We’re currently doing some very exciting work with East Village. If you’ve not heard of it, East Village will become London’s newest neighbourhood after the world’s best athletes vacate the current premises after the 2012 Games. It will become a living, breathing community – providing homes for thousands of people and a long lasting legacy for East London.
East Village is driven by three core values: more time, more space and more choice. We’ve used these as the inspiration behind our work, to develop engaging and interesting ways to evoke a sense of community, excitement and anticipation around East Village.
After an intense brainstorm late on a Friday afternoon, with the goal of encouraging people to talk about time, the team came up with a peach of an idea. We’d offer someone the chance to have their very own PA for a day.
Asking people on the East Village blog, London Living, just what they would do with ‘more time’, we awarded one lucky winner the services of yours truly for a whole day (absolutely free, I might add).
The aim here was to provide a personal and unique experience, giving the East Village brand a recognisable face and a human quality at the same time. Like a personalised random act of kindness, this was about us going that one step further for our client, and one leap further for our audience – and about taking something online, and making it happen offline.
I never really considered being ‘auctioned’ off as a prize to a member of the public as part of my first permanent career role, but I nonetheless looked forward to it with a lot of excitement (and a bit of trepidation).
It was with a nervous skip in my step that I went to meet Julia, an aspiring writer currently working in film, at 7am sharp (I know – an early start!) at the Shoreditch Grind, a lovely East London coffee house that sits next to the bustling roundabout by Old Street station.
It seemed Julia could not get over the novelty of the situation at hand; she’d clicked onto our blog, commented under a post, and now she had someone at her beck and call for the whole day. She thought it was a fantastic idea and said she’d dreamt of having a PA for years!
Having got thoroughly stuck into Julia’s mass of short stories, creative scripts and sonnets, editing and collating material as I went along, I spent the day organising her work into digestible prose. It definitely wasn’t light work!
Yet it was clear when the day came to a close that I’d really made Julia’s day that bit better. We know that 90% of recommendations come from face-to-face conversations. In this sense, Julia experienced the East Village ethos through a personal experience, and we amplified this message through proactive engagement with a member of our community.
It’s amazing what physical interaction can do, and Julia was full of praise for the concept and the execution.
I’d like to think Julia’s nascent opinion of East Village is now very much one of advocacy and that we’ve shown East Village is more than just London’s newest neighbourhood.
These days it can be hard to pass a poster or pick up a jar without finding a QR code promising exciting extras and exclusives staring you in the face. But are those ubiquitous monochrome squares more loved by marketers than anyone else?
Recently, bieMEDIA, an online marketing and media company, predicted the end of the QR code based on the fact that very few consumers actually use them.
We’ve blogged before about the good, the bad and the pointless ways brands are using QR.
But as they move into maturity what are the main arguments for and against these matrix barcodes, and just how valuable are they in driving word of mouth?
For
QR codes are so popular on posters, flyers and other marketing material because companies can use them to convey specific information about their brands to a target audience. Because the majority of people who use and recognise QR codes fall into the 18-34 age bracket, it means campaigns can be specifically developed for this demographic.
Their versatility also means they can be tailored to all sorts of needs as long as the creativity is there. Just look at this case study from India:
It looks pretty impressive from a community engagement and WOM perspective. But despite the initial positive response, how lasting do those conversations prove to be?
Against
As a QR-virgin myself (someone who has never actually scanned a QR code despite being surrounded by them every day), I am sceptical as to how these codes can be incorporated into a meaningful and lasting campaign. And the data is on my side.
According to an October 2011 survey from strategic marketing firm Russell Herder, although 72% of consumers say they have seen a QR code, nearly 30% of them don’t really know what they are.
More worryingly, 57% of consumers who have scanned a QR code say they did nothing with the information. This means that brands and marketing companies are spending time, effort and money on campaigns that don’t really seem to have an effect on consumers.
Couple this with the fact that other technologies such as NFC and mobile visual search are now on the rise, the trend seems to be towards QR codes becoming nothing more than distant relics of a past era: the marketing equivalent of the MiniDisc.
As with all tools, QR codes are only as good as the strategy or creative execution behind how they are used – and not very many brands are doing that well.
There are shinier alternatives creeping up too. NFC provides the potential for commercial services as well as marketing opportunities. Aurasma, an augmented reality app, acts as a much more tangible ‘bridge’ between the real and virtual worlds we inhabit, providing users with an interactive way of enhancing everyday life, such as this example of a polar bear on the River Thames:
So what do you think? What are your best and worst case studies of QR codes being used by brands? And how often do you use them yourself?
Perhaps a little much for a Monday morning, but Sex on Tap is what we’ve had on our minds for the past few months while we’ve been working with YouthNet, the UK’s leading online charity for providing advice, information and support to young people aged 16 to 25.
Back in March, YouthNet asked us to help them raise awareness amongst their key demographic (see above) around firstly, an issue that affects a lot of young people: the often volatile and potentially sticky (ahem) relationship between sex & alcohol, and secondly (and concurrently), the services that YouthNet’s ‘online guide to life’, TheSite.org, can provide.
So, sex & alcohol, surelyeveryone knows about the possible dangers and risks of combining these two pleasures (and who’s denying they’re pleasures?). The number of responsible drinking and/or safe sex campaigns out there must equal at least a year’s worth of drunken fumbles at (or after) a student night out!
But, irrespective of all the work that goes into this area, it still remains an issue. With statistics showing that after drinking, 11% of young people engaged in unprotected sex in 2007 and 11% again claimed to regret that sexual encounter. On top of that, Boyd et al. reports that heavy drinking amongst students (aged 18-24) is associated with high risk sexual behaviour and sexual aggression.
Not a good place to start.
It was clear that we needed to tell the story differently, in a way that would really capture young peoples’ attention and make them think. We know that being disruptive makes people talk and what better way to engage young people than to shake things up?
As I mentioned, YouthNet is a wholly online charity providing emotional support through services and sites such as TheSite.org. We wanted to drive awareness of the charity and its services amongst young people, but we wanted to do it in the place that they most need to listen, and that place (believe it or not) is not in front of a computer screen but in the ‘real world’ - offline, where they make their decisions… in the bar.
Based upon this insight, the Sex on Tap campaign and the ‘Morning After Brewery’ was born…
The results? 6,000+ students experienced the Morning After Brewery across multiple university bars and were exposed to TheSite.org for the first time, 17,000 fully branded assets were given away as well as the odd thing being ‘misplaced’ from the bars (well they are students after all!).
And outside of the uni bars? The activity was talked about online by students, university unions, university press and local press including the Manchester Evening News, The Coventry Telegraph and BBC Radio Manchester (who even interviewed some students from Manchester about the campaign).
In all Sex on Tap reached over three quarters of a million people with, in the words of one student from Warwick “…a good message, a good good message!” that they couldn’t help but listen to.
It’s hard to believe it’s a week since I was in Vegas at the WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) Summit, which brought together over 600 marketers, agencies, brands, academics and researchers over three days to share thought leadership, case studies, best practice and provocative debate. Over the next few weeks running up to Christmas I’ll be showcasing some of the best keynotes and insights from the event, and I thought I’d kick off with a personal perspective.
As President of WOMMA UK, this year I was heading up aninternational panel examining the global differences in word of mouth.
via WOMMA@Flickr; L-R: me, Barak, Craig, Jo, Shige
The idea for the session came from my experiences last year - I saw several excellent case studies from the likes of Tropicana and Mom Central but also realised that the very ‘American’ approach just would not wash with many European consumers.
1000heads creates pan-global campaigns for clients such as Nokia, Canon and SKINS and we have offices in London, New York, Sydney, Berlin and Paris, so we’re particularly sensitive to international WOM variations. Particularly in the UK, there is fierce protection of individual independence, reluctance to be allied officially with a brand, and suspicion of over-partisanship, so gung-ho, brand-heavy strategies would not be as welcome, or as influential, as they are in the States.
So this year, I assembled an eclectic team – Global Head of Digital for Nokia Craig Hepburn, dynamite Australian social media consultant Jo Jacobs, WOM Japan member Shige Ota and consumer psychologist and WOM economics specialist Professor Barak Libai from Tel Aviv University – to consider such questions as:
How willing is your region/culture to evangelise about brands?
How does the economic and technical infrastructure of the region shape WOM opportunities?
How and how extensively is social media used in your region?
What are some of the conversational triggers and taboos that affect brand engagement in your region?
To be honest, it’s amazing that these questions aren’t tackled more often, and the energy of the debate reflected the audience’s interest.
Among other insights, Barak explained the differing communication patterns of countries as determined by their collectivism or individualism; Shige emphasised how the anonymity of Japanese social media culture impacts on their brand conversation; Jo noted that Australians as a nation rebel against vulgar or overt brand association; and Craig described the challenges of promoting Nokia in its native country Finland, where sisu – the concept of strong, uncomplaining silence – is a cultural ideal.
One point that emerged was how important the basic challenges of differing infrastructures, governments and languages can be. In much of Australia broadband is so expensive that sophisticated augmented experiences just wouldn’t work. The censorship in the far East leads to more specialised social communities with localised spheres of influence. The fact is that if you want to transfer a US campaign globally, it takes people on the ground in each country dedicated to adapting and updating engagement in a way that works for their region.
An interesting question from the floor highlighted the different attitudes towards alcohol that affect marketing from drinks brands; but we also discovered that, similarly, brands using seasonal hooks to stimulate WOM such as Halloween or Thanksgiving ignore the subtle commonalities and contrasts these celebrations have across the world.
There was an overall conclusion that this debate needed to be continued in a much more visible way in the industry, with more shared learnings and challenges; we could have stayed in that room all day! As attendees pointed out, companies love toolkits or guidelines they can roll out across markets, but although some degree of consistent narrative is important, this simply won’t work with word of mouth.
On a positive note, there are real opportunities for marketers willing to explore and work with the differences. I for one find them one of the most fascinating and rewarding challenges of working with WOM.
So share your own stories, case studies and questions below, and let’s continue the debate!
Before we get share all the great case studies, keynotes and insight we gleaned from the WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) Summit 2010, we have to simply celebrate and say thank you to our team by highlighting the WOMMYResearch Award we won for our #NokiaNav campaign.
Collecting the award alongside Craig Hepburn, Global Head of Digital for Nokia
The WOMMYs are the most prestigious and rigorous awards in the word of mouth industry, and we are delighted that we’ve been acknowledged for “Best strategic thinking to measure the impact/success of WOM”. With #NokiaNav,we focused on understanding, measuring and shifting the sentiment of conversation around Nokia’s accessories and navigation tools. We believe that this approach, which moves beyond reach to the context and meaning of word of mouth, is essential in creating truly effective campaigns.
Here are a few of the guys who really deserve the credit: our Nokia Account and Community team Katie, Simon, Frank and Joel. They share billing equally with the Analyst Team of Joe, Allan and Marzena – who weren’t around for this photo but who did all the incredible data and insight work that made #NokiaNav possible – an awesomely talented bunch.
You can buy WOMMA’s Word of Mouth Works book to see full case studies of all winners; in the meantime get in touch if you’d like to know more about what we did!
Well, if you chow down at Giraffe and love what you eat, you’d be able to tell all your friends. The popular restaurant chain has always used social media well: their Facebook page is crammed with regularly updated news, photos and demographic-relevant chat, their Twitter feed is both relevant and gorgeoulsy engaging (with a healthy 6,000 followers), and they’ve got 200 photos from around the UK on Flickr.
But I’ve also noticed a very nice, simple extra touch: every one of their online menu items includes a Facebook like button, and shows you other friends who like the same dish.
Oh, sure, it’s not rocket science. But this attention to detail reminds us that creativity doesn’t just lie in big engagement campaigns, but in making every tiny detail of your consumer touchpoints as conversational as possible.
In a similar vein, I also love The Breakfast Club, not just for their scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, but for the clever way they use their Twitter feed: replying quickly with personal responses, suggesting collaborations and creative ideas, and seeding in little challenges and activities to win kudos and freebies.
What brands have you noticed who really pay attention to the little elements that provide a personal or conversational experience?
Well, if you chow down at Giraffe and love what you eat, you’d be able to tell all your friends. The popular restaurant chain has always used social media well: their Facebook page is crammed with regularly updated news, photos and demographic-relevant chat, their Twitter feed is both relevant and gorgeoulsy engaging (with a healthy 6,000 followers), and they’ve got 200 photos from around the UK on Flickr.
But I’ve also noticed a very nice, simple extra touch: every one of their online menu items includes a Facebook like button, and shows you other friends who like the same dish.
Oh, sure, it’s not rocket science. But this attention to detail reminds us that creativity doesn’t just lie in big engagement campaigns, but in making every tiny detail of your consumer touchpoints as conversational as possible.
In a similar vein, I also love The Breakfast Club, not just for their scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, but for the clever way they use their Twitter feed: replying quickly with personal responses, suggesting collaborations and creative ideas, and seeding in little challenges and activities to win kudos and freebies.
What brands have you noticed who really pay attention to the little elements that provide a personal or conversational experience?
If you’re not already sick of it, be prepared to hear a lot more about transmedia in the next few months. As a recent article in Wired UK put it, “whether you consider this a revolution or evolution, transmedia storytelling is beginning to change the way that books, film, TV and games are being developed and produced.”
What about products? What about brands?
When good old Wiki tells us that “a transmedia project develops storytelling across multiple forms of media in order to have different “entry points” in the story; entry-points with a unique and independent lifespan but with a definite role in the big narrative scheme”, you can understand why this barrier-busting way of delivering narrative is so relevant.
Creation of immersive brand experiences? Tick Multiple points of entry? Tick. Harnessing several technologies and platforms under one story arc? Tick.
It’s a form of storytelling driven by choice – you have the right to engage with the bits most relevant and exciting to you – and therefore perfect for the modern consumer.
We’ve talked before about the importance of storytelling in WOM. Word of mouth is inherently transmedia, crossing boundaries between different off and online platforms. The best way to spread and deepen WOM is to personalise triggers for different audiences across a number of spaces. But few brands outside the entertainment industry are thinking of transmedia as the way to capture both niche and mainstream audiences simultaneously.
It’s easy to think of games, films and TV shows that use this sort of immersive storytelling – Doctor Who, The Dark Knight – but brands tend to stick to one or two platforms, or keep traditional/digital and on/offline boundaries firmly in place.
The ever-insightful Mel Exon from BBH Labs has produced this interesting deck on the opportunities for companies brave enough to emulate the entertainment pioneers. Do you think any brands are coming close to offering a true transmedia experience?
As part of our thank you clients birthday week, we’d like to give a special shout-out to those clients who took the leap ten years ago and invested in word of mouth long before Twitter was even a flicker in Jack Dorsey‘s eye.
It’s a great reminder that WOM is so much more than Facebook or YouTube.
Our CEO and MD Mike R and Mike D had developed an early version of WOMTrak, our proprietary listening and analysis software, and they built a specialist team of young analysts immersed in social platforms around that. WOMTrak has evolved massively, but from the start it was designed with the belief that conversation is useless without insight.
Any engagement came from those listening insights. There were fledgling forums and communities out there – mainly gamers and niche passion-based fan groups – that we reached out to. But with the online space still taking its first tentative steps into 2.0, much of our work also involved looking at how offline WOM could be mined and harnessed, and how and why it was starting to seep into this new peer-led online space.
As for the early adopters?
Tescos was one of the first, intrigued by what they could learn from customer conversation, as were Red Bull, KFC and Toshiba, for whom we developed a particularly successful reactive strategy for laptop owners with broken machines.
Nokia have been with us from the start – they instantly understood the importance of a WOM approach for a company that makes connecting people its philosophy – and we collaborated on many great early projects such as the Jealous Computers campaign.
Miele have worked with us for several years and really invested in the food, fashion and family communities that rely on their brand; Canon did the same in the creative and photographic communities; STA Travel weren’t far behind, determined to promote the voice of independent travellers. And a couple of years ago The V&A were setting an example to slow-evolving arts organisations with our Cold War Modern campaign.
Over the past ten years we’ve worked with fantastic brands, blue-chip and niche, across all industries – from Lloyds to LocateTV. But it also took real foresight and guts to be one of the first to engage in the raw landscape of on and offline WOM.
Hats off to the early birds. You helped kick-start an incredible industry.
As we’re celebrating the industry in this, our first week of birthday fun, we thought we’d better talk a bit about our view of said industry.
Word of mouth is an approach that crosses disciplinary boundaries and embraces all different specialisms. It doesn’t sit in social media, or digital, or even marketing, but reaches across all business departments – retail, R&D, packaging, customer service, HR – to bring joined-up consumer insight and people-focused strategy to the company as a whole.
We therefore feel very strongly that agencies and practitioners involved in word of mouth must work together, rather than compete, to mutually advance the industry. There’s plenty of room for all kinds of specialisms, tools and platforms, and they all need to come on board to make word of mouth work in an integrated way.
Of course, that’s not as easy as it sounds, but it’s our starting point with every client and campaign.
It’s why Molly is President of WOM UK and on the DMA Social Media Council, Jacqui is on the WOMMA Measurement and Metrics Board, and James and Tim sit on the IAB. It’s why we write a monthly column in AdMap and articles for a load of different sector publications and attend many other events and workshops (see Meet us @ on the sidebar for upcoming stuff) to keep ourselves accessible and curious and challenged.
It’s why we’ve also started publishing case studies about the work we do. Some of these, such as our Nokia E72 deck, V&A showreel and Nokia Nav video, simply tell the story of the campaign and why it worked. However, we’re also developing a ‘How to’ series demonstrating how to achieve specific business objectives using word of mouth techniques.
Here’s our first, about the campaign we did for Tourism New South Wales.
It’s a conversation starter. Let us know what you think and point us towards your own. We want to move the industry conversation forwards from why WOM is important to how it works best.
