web 2.0 @ marketing tech

Earlier today, I spoke at Marketing Tech around the idea of treating email marketing as a conversation. From the feedback it seemed to go down well

The conference overall was good - I liked the interactivity of the sessions rather than the more usual presentations delivered usually - it is nothing like the interaction present in tech/web 2.0 conferences though - but then this is a much less tech orientated crowd - it was mostly brand or internet marketers present. In fact, I never even saw an open laptop during any of the sessions.

The session I was looking forward to, and most related to this blog, was the Web 2.0 session presented by Will Mcinnes (I am 99% certain he will visit this site again if he practises what he preaches and tracks his “ego” online!). These sorts of sessions are again completely different to the web 2.0 conferences. I asked a question regarding Twitter and how brands should look to get involved. I don’t think he really answered my question - mainly because not many had even heard of Twitter yet - even my geek savvy Account Manager had not heard of it as (though I sense she will be using it shortly) - I imagine this would almost be sacrilege in a web 2.0 conference these days! In any case, the session lived up to expectations and I thought he got across the concepts of “buzz marketing” and “sentiment analysis” and the idea of having a conversation with your audience which I believe is the way forward. Of couse to have a conversation you have to listen..

So one of the tools he mentioned was Brandwatch which I am assuming are these guys. They look interesting, and seemed to be able to show where conversations involving your brand are taking place. It is certainly a good place to start. Nielsen Buzz Metrics is a similar tool - I have used Nielson’s BlogPulse in the past to track conversations online and found it to be a useful free tool, though Will mentioned that Nielsen’s Buzz Metrics is paid for. Google Alerts is an even easier starting point to track your brand online, though possibly more time consuming.

Anyway, I don’t want to regurgitate the whole session again here - I recommend you head over to either Will’s blog or his company website for more info.

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Lots of people are thinking of ways to use twitter as a mechanism for getting their message out. The trick is I think to do it in a way that benefits the people you are telling.

Is this an example of how to do it?

You receive an email saying is now following you and then on going to the link, it is one huge background with their website and contact details. The usual reciprocal follow would then result in spam appearing in the Twitter stream (though in this case it did seem to be being used for everyday use).

For me this is not the way to do things, and I am inclined to block rather than follow. I sure hope this is not a trend. Whilst it will not affect my Twitter stream (unless I reciprocate the follow it will not appear), it is spamming my email address and I’ll have to switch off the updates telling me who is following me.

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Waxy.org has done some detective work and found that Sitelynx is spamming social networks on behalf of The Times to help boost their search engine rankings. It seems pretty conclusive after reading the post. No comment as yet from the Times or Sitelynx.

Some people have commented that if they had just said they were The Times in the first place then all would be fine. I’m not so sure thats true. People have a habit of lambasting people/companies who try and promote themselves like this, but it is definitely better to be open about it rather then subversive. The New York Times seems to have done a good job of this by using sites like Techmeme to promote themselves openly.

At the end of the day, if your self promotion is helpful to the community site then more people will interact with it and the community wins overall. This has certainly been the case with Techmeme and The NY Times.

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apophenia wrote an article about “who clicks on ads? and what might this mean” which talks about that common phrase from people - “I never click on ads”. It then concludes that the majority of people clicking on ads online are from the lower socio-economic groups online, taking this conclusion from a study produced by AOL. Go here to read the full article.

AOL’s customer base has traditionally had a bias towards this demographic and this would certainly lead to them having a skew towards this demographic clicking on ads. Even more so, marketers advertising inside AOL seem to understand this and display banners suited to this demographic. Yet those same marketers do not seem to do this in the wider Internet. If this demographic is clicking in the majority on online ads, then surely the majority of agencies are wasting their client’s money online?

I don’t agree with this conclusion, not just because doing so would mean Google’s valuation would very quickly collapse

People do click on ads online, but they do so only when it is of interest to them (or to put it another way, when they benefit from clicking). Whether it is because they are in the market for a car and see a car ad they liked, or because they have seen a film trailer they want to find out more about. Marketers everywhere are trying to show an ad to the right person in the right place and at the right time. Achieve this and click-thru and economic returns would be sky high. This is why Google is doing so well, its technology is able to place adverts in front of you at a time when you are interested in a specific topic.

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why is orange’s support email address 345@orange-ft.com. What’s wrong with 345@orange.com?

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