Howdy

I’ve been doing some thinking this weekend.

The question in my head has been – should we treat customers that complain online, on forums and such like any differently to those that complain directly? (I should add that’s not all I’ve been thinking about!)

In this time of forums and the ability to anonymously whinge about everything and everybody, there is understandable reticence for brands to enter a dialogue with the range of forum monkeys.

Just pop onto a fanboy site and experience the flaming you’ll get for simply suggesting that their ‘thing’ of choice isn’t perfect and you’ll see what I mean.

But is this the right approach? It’s long been considered by both customer care and direct marketing that a complaining customer is an opportunity to put things right and maybe even create a new brand advocate.

I’m sure we’ve all experienced poor service at some point, it’s a fact of life, however it’s not the poor service that’s the problem it’s what happens next.

Just watch Watchdog, by far and away the complaints are about customer service after an issue, if it’s all sorted then no problem, however if it takes months/years and still its a problem then that’s different.

Fixing something is also a brilliant way of creating that Holy Grail of marketing – word of mouth – just stop and think about it, the last time you had an issue with a company and they fixed it how many people did you tell? And the last time you didn’t have an issue – how many people did you tell then?

We’ve all got the chance to go out there and interact directly with our/ our brands / our clients customers – even if it’s scary sometimes, isn’t this something we should take advantage of?

One word of warning though, make sure you respond in a timely manner.

If you sit on your hands thinking about it for too long all you’ll do is re-open a discussion that’s probably dead. But if you get in on time, rise above the flaming and hold your head high, I’m convinced you’ll win in the end.

iPhone apps of the week

Bump – it’s on the latest Apple TV ad, it’s an app that lets you transfer your contact info from one iPhone to another by simply Bumping you’re hands together. Nice.

Fuel Prices UK- nice little app that searches your location and lets you know the cheapest place to fill up your fuel based mode of transport.

It costs £4.99 but it’s an app that might just pay for itself – for example, at the moment up near Chalk Farm it tells me there are 2 garages very close together – 1 at 108p/l the other at 106p/l.

On a 20l weekly fill that’s 40p a week – or £21 a year. Bargain, and of course. Genius.

Toot, toot.

Craig

Howdy

A Qik’y this week (typo on purpose – you’ll see why later) due to the monster of pitches n stuff.

News

Facebook’s been shopping this week and splashed out on the social network aggregator FriendFeed.

What this basically does is take all the feeds from all your social stuff, Facebook, Twitter, RSS etc, and pull it all together in one lovely place.

So what?

Indeed, well a bit anyway – one thing it certainly does is give Facebook an opportunity to keep its ad revenue up – it can now argue ‘don’t use Twitter – place ads with us and we’ll put them on Friendfeed too and you’ll hit Twitter too’ kinda, as in effect this move puts Twitter into Facebook.

Clever stuff – it’s also good if you use RSS a fair bit (you should) as you can then just head to one place online rather than a few – if nothing else it keeps your browser window neater.

So all in a good move for Facebook – if people sign up, which I’m sure Facebook will now be encouraging.

Nice.

Top Tip

Like posting and sending round weblinks to friends and family?

But sometimes they don’t work as the link is so long it gets a bit broken?

Use bit.ly (that the web address btw) simply paste your weblink into the window and it makes it super short – excellent for Twitter or text when you don’t have the space.

For example:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Geek-Handbook-User-Guide-Documentation/dp/0743417763/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1250609778&sr=8-6

Becomes

http://bit.ly/9OKA0

Genius.

iPhone Apps of the week

Sorry if your on an ‘old’ iPhone but my choices this week are 3GS only.

Qik – genius video app that enables you to shoot a video and immediately upload it to your qik account online for friends to view.

Great way to show your friends just how drunk someone is without them actually being there – on the App Store now and it’s FREE.

Cyclops – barcode scanner app that lets you take a pic of a product barcode then use that barcode to look the product up on the t’interweb to check prices – also enables you to buy it from within the app from Amazon, smashing.

FREE

Toot, toot.

Craig

Howdy doody

Here’s this weeks news from the digital frontline.

UGC

Everybody loves a nice promotion where consumers have to make a video/take a picture/ do something or other and then upload it to a website and see if they’ve won – consumer engagement like this is being asked for more and more – but how many of the great British unwashed actually want to do this sort of thing?

Well, depending on how you look at it either loads or not so many – 57% of web users have never uploaded stuff onto a website (stats from Lightspeed Research for NMA 23rd July).

Which means that 43% have – quite a lot I think. Of those that do most are likely to be under 35.

So tread carefully dear fellows – it might be asked for but its not always the answer – for the right brand yes, as a universal engagement driving mechanic maybe not.

iPhone apps of the week

Fring – can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this one before – but re-discovered it this week – brilliant Instant Message client for iPhone that covers most things out there including Skype, MSN, Gtalk. AIM, Twitter etc all in one place, works really well, and it’s FREE

Ocado – fancy doing your shopping whilst walking to the tube? Well now you can as long as it’s with Ocado (at the moment) – FREE

It’s the future.

Toot toot

Craig

Howdy do

After a week off last week (just in-case you didn’t notice, I was in the office, I mean digitally) I’m back, with a few tasty morsels of digital deliciousness and snippets that have caught my eye this week.

Tweet, Tweet

I’ve got back into Twitter this week, not sure why or how, just happened, I’m not posting my every move but have been posting, which is nice, as Twitter has also been in the news this week after it pulled a competition which had become too successful.

Moonfruit, a website building company was running a competition to win a MacBook Pro, the comp became so popular that it trended above such trivial stuff like MJ’s death and the war in Iraq.

Twitter decided that it had therefore become SPAM and removed it as a trending topic, thereby removing a major way that people would find out about it. (If you don’t know, popular topics ‘trend’ and appear as a list on the Twitter site thus helping them trend more by drawing attention to them).

This has brought about continued debate about whether and how brands should use Twitter.

It seems Twitter are happy for brands to play as long as they don’t get too popular and verge on SPAM. The question is what’s the cut off and how does a brand control it? Surely the point of Twitter is that only things that are interesting trend and as interesting is decided by the people, then even Twitter (the company) shouldn’t step in.

RSS

The other thing I’ve re-discovered this week is RSS, and Google reader.

I previously used it alot, then I stopped – again no idea why. If you don’t know (shame on you) an RSS reader is a way of keeping track of everything you’re interested in on the web in a single place.

Google reader is a goody as its available from your google log in and so from any computer in the world/house/kitchen.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about give me a shout and I’ll show you – its really rather handy and served me a very useful article on why I’m such a potty mouth yesterday. Lovely.

And finally

This week saw Apples App store serve up it’s 1.5 billionth app download in just under 1 year. Jeepers thats a lot of apps, even for me. And I love apps. Leading me nicely to…

iPhone App of the week

Worms – genius turn based strategy game that’s simple to play and hard to master.

You basically control a small army of cute Worms that try to kill the other army by means of exploding sheep and other marvelous weapons.

It’s also multiplayer so a big reason for saying it’s great is not only cause it’s great but so I can have someone to play it with. £2.99

Toot toot.

Craig

Howdy

How you all doing this week? Super, smashing, great I hope.

This weeks nugget of golden wisdom is all around social networks and was discovered in NMA from a piece of research by Trendstream.

They’ve just completed a piece of work looking at how our sources of influence have been transformed in this digital age.

Where once we trusted only known sources of information like friends and family, we’re now almost as likely to trust a random stranger on a website or social network.

The scores, out of 5:

Family – 4.5
Friends – 4.4
Work colleagues – 3.6
Neighbours – 3.3
Good contact on social Network – 3.2

Although to be honest I’d rather trust a random stranger on a website than most people I know – I accept that maybe that’s just me. Politicians, rather unsurprisingly came last in the survey, scoring a surprisingly high 1.7.

The study also looked at peoples opinion of brands and how they are improved when given the chance to ask questions and be listened to.

The highest percentage here was simply having a contact us page on a social profile at 23.8% of respondents, whereas only 6% wanted to be a brands ‘friend’ on a social network.

Something to bear in mind when developing all the interactive and UGC type websites that we’re being asked about in current briefs. Lets not forget the things that really matter, give people a chance to speak and then listen and respond – genius – I’m sure this works in the real word too.

Quote of the week

Jonathon Ive, Apple Senior Vice President of Industrial Design (he did things like the iMac, iPod, iPhone etc if you didn’t know)-

‘We don’t do focus groups. They just ensure that you don’t offend anyone.’

Smashing.

Apps of the week:

1. Navigon – turns your iPhone 3G or 3GS into a full sat nav – £52.99 – expensive, but still way cheaper than a TomTom and you’ll always have it with you – works very well

2. Email ‘n Walk – uses the camera on your phone to enable you to see where you are going whilst you stare at your screen typing, great way of avoiding the chuggers too. £0.59

Toot toot

Craig

Howdy peeps.

Thought that everybody is already on Facebook? Surely it’s slowing down and people are looking for the next big thing? Apparently not.

Facebook has now taken 3rd place in the rankings of the UK’s most visited sites from Yahoo with 23.4m unique visitors in April (NMA, 18th June 2009).

The same article also points out that in that same time period Facebook also increased its users by 63%, so not only are loads of people visiting, loads of new people are still signing up too.

Jeepers.

It won’t be long before the only reason you’re not on Facebook is because you’re dead – and even then you’re probably still going to be on as you won’t be around to delete your profile.

So, what does all this mean for marketing – well, in my view, it’s just another channel to be used as and when the time is right.

You don’t have to be super clever and make a super duper app for a brand to be on Facebook, nor do you need to actually make a fan page and get people to be your friends.

You could, but you could also just use it to hit your target in a place where you know they are, with something interesting, and treat it for what it is, another channel.

Something else that caught my eye this week was the campaign for the new Transformers movie (NMA again), Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, out this Friday if you didn’t know – Megan Fox, hmmm.

Anyway, they’ve really gone to town with a campaign that includes, viral, mobile, red button TV, augmented reality ads (remember Yorkshire Tea, from last week) and Playstation Home advertising – not sure if anybody actually uses this other than once however, really rather pointless IMO, although I’m ‘probably’ a ‘bit’ old!

The website is really good and has a Robotize me feature – me as Optimus Prime attached, nice! It’s a nice campaign with really high production values and let’s face it everybody wants to be a robot. Roll out.

iPhone apps of the week

1. Not strictly an app, but it’s got to be the 3.0 software this week, if you haven’t got it yet get on iTunes and update, it came out last night – it adds everything that the iPhone has been crying out for since it’s launch and more, and best of all its free.

2. Tentfinder – genius idea. Allows you to log the location of your tent at this summers festivals using the GPS in your iPhone and then get directions back when your pissed later, it’s even got a built in torch – super genius.

Obviously you could also use it to find your car in a carpark if you’re a girl. £1.19

Toot, toot.

Craig

Howdy

Couple of little snippets for this week.

Marketing

Yahoo have launched a “things look brilliant from here” campaign – if you see a big purple splodge on the floor, you can take a pic and then MMS it to a code and your image will be added to the Brilliant Spots website – if you join in you can win a ‘brilliant thing’.

You can also email a pic if you’ve an iPhone but it doesn’t actually tell you that on the spots, doh! I saw one on the embankment this weekend – pic of the spot attached.

The campaign runs for the next 4 weeks and will also be using the front seats of 50 London buses.

The idea is to promote Yahoo and its services like flickr (the pics go into a flickr group) offline.

It’s a nice idea – but at the moment the website doesn’t seem to work properly, which is a shame.

I also can’t find any reference to winning something, which is odd. On the upside there are a couple of groups on flickr around the idea – one of which is actually just posting picks of the spots themselves and trying to find them all.

New Launch

This week saw the launch of Nokia’s Ovi Store.

It’s Nokia’s answer to the iPhone App store so if you’ve got a Nokia phone check it out. From a quick look getting set up seems a bit long winded but once you’re set up I’m sure its vaguely interesting if you’re using a Nokia.

If you google it you’ll see that it launched 2 days ago and the launch was a disaster – it didn’t work basically, but they seem to be getting a handle on it now.

iPhone App of the week

Airfoil Speakers Touch (free) – its an app that lets you set up your iPhone or iPod touch as a remote speaker – you can stream your music from your mac or windows PC – you do need an app on your Mac or PC that costs £19 but its way cheaper than an airport express or a separate stereo in another room if you’ve got an iPhone or touch and some speakers you can connect, or even if you want to listen with headphone away from your machine.

Plus you can use it for Spotify.

Last FM etc while express only supports iTunes. Smashing.

Toot toot

Craig

Mobile Advertising Workshop

Here are some top nuggets for mobile ads.

1. You can target consumers by handset – handsets tend to be tied quite closely to demographics and hence can be helpful
2. When developing a campaign ensure that its designed to work across all handsets – they all have different screens, operating systems etc – basically use a specialist and check that they do this
3. Don’t just take an existing website or ATL campaign and slap it on a mobile – use the media effectively, make the mobile experience worth doing
4. Don’t assume mobile campaigns are just for youth – biggest users of mobile internet are 25-44

This Weeks Top iPhone apps

1. National Rail – superb app that allows you to check train times, delays and even see where on the journey your train is at that moment – £4.99
2. Fring – VOIP and IM client covering all the major options – Skype, MSN, AIM, Gtalk, Twitter etc – FREE
3. twitterfon – twitter app with all the major options covered – FREE (ad supported) or £2.99 for Pro
4. Tetris® English – excellent version of the classic block based game from EA – £2.99
5. Wired Product Reviews – Reviews of gadgets from the magazine of the same name – FREE
6. ITN – Excellent news feed – better than the BBC one – FREE
7. Evernote – Excellent note taking tool that syncs your notes where ever you are, Mac, PC, Web – makes photos of words searchable, genius – FREE
8. Cropulator -image cropping and horizon straightening tool – £0.59
9. Friendsync – syncs your Facebook contact detail and pictures with you iPhone contacts list – £1.19
10. GoogleMobile App – gives you access to all you google applications from one place – also lets you run a google search by speaking into the iPhone – FREE

Top Web Apps

1. Google Docs – genius stuff, if you ever work on a doc at home and at work, google docs is the way to do it – allows you to work on the same doc whilst leaving your laptop at the office. Produces word, xls and ppt compatible docs – might just save your life if your presentation is corrupt on your memory stick – you can download it from any machine with web access, even a blackberry but not yet an iPhone!
2. Toodledo – excellent To Do list organiser that’s web based and hence can be accessed from anywhere – good integration with workflows like GTD. Also available as an iPhone app so your to do’s are never far away.
3. www.visualthesaurus.com – ever stuck for a word? Go here, it cost $19 per year to access, after a 14 day trial. However it gives a great visual representation of related words – worth a look and I’m sure Rod wouldn’t mind setting up a Wax account if it proves useful.

That’s it for this week.

Toot Toot

Craig