Influential Marketing Blog

Why Singapore Needs A World Class Airport

Singapore Changi International is one of the best airports in the world. Despite being a tiny country, Singapore is home to one of the largest international hubs for air travel in southeast Asia, and home to one of the best airlines in the world - Singapore Airlines. Why would such a tiny country need such a huge government supported global airline and such a world class airport? For any place, the airport is the gateway to success. Having a well developed airport allows you to attract more flights and more flights means more tourists and more business travelers. More importantly, businesses looking to set up international outposts are very concerned about the Airport. Not having a good one could mean losing millions or billions in investment or tourism income.

Singapore does even more to make their airport a destination through innovative cross promotions, the long standing "Singapore Stopover" - and even the "World's First Airport Butterfly Garden." All add to the appeal of Singapore as a destination for work and leisure.  So why do so few cities focus on building a world class airport? Obviously, it's expensive - but usually it's because the link between the airport and prosperity is not always immediately obvious. There are other things like roads, climate, culture, education, accommodation and attractions that matter - I'm not saying they don't, but the airport is pivotal. Many things in business are the same way -- including social media. The real power of customer conversations, authenticity and everything that social media can bring aren't always obvious. Sometimes it's just easier or more critical in the short term to fix the potholes (figuratively speaking). 

Eventually, every great company realizes that having a quality product or experience is only half the battle. The other half is having a good gateway (or airport) to get your customers there.

Don't Be A Flack ... Why Bloggers Need Personal Pitch Guidelines

As a blogger for now nearly five years, I get my fair share of pitches from PR people and companies. So when I was updating my website and adding a top navigation bar and new pages with information about speaking, media and other things ... I knew I would want to address the topic of getting pitched and how I'd like that to happen. Quite frankly, as someone who works in a PR environment, I wish more bloggers did this. So I created my "Blog-At-A-Glance" page as an easy introduction to my site for first time visitors and included the following information about my philosophy on getting pitched:

I don't believe I'm too good or popular for your pitch, and I never "out" PR people for sending me something, but there are a few things I have never written about and are a total waste of time for you to send me. Those include "news" about hiring someone and announcements about something that has nothing to do with marketing or no connection to something I would reasonably write about. If you send me pitches like that, I may not share your name publicly, but I will privately think you are lazy and/or an idiot. And your reputation should matter to you more than that - especially in an industry like ours where the people you "pitch" today could be your colleagues tomorrow.

If you're new to pitching blogs, you might want to check out the suggestions that our team at Ogilvy follows in our Blogger Outreach Code Of Ethics. Stick to those and you should be fine, even when approaching bloggers that are way "snarkier" than I am.

Accidental Measurement And Why We Love Useless Metrics

I'm not a measurement geek by any stretch of the imagination. As much as I love a good statistic, I'd put myself in the same category as most marketers ... we realize that measurement is important, but we wish it were easier to grasp and involved less guesswork and questionable assumptions. There are many smart people talking about measurement, and we have several on our team working on a much more sophisticated model for things that have traditionally been difficult to measure such as word of mouth impact and social media engagement.

The real challenge is that measurement online has become an exercise in silliness for many marketing teams. They report on things that don't matter about behaviours that tell you little to nothing about what is actually happening online. Why? There are three core reasons your metrics might suck: because you're just measuring what you measured last year, you're focusing on just finding "one big number" to report or because you just don't know how to measure better.

Luckily, the solution for any of these reasons is increasing your knowledge about what you should measure, and what you should avoid. To help get you started, here is a list of five useless metrics that many marketers use:

• Accidental Impressions - this may be the most favorite measure that marketers like - counting impressions for ads or sites no matter how long someone stays or if they click it or not. Counting impressions without any context is like the amazing color changing card trick - you're watching the wrong thing without realizing it.
• Accidental Time Spent - time that a user spends on your site looking for what they want to click on, but unable to find it. This is not a sign of engagement (as commonly assumed) but rather a sign that your design or layout is not usable enough.
• Accidental Email Open Rate - if you use Outlook, you know that many emails are automatically opened as soon as your cursor hits them. Most email marketers count this as an "open" even though you may have opened the email by accident. If a large number of people getting your email are on Outlook, for example, that high open rate may not actually be an indication that they found the content of your message appealing.
• Accidental Clicks - who hasn't experienced that annoying banner that pops up at the least convenient time? Sometimes finding the button to close it is so difficult that you end up clicking on the ad accidentally. If you are running a campaign where you are counting these desperate clicks to make you disappear as clicks and conversions, you're getting a skewed view of effectiveness.
• Accidental "Add to Cart" - a favorite tactic of many online sites is to have every uncertain click on a product automatically add it to a cart. Other sites make you add a product to your cart before seeing the price. If you are tracking your shopping carts and conversion, make sure you're not skewing the numbers with people adding a product they were never thinking about buying.

So what should you be measuring? Unfortunately, there is no single answer as it depends on your goals, but to get smarter about metrics online, one site you should definitely check out is the blog Occam's Razor from Avinash Kaushik. He also has an equally brilliant book called Web Analytics: An Hour A Day that I highly recommend you pick up.

I've been working my way through it since meeting him at a presentation and hearing him speak. His acronym H.I.T.S (How Idiots Track Success) remains one of the more inspired acronyms and one-liners I've heard in a presentation ...

Why Content Spam Works And 3 Ways To Fight It

I am a marketer and I have a few confessions to make. I click on all sorts of things I shouldn't online. I request catalogs I might only read once. I subscribe to emails just to see who's buying ads in them. And I sign up to beta test sites that I may only ever log into once. For me, it's all part of the research that I do to keep up to date on the state of online marketing and what companies and brands are doing. I do it to make me smarter and better at my job.

As a result, I have many ways that I actively invite spam (but I still do want to get some of this content and can't help signing up for it).  For any of us, this is "content spam" - content that you actually want to interact with, but will be paying for by receiving lots of spam afterwards. For this type of spam, we can't just rely on spam filters or having a separate email address to sign up for all these services, or using a PO Box or work address for some of the marketing lists you sign up for. Here are a few of the advanced ways to fight content spam, while still getting the content that you want:

1. Disposible Email - Often the main reason sites ask you to provide your email address is so that they can send you some kind of confirmation email that you need in order to enter a password. Services like Mintemail allow you to create a disposible email address that expires after 8 hours ... just long enough to pick up that confirmation email and use it.
2. Anonymous Phone Numbers - Your phone number is likely the one piece of information you are most sensitive about giving out. After all, emails are easy to delete, but incessant phone calls can be tough to ignore. Now with services like iNumbr or TossableDigits, you can create fake phone numbers that will forward to your real number for a set amount of time.
3. Virtual Credit Card Numbers - For some time now, credit card companies such as MBNA, Citibank and others have been offering the ability to generate custom virtual credit card numbers for single transactions. These are totally different from your real credit card number and are only good for a single transaction. As a result, they are great for making sure that you are not continually charged monthly subscription fees for a one time purchase.

Any other methods that have worked for you? Add them in a comment here.

7 Lessons Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Twitter's Success

By any measure, the growth and popularity of Twitter has been phenomenal. To say that Twitter has hit mainstream isn't really the right metric to use. It's more powerful to note that for a large group of Twitter enthusiasts, to spend even a day without using it would be as bad (or perhaps even worse) than not having email. It has become just that necessary. How did the site get to this point? And what are the lessons that any entrepreneur might be able to learn from how it got there? Here are a few thoughts on the real secrets behind Twitter's success:

1. Focus on real time. For the socially connected online, there is little use for yet another place to talk to your friends. If anything, we all have too many of those to start with. But a site dedicated to RIGHT NOW stands out. It's useful in a way that none of the other sites we use are.
2. Skip the extra step. Approving every friend request can be a lot of work - even if you're not the most popular of people. It does make sense on most social networks, but when it comes to posting updates on Twitter, if you do it publicly, anyone can follow you without approval. The result is that any user's audience on Twitter can grow exponentially without barriers.
   
3. Force your customers to do less. If you have ever heard the saying that "less is more" - Twitter is the ultimate proof of that. The forced 140 character messages have made us all refocus on brevity, and as a result of this volume decrease, those of us that are constantly overcommunicated look to the site as the one place where we can still feel that we are on top of the flood of communication that rules our lives.
4. Build enough evangelists to compensate when things go wrong. One of the most well known facts about Twitter is that the service has been notoriously unreliable and crashed frequently. Though it is much improved from those days, the site still goes down or loses functionality relatively regularly. Yet it has managed to build up enough power users and evangelists, that people forgive their down times and keep coming back.
5. Integrate with the most popular competition. The single most useful feature I personally uncovered from Twitter was the ability to integrate it into my Facebook page so that may Twitter updates also become my status on Facebook. This demonstrates a fact that many entrepreneurs already know - by integrating with your competition where your "customers" currently are, you make it easier for them to migrate over to your site.
6. Launch where your influencers are. A big reason for the early success of Twitter was their launch at the SXSW Interactive festival two years ago. It was a place where all the influencers that matters for Twitter were already going to be and putting the site in front of them there allowed them to become word of mouth ambassadors for the site following the event.
7. Offer a public ranking or authority. The final element that has helped Twitter to succeed is that it has a built in authority ranking with the number of followers you have. This is located right beneath your username on the site and it's high visibility means that it is easily the ultimate metric for anyone using the site. And you can't help but want that number to go higher. 

If you enjoyed this post, check out my other posts about microblogging and follow me on Twitter at @rohitbhargava.

Customer Satisfaction Doesn't Matter

I'm a satisfied cable television customer. My TV signal generally works, I have it bundled with my home internet access and in four years of service I've only had one issue, and it was fixed relatively quickly. The price I pay is average, and though I'm not getting a great deal, I'm also not getting overcharged. When I call my cable provider for any reason, I can usually get through and have my questions answered. By every metric you could choose to assign to my experience, I'm a satisfied customer.

Now let me tell you something that should scare you, no matter what business you're in. If something even slightly better came along as another option for me, I would switch without hesitation. Luckily for my cable provider, they have a near monopoly as my other other option would be satellite. But this situation is not uncommon. The fact is, in today's market customer satisfaction doesn't matter as much as customer loyalty. So how do you generate this loyalty? A small part of that may be your customer service. A greater part is whether your product or service actually delivers. The rest depends on the personality of your brand and whether it gives people a sense of belonging and participation that makes them unlikely to switch no matter what else comes along.

That last part is what word of mouth marketing focuses on. It's what social media can be great at igniting. Most importantly, it's the one thing that only the best companies ever figure out.

SEO: A Business Model Worth Copying

Amidst the gloom surrounding media and even online advertising, there is one category that has steadily been growing year after year and shows few signs of slowing down. Search marketing groups that offer search engine optimization (SEO) are still the darling of the interactive world (along with social media groups, of course) and in many cases this is justified. After all, search marketing and SEO specifically is highly measurable, impacts the bottom line and for many businesses it is a necessity. What makes their business model so strong - and more importantly, what could any business learn from it? Here are a few thoughts:

1. Everyone knows it matters. If you are on the Internet, you realize the power of Google. If you're not listed, you may as well be invisible.  SEO is the cure for that invisibility.
   
2. It has an easy sales pitch. Most SEO firms could have a two word pitch for their services: "rank higher." Getting there may be more complex, but at least describing it is relatively straightforward.
3. Not everyone can do it. For some it may seem easy, but good SEO takes time and attention. Keeping up to date on changes and continual monitoring as well as advanced techniques to impact Google's algorithm make this a specialty skill most people need help with.
4. Little infrastructure or hard costs. Technically, you don't even need an office space - just a computer, an Internet connection and enough knowledge to succeed.
5. Your clients spend money to avoid spending more money. The alternative to good SEO is paying for search ads. Based on Google's sliding scale auction model, this can add up pretty fast. If you rank highly for the right searches, you can avoid paying the hefty advertising fees to Google.
6. You need to keep it up, you can't cancel. Anyone who has purchased SEO services know that it's a bit like a drug - once you're on it and it's working, you can't go off it. If you do, you'll lose much of the benefit you received while using it.
7. Results are highly visible. The last and perhaps most important reason for SEO's success is that anyone can very quickly see the results. You either rank highly, or you don't.

I'm a believe in the power of SEO services and think they are a necessity for most businesses. Aside from the benefits of doing SEO, it turns out you may be able to learn something from their business model as well.

How To Create A Content Marketing Strategy

If you haven't heard the term "content marketing" - you soon will. The idea of content marketing is becoming more popular among marketing teams as a result of the growing influence of social media, but it has been around much longer than that. White papers, contributed articles, even infomercials are all forms of content marketing. Essentially, when you create content around a particular subject and then use it to deliver a message that may drive someone toward purchasing or recommending your product or service, you're doing it. The question is, are you doing it in a strategic way?

Today at 3pm there is a free teleseminar I'll be participating in along with Brian Clark from CopyBlogger and Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett (founders of Junta42 and authors of Get Content. Get Customers.) all about using content to impact your bottom line. To give you a taste of what we'll talk about, here is my quick checklist of the questions you should ask yourself as you start to build your own content marketing strategy:

1. What is the problem you will try to solve? Great content marketing focuses on answering a key challenge or question that relates to your business.
2. How can you make it about more than you? This is not a sales pitch. It needs to be useful and offer more context beyond just how great your product/service is.
3. Who's going to care to read and share it? It needs to be interesting, but the sharing is particularly important, as great content marketing should be something people can't help sharing.
4. What's the best platform and format to use? Think about video versus blogging versus downloadable PDFs and what will be easiest for your audience.
5. How will you promote it? Plan to spend quite a bit of time thinking about how people will find your content, as it is completely useless if no one can locate it.
6. How will you know if it's working? Your metric for success may be directly tied to sales, or awareness, or consideration. Whatever it is, know before you start how you'll tell if it was successful.

Want to know more? Tune into the teleseminar today at 3pm EST here: http://www.authorteleseminars.com/getcontent2.html

And just in case you can't make it, there will be a full archive available from our host Elizabeth Marshall at http://www.authorteleseminars.com.

A Marketing Lesson From Landlocked Mangoes

In India, there are over 1000 varieties of mangoes. The fruit is used for everything from drinks to cooking - and it is pickled, stewed, juiced and even used for medicinal purposes. What you may not know about Indian mangoes is that until 2007 there had been an 18 year ban on importing them into the United States due to the pesticides used in India. Now that the ban has been lifted, there are approximately 20 types of "commercially viable" mango varieties that are exported from India to the US and demand for them is high.

What is most interesting about mangoes, however, is that there are hundreds more varieties of mangoes that you will never be able to taste outside of India. Most of these mangoes are too far from any shore of of the subcontinent to be transported before they ripen and start to rot. In other words, these mangoes are landlocked. Yet they offer one of the most authentic food experiences you can have in the world. The mystery and appeal of traveling to sample those mangoes is a draw in itself (admit it, even reading this far you are wondering how they might taste) - but few Indian tourism groups promote the experience or even offer it to travelers. In India, landlocked mangoes represent a missed opportunity. 

Now think about your own business and what is "landlocked" in your experience.  This might be the unintended uses for your product that people are embracing but you don't promote.  Or the "behind the scenes" tour of your offices or production facility.  Or the varieties of your product or service you decide not to release, but which still may have an audience. These are the secrets you are intentionally keeping because they are not convenient to market or go overlooked. They are a missed opportunity, but they don't have to be. It is the undiscovered parts of an experience that sometimes offer the best marketing opportunities ... if you can just focus on spotting them.

Why Government Needs Social Media NOW

Recently there has been some talk on a few other DC-based social media consultant blogs about the rise of "Government 2.0" and whether the so-called experts in the space really deserve that title. Yet for all this attention on expertise in social media (justified or not), those of us who at least work and provide advice in the space have not done as much as we need to offer the ammunition to the people who are really in a position to move government forward into using these tools. These are the web masters, communications managers, PR directors and other such people who are the voices waiting to be unleashed within government offices everywhere.

For them, there needs to be a simple reason to care about social media - and actionable advice to sell it into their organizations so they start focusing on it sooner rather than later. Thankfully, the new administration coming in offers that simple reason in three short crucial words: Get Obama's Attention. Since government loves acronyms, let's call this idea GOA.

GOA means building your public support. It means getting more funding and more attention from the new administration. GOA can allow you to have a greater impact on people in the US and have an easier time finding and connecting with those who believe in your mission and can help you. It can even make recruiting to get the best and brightest working with you easier. GOA, in short, could be any government agency's initial reason for starting to use social media.

Though this may be a vast oversimplification, consider that if used strategically social media for government can do all of the following:

1. Share real voices and stories to help bring the mission of a particular agency to life.
2. Demonstrate widespread public support for an issue or department's mission.
3. Be findable by staffers who are the first point of research for any policy or legislation.
4. Activate the most passionate voices internally and externally to promote an agency's mission.
5. Own Google search results to manage negative comments or content on a particular issue or policy.

No matter how traditional or risk-averse the leader of a particular government agency happens to be ... there is none that I could imagine who would not want to get more of Obama's attention (and by extension the attention of his administration). Those advocates of social media within government may finally have the reason they have been seeking to sell the idea of social media internally.

Update: Several responders on Twitter and people leaving comments shared the point that a social media strategy shouldn’t just be about Obama. I used him as a symbol in my original post, but the idea of GOA could more broadly be described as getting the attention of those influencers who matter when it comes to funding and support. Obviously that is more than just Obama - but the point is that sometimes the most powerful argument to support using social media is the visibility for an issue or mission that it can offer.

Note: This post was originally published on the Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence blog.