age of 25, but base this on only the 0.7% of users who actually disclose their age).

Looking past these small points, the report does share some fairly interesting observations and stats as well if you dig a bit deeper. Here's my read on the 10 standout conclusions that the report offers to help you (and your brand) better understand the potential uses of Twitter:

1. 21% (One Fifth) of Twitter accounts are empty placeholders. These are the percentage of Twitter accounts that have never posted a single tweet. They may either be registered simply to hold a username for later use, or be experimental accounts started up but never used.
2. Nearly 94% of all Twitter accounts have less than 100 followers. In a finding perhaps consistent with the newness of the tool as well as the fact that many people may currently have an account simply to start experimenting with the tool, Sysomos found the vast majority of Twitter users have an extremely low followership.
3. March and April of 2009 were the tipping point for Twitter. During these months, Ashton Kutcher launched his quest to get to 1 million followers faster than CNN, Oprah started using Twitter, and the steady flow of new users to the site continued. For many, it offered a safer and easier way to get their feet wet with social media, 140 characters at a time.
4. 150 followers is the magic number. In a particularly interesting data point from the survey, Sysomos found that Twitter users tended to "follow back" all their followers up until about 150 connections. Then the reciprocation rate fell off dramatically, which seems to indicate that this number may be the crossover point where people shift from using Twitter for more personal use to using it more for "lifecasting" their thoughts and actions to a community of people who they feel varying levels of connection to.
5. A small minority creates most of the activity. A steep curve of a small minority of actively engaged content creators generating most of the activity on a site is common among social networks, but it is steeper and more pronounced on Twitter. 5% of users account for 75% of all activity, and 10% of users account for 86%. This seems to suggest that the site has managed to engage a mass audience beyond those who typically engage with social media.
6. Half of all Twitter users are not "active." If you take a general description of being "active" on Twitter to mean that you have posted a tweet at some point in the last 7 days (1 week), then the survey learned that 50.4% of all Twitter users fit this category. If you remove the 21% from point #1, this leaves about 30% of users who have an account and have tweeted before, but happen to be inactive now.
7. Tuesday is the most active Twitter day. One of the most useful data points from the report is that it clears up the common question of which day of the week is the best day to tweet something. Sysomos found that Tuesday stood out as the most popular day for tweets and retweets, followed by Wednesday and then Friday.
8. APIs have been the key to Twitter's growth & utility. In terms of tools that people are using for Twitter, Sysomos found that more than half (55%) of all Twitter users use something other than Twitter.com to tweet, search and connect with others. This may, in part, be due to Twitter's notorious reputation of failing/crashing, but also is a credit to all the third party applications that have been built on top of Twitter and do their fair share to bring new users to the service.
9. English still dominates Twitter. When exploring Russia as part of a class that I am teaching this summer at Georgetown, one of the barriers we learned about was the difficulty of fitting some Russian language words into just 140 characters. Twitter is, however, extremely English-friendly. As the Sysomos report found, the top four countries on Twitter are all English speaking (US, UK, Canada, Australia). Of these, US makes up 62% of all Twitter users, followed by UK with nearly 8% and Canada and Australia with 5.7% and 2.8% respectively. The largest non-English speaking country on Twitter? Brazil with 2%.
10. Twitter is being led by the social media geeks. This particular finding should likely come as no surprise, but 15% of Twitter users who follow more than 2000 people identify themselves as social media marketers. These individuals are more likely to post updates every day (sometimes more than once per day) and also use Twitter more actively for direct communication.

Bonus Geographical Stat/Quote: "The cities with the biggest Twitter populations are New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco, and Boston. Los Angeles is the fastest growing city on the list."

Download the full report from Sysomos at http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/

Unexpected Marketing Ideas That Could Transform Your Customer's 4th of July

This weekend is the celebration of the American Independence Day on July 4th and if you have ever lived or travelled to America on this date, you know that the day is typically celebrated with BBQs and fireworks. Across the nation, people get ready for traditions that have remained largely unchanged. As the big day dawns, though, there are several ways that social media and particularly social media tools on mobile devices could transform the day for the digitally connected - and offer a great promotional idea for the right brand in the process.

Here are a few ideas:

1. Fireworks Finder Mobile App - A simple map based application that would allow you to search for local destinations that have fireworks to decide where to go. In addition to the location, it would offer useful information like what else is happening, and how long the fireworks in that area are estimated to go for. After all, who doesn't want to see the longest fireworks display? Who This Idea Works For?: Fast Food Restaurant (could show nearby restaurants), Fireworks seller (link to nearby retail spots), Local city governments (to increase tourism and locals who stay close to home)
2. Fireworks Countdown Timer - One of the biggest questions on the 4th of July as people pack into large cities and gathering areas to watch fireworks is when exactly they will start. Though they are scheduled, often the real start time is different and due to weather or when it actually gets dark enough. This timer could be a mobile app that would be updated in real time with the true start time of the fireworks. It could also count down as the fireworks are running until then end so you know how much time is left. Who This Idea Works For?: Baby/Kids Product Makers (as a useful service for parents to answer impatient kids), Watch/Timekeeping Brand (relates to keeping time), Cell Provider (exclusive download to certain cell networks for subscribers)
3. Fireworks Photo Tips PDF - During the fireworks, people often can't help taking their point and click cameras and trying to get a shot of the fireworks. Usually, there are some simple things, like zooming in, turning autofocus off and turning the flash off that can make a big difference in the quality of pictures. Giving people a download ahead of time with how to get the best photos from the day could be a great useful printout that people actually offer their email in exchange to download and print to take with them. Who This Idea Works For?: Photographic Equipment Manufacturer (include info on best cameras with night modes), Photo printing services (offer a coupon for discount on uploading and printing your photos afterwards).

Anyone seen any of these ideas being used already? While every retail brand is doing the typical "4th of July sale" - the may be opportunities are out there and waiting for your brand to engage people through social media and stand out from your competitors in the process.