Can it be said that digital is simply an ‘add on’ to a strategy or are brands looking at digital in the completely wrong way?

With any new media there is always concern and uneasiness regarding its use, but the growth of digital has now surpassed this child-like stage, where more brands are now choosing to allocate a larger percentage of their budgets towards the use of digital media over the use of traditional media than ever before. According to the Digital Media and Marketing Association “The outlook for the South African digital publishing industry is positive with excellent results being recorded in the first quarter of 2010.”

It can therefore no longer be said that digital is an ‘add on’ to a brand strategy due to its rapid growth over the last few years. Digital should be seen as a viable platform; just like that of television and newspapers and just like with any other platform the selection for a brand will ultimately depend on the overall objectives determined within the strategy. A brand should thus always utilise a media neutral approach.

If digital does however work for the brand there are various advantages of its use. Digital can be updated and changed whenever necessary, unlike that of traditional media, so if there is an issue with a website for example, it can be fixed almost immediately. Secondly, the concept of instant links back to the world of digital and directly correlates with the ideals of the new consumer who ultimately thrives on instant gratification.  Digital media is also much more measurable in terms of reporting, as information is more freely available and through Google analytics for example information is collected and organised almost immediately.

There are many other digital tools for tracking and measuring data and many can be utilised free of charge, making it a lower cost medium in terms of measuring. Lastly, digital is more focused on Return on Investment (ROI), however it is vital to ensure what the set criteria is in order to achieve that success. According to Ahmed and Tunnah, who are both involved in large corporate digital endeavours “If you don’t have clear criteria for success and a way to measure your progress against them, there’s no way you can be deemed to succeed.”

Conclusion

Digital should no longer be seen as an ‘add on’ to a strategy, because it has gone through a rapid growth over the last few years.  It should however be viewed as a platform, whereby it is selected so as to achieve specific objectives. A brand should never just push digital to fit into a specific message, as this will simply result in wasted time and limited results. Digital offers many advantages over the use of traditional media and therefore if it is determined that digital media is relevant in achieving the objectives, the desired goals must be identified so as to measure the brands overall success.                                                                   

  How does your brand operate?

Have you used digital as an ‘add on’?

Are you operating in a media neutral way?

Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is currently worth $17.5 billion (just in case you weren’t aware), has recently added a few changes to Facebook. So before you start panicking and calling your children or grandkids for help, here are a few things you should know, just to help you out!

First of all let’s look at your newsfeed.

This has been made more efficient by removing both Top Stories (which showed the most popular topics) and Most Recent (which placed news in chronological order). The newsfeed now puts up one stream of all the stories relevant to the time they were posted, and according to Facebook “News Feed will act more like your own personal newspaper. You won’t have to worry about missing important stuff.”

Facebook has increased the character limit for status update s from 420 to an impressive 5,000 meaning that brands now have the chance to say more than ever before. There are also bigger pictures in your newsfeed and you can mark stories as top stories meaning that Facebook will automatically put similar stories at the top of your newsfeed.

What is the ‘Ticker?’

Ticker allows the user to link up with friends in real-time whereby you can see immediate updates and join in conversations at any time as the news feed seems to lag in terms of immediacy. The ticker has now created the ability for you to ‘listen in’ on conversations that were meant to be private with people you may not even know (i.e. friends of friends).

What are Smart Lists?

Smart Lists allow the user to create lists based on certain aspects of an individual’s profile for example your family, school, university and so on. Once an individual in the list updates their profile or posts a comment, the list will indicate the total number of new posts by that group of people.

What about my privacy?

It is important to note that through the addition of the ticker, it is now easier for people  to view pretty much everything you post, like or add. You can limit this by changing your privacy settings to “friends only” or “custom” lists. These settings can be accessed either through the privacy setting in the top right corner of your post or at the top right corner of your page. Remember that with the new Facebook, everything you do will be shared immediately to your newsfeed so be careful when authorising various apps, and make sure you understand and are aware of your privacy settings.

According to an article by Alexandra Reid “If you’re friends with a prospect on Facebook, what you’re watching, reading and listening to, and even what locations you check into, can impact their perception of you professionally and damage business relationships.”

An important aspect you should however take note of is secure browsing. According to Carl “By default, Facebook sends your access credentials in the clear, with no encryption whatsoever. Switching to HTTPS is important because a browser extension called Firesheep has made it especially easy for anyone sharing your open wireless network—at cafe or conference, for example—to sniff your credentials and freely access your account.”

In order to change this, it is important to go to your account settings, select the security setting and enable the secure browsing option.

What should brands be aware of?

With Facebook’s new social plugin it is now possible to drive additional traffic to your site. The social plugin is installed on the businesses website and must then be permitted access by a Facebook member. Each time a user visits the businesses website a notification (stating that the page has been read) can be returned back to Facebook whereby a post will be shared on the users’ wall, and newsfeed. This facility is available to developers via Open Graph

A new button referred to as the ‘Subscribe Button’ could also assist in benefitting brands and their engagement with consumers (followers). The subscribe button allows the individual to subscribe to updates by public figures of the brand, who can share posts for the individuals who have subscribed. Additionally the brand can subscribe to regular influential visitors assisting in mutual relations. The subscribe button shares similar resemblance to the follow button on Twitter and works in a similar way.

The Ticker can be used to a brands adavntage as long as a brand has a cohesive strategy whereby updates are placed thoughtfully and interaction with consumers is relevant. Brands need to create relevant, consistent and interesting stories so as to keep the user interested and willing to engage regularly with the brand.

Conclusion

According to SodaHead a public opinion forum, 86% of users are against the Facebook changes with many saying that Facebook is overloading the user with too much information from both the Newsfeed and Ticker, being compared to a kind of Twitter feed, but it’s important to remember that “We are its product, not its customers,” says Andrew Brown editor of Cif belief, with its customers actually being the advertisers.

A beautifully fresh morning welcomes everyone at this, the next episode of The Journal of Marketing Breakfast, at The Michelangelo in Sandton. A Loerie themed morning, Hosted by Andy Rice, today’s topic revolves around “Squawking About Winning Advertising”.

Loerie ads are judged according to 5 categories:

• Innovation – creativity in terms of being distinctively different
• Quality – how well is the idea executed
• Relevance to the brand,
• Relevance to target audience,
• And relevance to the  chosen medium

On the menu today to talk and question about winning ads are:

Andy Rice, Chairman, Yellowwood Brand Architects
Oresti Patricios, CEO at Ornico Group (Pty)Ltd
Steve Miller, CEO at BF Strategy
Lou Boxall-Davies, Chief Strategist at Morris Jones
Geoff Whyte, Managing Director at Snackworks

Advert 1:

The Vodacom Music Station, done by Draft FCB, directed by Neo Mashingo.

Goal: To promote that Vodacom provides the listener to have radio at their fingertips, their own choice of music.
Creative angle: The DJ Keeps talking over the music, that the listener really wants to listen to. Where as they have their own choice of music via Vodacom.
Delivery: Pointers were given for the voice artist to talk about, and then were elaborated on in studio.

• The voiceover artist did a fantastic job at depicting the DJ.
• The ad explains that it is music without a DJ, any category any music. Like listening to a radio station, on your cellphone.
• Was flighted on vernacular ALS radio stations.
• The Vodacom brand doesn’t come out strong, but appears as a spot read by the DJ.
• Sales increased in terms of data markets. A lot of teaching still needs to happen. The campaign was driven to teach people on ALS stations to use their phones for other functions, like data, and not just voice.
• In terms of building the brand, they wanted the brand to be viewed as a friend, with a comedic thread.

Advert 2

Yuppiechef vs Woolies
Agency: Hello World
Danni Vos, CEO

The sign, which had the incorrect URL on, which Yuppiechef held ransom.

Yuppiechef.co.za hijacked Woolies’s misspelt URL, registered it, and held it ransom.  Challenging them to donate money

• They had less than 14 days before Valentine’s day.
• Social media driven, but mainly driven by the PR.
• How do Yupppiechef now continue to engage? They are an online company, so they continue with online and social media.
• It’s about finding the right social idea, and backing it up with the right brand.
• If it were to be done again, would it be done differently: Because of time constraints, strategy couldn’t be planned.  A bigger base could’ve been achieved, and the Yuppiechhef current bas could’ve been utilized.
• Great opportunistic campaign, and a great PR exercise – what was the PR strat: was totally focused on radio and online media. Power of online has turned a corner, to use Online PR more – to engage online bloggers more.
• Built their social media database immensely.

…./2

Besides the Facebook Movie, the Facebook Like Button has got a lot of tongues wagging over the internet in recent weeks.

The Facebook Like Button has been in existence quite a while now but only a few people have ever bothered to actually think of its power in terms of numbers in web traffic.

The kind people at Mashable have written a comprehensive article on this ‘tool’ after attending the Facebook’s Developer Network Insights Conference. They found that the Facebook Like Buttons don’t just generate interesting data about the ‘likers’ (users that click ‘like’ on the content) but this “data also speaks volumes about click-through-rates, time on-site and other engagement metrics”.

Here are a few points i picked up from the article:

• The Facebook Like Button is now present on roughly 2 million sites around the web, from sports sites to news organizations and many other publications.
• On average, a Facebook user who “likes” your content has more than double the number of friends than a typical Facebook user.
• An even more interesting stat about the likers is that they click on five times more links to external sites than the typical Facebook user.
• News sites: The average Facebook user who “likes” content on a news website is 34 — that’s about two decades younger than the average newspaper subscriber.
• Facebook relays messages from publishers saying that these users “are more engaged and stay longer when their real identity and real friends are driving the experience through social plugins.”
• Facebook is only part of social media referral traffic, but it’s becoming a larger part as the network grows and users become accustomed to interacting with third-party and external content from within the comfort of their social graph.

Read the full article here.

Last week, Mario Gamper paid Virtuosa a visit taking time as an ‘intern’ with the hope of learning more about specifically online  marketing and  search marketing  in the Agency  environment in South Africa. He met Ingrid Rubin, our GM, at Cannes two years ago at a Lowe Worldwide Digital Conference; and made Africa (specifically South Africa) one of his stops as he is interested in seeing how agencies are structured here, the maturity of the market and approach to strategy and emarketing.

For 5 days Mario had  an intense ‘internet marketing crash course’ to help him in writing his book before he continues with his worldwide tour to other countries and continents.

I had the opportunity to interview him while he was here and I must say that he is a very knowledgeable and interesting guy, with a fresh approach to looking at online advertising. I envy his vision and the end result of his worldwide summary of advertising and the future is certainly going to be interesting.

Mario’s Background

Mario Gamper has a TV and Print Ad agency background where he worked at Scholz & Friends for 10 years. After heading up the interactive department, he finally decided to travel and write a book on changes in the advertising sphere around the world and what to expect in the future.  He has teamed up with designer Raban Ruddigkeit, who is the editor of Freistil, a magazine on Illustration in Germany.

What the book will be about?

Mario’s project is called ‘Ideas Will Travel’, which is derived from the notion that people have to be moved by the ‘ideas’ in a campaign/ad. Mario views ads as ideas in motion and the book goes further to investigate:

• how we create ideas that are being talked about,
• why they are being talked about,
• how they are being passed on.

Basically, in Mario’s view the challenge for ad agencies (on and offline) all over the world is to generate a successful ad that can generate a discussion, in his own words “that is the value… that is the lesson“.

Why is the book different?

Mario believes that we are already living in the ‘future’ that we predicted 5 to 10 years ago with micro-blogging and augmented reality, and the question the book answers is: “What can we expect in the next 5 years of the advertising industry?”.

He believes that ads/campaigns (on and offline) will aim to constantly re-educate and their success will be measured by their ability to create new ideas and be shared through various mediums.

It was great hosting him and I for one can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of this insightful contribution to advertising. There are not too many authors and books in this market that have managed to provide a well researched and global insight into changes in marketing and advertising.

To keep track on Mario and his journey visit: Facebook and to ask him any questions, you can also visit his blog: www.ideaswilltravel.com .

Today I am deliberately taking a lighter approach to blogging with a collection of my ’5 Funniest SEO Cartoons’.

I know what you are thinking – and the answer is Yes!! I am lazy to write a blog that some of you may not have time to thoroughly read through. Besides, like Mani Karthik says, “SEO is not always serious stuff you know” (I also took the liberty of adding a short explanation to the terms in each cartoon: For my non-SEO folk). Enjoy

Happy Birthday

Keywords and phrases strategically placed and crafted into your website can significantly boost your ratings in search engine results

Rankings

SEO is no longer about ranking anymore. The significance of ranking has disappeared with the use of personalized search, universal search, real-time search and local search in the SERP’s. Search Optimisers are crazy about this factor, often worrying about drop in their rankings for competitive keywords.

Changed Algorithm

Search engines like Google are frequently changing their ‘algorithms’ that can help your site rank number 1 for targeted keywords. Just imagine there was an algorithm to get to heaven?! – a constantly changing one at that.

No Follow

Basically the No-Follow attribute instructs the search engines how they should value a particular link, in this case not to index the link.

Socialitis

Not only Search Engine Optimisers suffer from “Socialitis” – addicted to social media (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr).

Click here to see more SEO cartoons. Props Mani Karthik for insipiring this blog with his blog post.

The growth in the Mobile Industry over the last decade has made it paramount for all businesses to have Mobile Sites in order to reach this growing new target market.

Current local (South Africa) trends show that:

• There are ten million mobile Internet users in SA (Five million PC Internet users in SA)
• One in six Google searches in SA originates off a mobile device.
• In South Africa about 40 percent of mobile phone users have WAP-enabled phones.
• The top Mobile Applications currently in South Africa are: Mxit – with 15 million+ users – and Facebook.
• Mobile search and eCommerce will be a large area of growth in 2010.

In short, this indicates an importance for businesses to target mobile searchers and users of mobile applications.

Some of the best Mobile Site examples I can give include BBC, the Goal mobi site, and College Humour (N/B: “these examples obviously look better on your mobile phone – feel free to suggest your favourite mobile sites below“).

However, when creating a Mobile Site it is also imperative to build and optimise the Mobile Sites so it is user-friendly and accessible on the Mobile Web.

Mobile Design and SEO Best Practices
When designing a Mobile Site one aspect to consider is that one must understand that mobile searchers/users are different from PC searchers/users. In order to cater for Mobile users designers must:

• Provide an elegant experience by considering whether individuals possess a smart phone (for example an iPhone with fully featured web browsing) or a standard mobile phone (with stripped site features).
• Consider that phones are not used like PC’s – users are usually on the go therefore the site should be more goal oriented – Relevancy and Simplicity is key.
• Mobile designs are to conform to the new W3C standards in order to create mobile-friendly style sheets (CSS).
• Mobile Sites must be small, lightweight and fast-loading site – (< 20kb / page).
• Consider User Agent Detection –  this is another form of transcoding which takes into consideration the type of mobile phone an individual uses to search and provides more uniform browsing experience for various device types.

Once the Mobile Site has been built, Mobile SEO steps can now come into play. These include:

1.    Validating the page with the .Mobi Validator or the W3C Validator
2.    Following ‘traditional’ on-site  SEO Best Practices such as:

• Major keywords in the title tagging
• H1′s and body text
• Rich keyword Meta Titles and Descriptions
• Keyword-rich anchor text for internal links

3.    Mobile Search results tend to reflect ‘Local Search results’ – your site must be optimized for local type searches. Also submit your business info to local directories making sure your site is verified and included in sites like Google’s Local Business Center.
4.    Get the Mobile Site spidered and indexed – submit to major search engines:

• Google Sitemaps
• Yahoo! Submit Your Mobile Site

In short, the above Mobile Design and SEO factors are to be strongly considered when building a Mobile Site. These aspects help provide a solid Mobile Site foundation for your Mobile Campaign or Strategy. For further Mobile Campaign or Strategy enquiries, visit our Virtuosa website.

Last week we saw the Virtuosa team heading to The Venue at Melrose Arch for the Habari Media Facebook Launch. The line-up of speakers  included Mike Stopforth a leading local social media expert, Blake Chandlee  a fairly important guy at Facebook and Mark Cohen.

Social media is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers.

Among some of the topics discussed were social media  and how it  is changing the online world, its evolution of discovery, and the Facebook story itself. The interesting bit for me was the evolution of the Facebook ad.

The Facebook advertising strategy has evolved from the common banner and text ad into something much more engaging and informative for advertisers. For them communication in media is changing because the user has changed.

Facebook ads are evolving to drive user engagement and connections just as social media does.

They encourage users to interact and share advertising with engaging ad formats which range from the following:

Facebook campaign formats include:

• Quizzes: Brands can ask questions about your brand  or find out what consumers of your product like.
• Contests: Brands can advertise contests and promotions.
• Coupons: Brands can give away free samples to the people that chose to interact with the advert.
• Gifts: People are able to give brands gifts or recieve branded gifts.
• Sign up forms: People can opt in from the ad to receive promotional material and product updates.
• Fan Pages: People can become fans of particular products and brands. These fan pages can then in turn create connections and can be used for PR, Customer Services and Market Research.
• Polling: You can find out what people feel about your product and what they prefer.

This allows the user to engage and interact with the ad allowing a unique dialogue between the brand and the audience as well as share the advertising to others within their social network.

On Friday the 11th of December, Virtuosa had their Christmas party and needless to say it was one that touched more than just the Virtuosa team member lives.

The day started with the team separated into groups and by participating in a game similar to the Amazing race – each group had different tasks to complete. While we were trying to figure out the clues running from one destination to another, each group had to collect a reward from one of the stopping points. One group had to collect and carry garden tools while the others had to pick up rolls of grass and trees for planting: it was clear from then on that we were not on our way to a party venue at all.

As the teams arrived at the final destination, we were surprised to be greeted by the school children at Witkoppen School – a “less fortunate” school within the community of Fourways, Johannesburg. The challenge for the day were to plant the grass and trees for the kids at this school and the Virtuosa team got straight to work as you can see below.

With a sense of giving back to the community, the whole team took up the challenge with enthusiasm. Virtuosa also volunteered to paint one of the classroom walls with the Witkoppen School logo & motif  (images below).

As a team, we are proud to be giving back something to the community and to have the opportunity to do something different for our year end party. What better way to build team moral and spent the whole day together as a team. It was totally AWESOME (describing my feelings in layman’s terms) to spend time with the children of Witkoppen School as they appreciated our presence and gift.

Since the partnership between longtail and Pixel8 in January, Virtuosa Newsletters have been sent on a monthly basis. This month is no different from any of the months before and in our December edition we are highligting the top 5 “most read” articles during 2009. Here they are:

Designing for Results Online
Creative Director, Bryce Hancock let us pick his brain in regards to the thinking behind the refresh of the Virtuosa website and we also convince him to part with some of his expertise …

Bang for our Buck?
Recently, one of our clients asked whether the cost of banner advertising is feasible and whether we are receiving “bang for our buck” …

Augmented Reality, say what?
Sounds like something out of a Steven Spielberg movie? Don’t worry you are not alone in your thinking, this is brand new technology that has finally stepped out of the box …

Kulula Jetsetters miss out!
It’s something that can happen to any popular website that receives a lot of traffic – it can crash. But try to explain that to unsatisfied customers …

What influences the SEO landscape today?
The pace at which Search Engine Optimization is changing is enough to make anybody’s head spin. Well, it is probably not as bad as that, but in our fast paced technological world …