stop moaning…

I think all the recent financial turmoil has got me into a habit of looking for and feeling a compulsion to read (in a car-crash kind of way) anything with any relevance to the economy. Even though I know it won’t make me feel any better about anything… And so I found myself reading with interest the IMRG’s recent e-retail sales index for November. Far from complete doom and gloom I came away with a rather strange feeling – maybe we WILL weather the storm.

Whether or not the entire banking system as we know it goes through a complete overhaul and changes beyond all recognition, one thing remains certain (and if anything will be effected positively in the downturn): that people will spend more time online. This seems to be reflected in the statistic from the EIAA that 81% of advertisers claim their allocated online spend has grown during 2008 and believe it will continue to do so over the next two years.

There’s tick number one for the world of online…

Will this just be people posting their holiday photos on Flikr (to Bognor Regis rather than Bahamas) or moaning on forums about being skint? Not if you’re to believe the IMRG

Online retail spend in Q4 08 is predicted to be 15% higher than the same period last year (a staggering 13.16 Billion…). Interestingly clothing, footwear and accessories are predicted to buck the general economic trends by rising more than 25% year-on-year to be worth £1,260 million during the final quarter of 2008.

The less positive side is that year on year growth for October grew by only 12.7%, the lowest year on year growth since December 2004. Oh no! What tragedy. How many other industries/sectors would bite your arm off for 12.7% growth year on year…

Which sort of brings me to the point of this post. We have all experienced unprecedented prosperity in our market over recent years. And all the figures point to the fact that we will continue to experience growth, just at a much slower rate, over the coming year or two. We really should count ourselves lucky. There are some industries which have little hope of any decent growth whilst we are worried that it has slowed to 12.7%.

There is still money to be made in online. Ok, so we may all have to work harder for each deal/customer but money is still being spent online and it will be the smart people who will come out of the other end with big grins on their faces and nice shiny sports cars. And they won’t be the ones who have spent their time hiding under the duvet or behind the sofa hoping that when it all blows over they will still have a business to salvage. They will be the ones who have been fighting tooth and nail for every scrap of business, looked at where they can provide real value and done everything in their power to keep their customers happy.

James Drake-Brockman
Internet World

Does Social Media Marketing actually work?

By internetworld

This is a really thought-provoking piece by John Battelle, who is well known as a digital guru, in response to a recent AdAge piece claiming that advertising on social media doesn’t work.
As John argues, “barging” into social media spaces with banner ads and other inventory that produces results in other spheres doesn’t work - where’s the surprise there?
At the recent Future of Social Media conference, we heard again and again that digital marketers need to live and breathe social media, and be passionate about what it can do, in order to craft unique, compelling propositions that raise awareness of their brand, their offerings or their propositions. The sledgehammer approach doesn’t work - because social media is so different from other media channels that we have grown accustomed to.
As John writes: “So far, there’s simply not an algorithm for understanding the nuance of conversations between humans, and conversations between humans are what drives social media.”
Digital marketers operating in the social media sphere need to understand the new paradigm and appreciate that whilst social media marketing doesn’t perhaps generate traditional returns, what it can be is extremely effective in beginning to change perceptions, in turning your consumers into advocates of your brand and getting your customers to spread the word about the great experience they had with your brand.
I will leave the final word with John Battelle:

In short, if your brand creates or underwrites a valuable conversation, you are accruing value to your brand, and more valuable brands, be they soap, computer chips, or charge cards, are brands more folks will buy. Customers will reward brands that have added value to their lives. And at the end of the day, isn’t that what marketing is all about?