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Avoid The Ego Trap In Digital Marketing

In the old days of traditional marketing, you conducted some research, consulted with your colleagues and agency partners and in the end, decisions were often made on gut feeling. I mean there were what 3 TV stations, a local newspaper or 2 and some trade pubs.  How hard could it be?

The promise of Digital Marketing was going to change all that. Because it brings a ton of metrics we can use to make better media buying decisions, right?  We can test offers and creative and then optimize our campaigns as we go. I mean that’s how it works in your organization, right?

Digital marketing, like any other business venture, has both its pros and cons. It is crucial to fully understand where one may fail and where the other will succeed. To be a success in the fast paced world of digital marketing, one should follow five basic points:

Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream of Vermont announced in an email to their subscribers last week that they will be discontinuing their regular email marketing campaigns, in favor of social media. This was a major surprise - Usually, I think of social media and email marketing as having a close relationship and that they are most effective when used together. However, Ben & Jerry's clearly feels otherwise and that their customers prefer contact through social media sites to email in their inbox. In their last email message, they invited their subscribers to connect with them via their Facebook or Twitter accounts, and this would be the last email they would receive from the famous ice cream brand.

Since this announcement, internet marketers and marketing blogs have been buzzing with the news. This is the first major corporation to completely discontinue email marketing, a mainstay of internet marketing since the 90's, for other internet channels. Ben & Jerry's customers had indicated that they disliked the email despite loving the brand, which means that it wasn't building the positive relationship that the famously brand-conscious ice cream company wanted.

Just after the Marketing VP set the bar at 20,000 downloads in the first six months, Petra Neiger and the myPlanNet game team at Cisco wondered, “How the heck are we going to do that?” The marketing budget was well under $50,000, her team was tiny and each of them had other marketing responsibilities. Nonetheless, when I met Petra this May, the program was already a stunning success and being honored with BtoB’s Social Media Marketing Award for Best Integrated Campaign...

via fastcompany.com

"Neuromarketing".. sounds like something from a William Gibson dystopia.

“This thing is bigger than any marketing we could have concocted,” says Lennox, whose parent company also owns Island, the Bieber label.

And yet Biebermania was concocted – it is the product of a carefully engineered marketing campaign that plucked a downy kid from small-town Ontario and relocated him to a hip-hop hotbed in the Deep South. In Atlanta, young Justin was transformed from the runner-up of a local talent competition to everybody's boyfriend in what seems like no time.

His throngs of caterwauling fans look like the latest incarnation of Beatlemania, but there is something very different at play here:

Justin Kozuch selected as first recipient of $40,000 prize

While there’s been plenty of coverage about user privacy concerns, attention on Facebook’s changes on brands hasn’t been adequately covered, this analysis is intended to unravel what’s at stake –and what brands should do.  I’ve spoken to a handful of brands and their representatives to learn what’s eating at them.

Summary:  Facebook has quietly launched ‘Community Pages’ Hampering Brands
Facebook has launched several new policies and features since the F8 Conference ‘Crusade of Colonization’ which has resulted in a large backlash from media around user privacy.  It’s not clear if beyond the vocal media if users will leave the site in droves.  Perhaps more importantly,  Facebook launched “Facebook Community Pages” (read the official post) a feature that aggregates content from wikipedia and Facebook wall posts.  Think of it as a cross between Wikipedia with user comments –sometimes unwittingly.  These changes cause confusion for users, diminishing control for brands, and strains on the already torrid relationship between Facebook and brands.