Healthy reminders for marketers

Gosh, another month has gone by... I've turned into a once a month blog poster.  Depressing really.  Sure, I'm still juggling some internal stakeholder focused publisher platforms at work, and there's been a lot going on in my "real" life.. that thing that has lived on the sidelines for a while during a period of intensity at work, but still!  I'm sure I've missed out on a heap of interesting stuff.

I can at best claim to have managed to watch one TED talk in the last month. Must try harder... TED never ceases to inspire me.

My digital treasure find of the month was Comscore's really useful paper on UK / European digital trends, full of handy slides like this one... Might not be rocket science but good to have stats to back stuff up.

So, with a slightly calmer week, I've fired up Tweetdeck, and started nourishing my inner curiosity monster again. He feels so much better already!  So nothing desperately new today but a few nice examples of things that as marketers we should remember to stop and remind ourselves of once in a while.

So first up... this great Slideshare from W&K, providing a healthy reminder for those  that spend too much time at work, that we also wear a consumer hat and we should reconcile the two more often, nothing new in the thinking but a story well told deserves sharing...

How to (not) Fail from Martin Weigel

One of undoubtedly many such posts kicking around the internet on the topic of marketing kpi's... and why we need to remember ultimately we should be measuring the right things that answer the objectives and not just measuring stuff cos we can... nothing new here again but a brief reminder does no harm.

A nice post from the Harvard Business Review that whilst likewise is not revolutionary does a nice job of simply starting to explain attribution and predictive modelling.  As just one potentially small part of the mix these days, Twitter are trying to demonstrate their ad formats really work with this Nielsen research piece.

And whilst there's been lots of interesting things going on with both the CeBit conference in Hanover (Spotify player on the web and in Volvo & Ford cars for example), the Mobile World Congress (still no phone capable of making & bringing me tea in bed yet though), nor SXSW in Texas this week, my discovery of the week is this post from Stephen Wolfram (of nerdy but awesome computational knowledge / solutions engine Wolfram Alpha), who predictably has taken the notion of data visualisation and personal data modelling into a whole new league.  Seriously nerdy yet quite fascinating in a world where Nike + & Fuelband, apps that monitor all sorts of things are increasingly helping us make different decisions about our life (02 health are doing some interesting things in this space)  and measure our goals.

As I type, Mark Zuckerberg is announcing the latest re-design for Facebook - new larger images (the instagram influence), a new approach to the newsfeed... and a heap of new things I'll now have to explain to my Dad. ;-)

Fairplay to AOL for showing they are listening

Listening to consumers.  Something that brands should be doing a lot more of than is readily evident most of the time.

No self-respecting PR department would dream of not having a press clippings service, so that they come in of a morning to a round up of where their company or brands have been mentioned in the (printed) press. Yet now that an awful lot more of the written word and opinion is online  it never ceases to amaze me that so many companies aren't employing proper buzz monitoring.

Which makes it all the nicer to find examples of companies that are paying attention.  Two such examples fell in my lap today.

Earlier in the summer I had a big rant about AOL holding my email account and my contacts hostage after 13 years of loyalty to them.  All points I made wittingly and stand by based on the information I had at the time.  Today, a very nice chap called David from AOL rang up, explained that my blog post had come to their attention, he had looked into the correspondance that I had had, and wanted to apologise that I had been mis-informed by their client service operator and could actually terminate my dial-up agreement but keep my .com AOL email address that I've had since 1996.

Unfortunately for AOL, I have duly spent 3 months migrating over to my previously under-used Gmail account, so their timing was a little off, given the time I've invested in doing the transition. David was awfully nice about it, and sorted my dial-up termination there and then (it was on my jobslist for this weekend). And I can still keep my AOL accounts in case there are still odd things I subscribed to using that address that I've missed. He then emailed me to confirm everything we discussed, to apologise once more for the confusion that had arisen and to confirm that the customer service teams had been updated on proper process.

What was a very negative situation has been turned around into a more positive one.  Which is exactly why brands should be listening. It doesn't need to be difficult. It doesn't have to take a lot of effort to turn a situation around.

Whilst I am not about to re-migrate everything back again, my opinion of AOL has been redeemed somewhat and now I have a nice example of a brand that does listen to share with friends, colleagues and the future participants of the digital training courses I run.

We'll also award Comscore (US based digital measurement giant) points for listening today. Within 5 minutes of me sending out a tweet regarding an email I had received from their competitor, Nielsen, about the proposed UK digital planning system, and mentioning them within the message, they were following me on Twitter.

Shame Nielsen haven't managed to respond to 2 emails I have sent to them since they updated their blog monitoring website BlogPulse a few weeks back, asking why the Blogpulse stats section which I used to follow almost daily had stopped working / being updated.  Nul points for their listening skills then, which I find rather ironic given that they offer buzz monitoring as a service.  Doh.

Nielsen are in good company though as T-Mobile have yet to notice my rant a month ago about their appalling customer service despite me linking the article directly to their Twitter account, and shouting about their failure in a wide range of digital channels at my disposal. Fail yet again.