The Chameleon Net blog

The Un-Measurable Success of a Profitable Poker Night

rossm@chameleonnet.co.uk (Ross Miles) — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 13:00:44 GMT

The general consensus is that no matter how good your idea, strategy or marketing campaign, without KPIs or specific goals it is hard to qualify the success of what you have done. Also, when it comes to social media activity RoI is notoriously hard to measure.

So how much is a positive mention on Twitter really worth to your brand or product? If you cannot measure something and assign it a monetary value, does that then make the actions that caused the comments harder to justify? Why am I even asking these questions!? Well I recently attended a networking event for people in the digital and eCommerce industries in the guise of a poker evening, paid for by my employers under the agreement that I was to return and blog about my experiences, so let me continue…

The event was definitely well received. It ran smoothly and was carefully organised with the 60 players drawing their table numbers before play started, with professional dealers on each table. The venue was pleasant, centrally located and the staff were always accommodating. We got a free drink, some dinner and the cash prizes were certainly well received by the top 6 finishers. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and am already looking forward to its next incarnation later in the year. I should probably add a qualifier that I finished in the money and went home with a tidy profit. However, regardless of my financial gains I enjoyed the experience and would happily attend again. But was the event a success?

Strictly speaking we were at an industry networking event. Before we were seated and the first cards were dealt, people seemed to keep themselves to themselves, with the conversation limited to colleagues advising less experienced colleagues on the rules of Texas Hold ‘em. As soon as our chips were on the felt steely glares were exchanged and any chatter between players became poker related.

After one hour we broke for the buffet dinner where people joked about the lack of networking taking place around the tables and the serious nature of play! However, this did prove to be an ice-breaker to allow us to at least exchange business cards.

After around another 30 minutes of play ‘Barry the Broker’ jokingly introduced himself and laughed at how we hadn’t even told each other our names after an hour and a half of play! As the hands went on and players dwindled the tension on the tables led to more banter, but again, it wasn’t as if we were discussing possible business partnerships as the re-raises went in.

By the time we reached the final table of 10 rapport had been built through shared experiences and bad beats. Even some of the players who had been eliminated were hanging around, gathering around the table watching as we duelled out the final hands as the blinds and antes escalated at an alarming rate. It was around this point that I began to realise that by virtue of staying alive by the skin of my teeth a few times and making some outrageous bluffs (which I then showed) I had become a recognised figure at the table which put me in the enviable position of being ‘rememberable’, which is surely the purpose of such an event for me!

The morning after I made an effort to track down anyone tweeting about the event, send a quick e-mail to those I exchanged business cards with and added one contact on Linkedin. People tweeting about the event were positive and even those that mentioned their losses did so punctuated with emoticons. Did I uncover any immediate opportunities for Chameleon Net on the night? No. Did I leave enough of an impression for people to remember me? I hope so… I just have to hope they also remember I work for a Digital Solutions Agency!

So why the intro about measuring success and RoI? Well I was trying understand if the poker night was a success in terms of it being a networking event. Strictly speaking on traditional criteria it would be hard to say yes, but in those difficult to define, social-esque ways, it was. My positive feelings towards the event organisers have increased. No-one I encountered had a negative word to say about of the event. I did hand my business card out to several people, some of who eventually saw me make some ballsy bluffs on the final table (all-in three times in a row with 2 6, 2 3 and 2 7 on flagrant steals!) which meant I was someone they now remembered rather than just a random card in their pocket the next day.

In the same way that it can be hard to quantify my success with interaction via social media, it is difficult for me to quantify my success in selling Chameleon Net during that evening, but what I did do was establish personal connections with people on a real one-to-one basis, which hopefully makes me an approachable person when their company needs a digital solution.

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Top Tips For Understanding Mobile Users

richardk@chameleonnet.co.uk (Rich Kirk) — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 09:24:18 GMT

This topic was covered at yesterday's "Money Talks" seminar. I said I would post some info on how you can segment your mobile users within Google Analytics; well here it is! What appears below is cut from an article I wrote for Marketing Pilgrim in the States. You can check out the full article here.

Understanding Mobile Users: Entry Level

Even if you feel the implementation of a mobile strategy is a long way off for your company, and you have no technical skills whatsoever, there is no excuse for not starting to try and get a handle on who your mobile users are, and how they interact with your site. This is a customer segment that will grow in the future.

Demographics You can easily build up a picture of mobile web users through the plethora of surveys currently being released. Here are a few recent stats:

74% of iPhone users are over the age of 25, (31% are 35-49) and more than 70% of iPhone users are male. [see here]
64% of key decision makers in marketing departments are using mobiles to view emails [see here]
Leading mobile browsing systems worldwide (May 09) = iPhone/iPod Touch 37.2%, Opera 24.6%, Nokia 17.9%. [see here]
In 2008 61% of all smartphone owners had a household income of greater than $70000, compared to just 49% of normal mobile owners. [see here]
40% of “smartphoners” in ‘08 would access the internet at least once a week on their device, (78% for iPhone owners specifically). [see here]

Behaviour as well as looking at the demographics of people browsing the mobile web, it’s also vital to understand their goals are likely to be different to those of folks browsing on a computer. Conversion points for mobile users are often basic things such as finding a shop location, contact information, or viewing product details. Generally speaking goals are more immediate and information based. More traditional goals such as purchasing or accessing documents will only be undertaken as a last resort where a computer is unavailable.

Mobile users break down into three rough categories:

“Time to burn”: browsing between events / meetings etc: your goal is to offer bite sized chunks of interesting content in order to attract repeat visits later via traditional browsing methods.
“Monitors”: Users who browse your site for specific data that changes over time: stocks and shares, sports scores etc. Identify the information on your site which gets repeat visits and make it as easily accessible as possible.
“Need it Now”: Live information e.g. running information, store locations, opening hours etc should all be easily accessible from your mobile homepage for those people who are relying on your brand rather than just browsing.

Understanding the key differences between your mobile and traditional users should directly inform the architecture of the mobile version of your site. For instance: An airline may focus on selling tickets online, but its mobile site should focus more on check in information, live flight times, and airport locations for people who are about to fly. Similarly, a financial services company might view their website as a place for prospective customers to research their products, but their mobile site could add value by offering simple services to existing customers e.g. balance checks.

With a bit more budget you can start to build up data specific to your organisation. Marketers should be equipped with smartphones, as using a mobile browser is the best way to understand and discover the difficulties and opportunities surrounding your brand and the mobile web.

Understanding Mobile Users: Intermediate / Advanced Level

Google Analytics provides a segment for iPhone users, but a broader mobile segment for analysing this traffic would be preferential. The most obvious way to construct this segment is by grouping together the different types of mobile browsers currently on offer, but this list is ever-changing and many of these browsers are poor at executing JavaScript: mobile data will be missed altogether and the segment will be less accurate. [ more info here]

A better option is to construct a GA segment based around screen resolution, as there is a greater accuracy of data collection:

Open a new custom segment within your GA dashboard
Select “screen resolution” as the segment’s dimension. You can find this by drilling down on “Systems”.
Select the match type “Matches Regular Expression”
Paste the following regex into the next field: (^[1-2]?[0-9]?[0-9]|^3[0-1][0-9]|^320)x([1-3]?[0-9]?[0-9]$|4[0-7][0-9] $|480$ )

For the more advanced technicians amongst you the installation of mobile-specific tracking software is a further option, however this can be costly and difficult to integrate with GA. Bango Analytics, Mobilytics and Amethon are key players in this sector.

UPDATE APRIL 2010: GA now offers mobile website tracking for FREE.

Once mobile users behaviour on your site is isolated marketers are able to analyse top content, entry and exit points, site search, etc. It is crucial to try and understand mobile user’s goals this data. These goals will define the architecture of your mobile site.

I hope that's useful: Try applying this segment to your website and looking at monthly visitor numbers over the past 18 months: usually a pretty telling statistic.

If you're struggling to get buy-in for a mobile site, why not sit your boss down, give them an iphone and get them to complete a key user action on your site?! - better still set them a time limit of the average time it takes a desk-bound user to complete that goal.

Google Grants Blog 2: Your first campaigns

richardk@chameleonnet.co.uk (Rich Kirk) — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 09:08:23 GMT

You’ll actually build your first campaigns before you’re account has been signed off by Google: this is because submission of well-targeted campaigns that meet Google Grant’s criteria is a requirement for receiving The Grant.

So what key areas should I cover with my first few campaigns?

I’d advise that to start with, you should just cover a few topics, so that you can get your final application off to Google with the minimum of fuss. You need to impress the people upstairs with the first part of any marketing camapign so not spreading yourself too thinly is vital.

You could start with a campaign focussed around your brand and the main topics that your organisation is focussed upon. I would have an Ad Group and associated keywords for each of these topic, as it allows you to create specific ad variants based around that theme. Most donations that you receive from PPC traffic will be triggered by people searching these terms so it’s important to get them live and start optimising as soon as possible.

A couple of tips:

If part of your brand name is common to other popular culture terms, ensure you use negative match keywords to stop your ad being shown unnecessarily. E.g. if your charity was called “Lost Children” and your brand campaign targeted keywords broadly similar to this you would negative match terms like “lost property”, “lost tv” etc to ensure you weren’t paying for irrelevant clicks.
Include as many misspellings and acronym keywords for your charity as possible to your “brand terms” ad group: this will ensure you reach as many of the people searching for you as possible. Take a look at your site’s entrance keywords in Google Analytics for inspiration. (remember to filter out non brand terms to save time)

It’s also worthwhile to create another AdWords campaign for promoting specific fundraising drives or “take action” campaigns. Your ads here should try to contain a call to action; remember you can fully customise the display URL in your ad so this is a bit of extra space to incorporate messaging if you’re struggling with the 95 character limit on the ad.

So there we have it: try to focus your first campaigns on your brand, your primary issues and your current campaigns and you should have a solid platform to work off.

Next time I’ll be talking about how to track your AdWords / Google Grant activity against tangible goals such as donation, newsletter signup, form downloads etc. Add our RSS feed to your reader so you don’t miss out.

Rich will be speaking at our seminar “Money Talks” for charities on April 22nd. You should sign up to come along!

Google Grants 101: "What is The Google Grant?"

richardk@chameleonnet.co.uk (Rich Kirk) — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 12:32:09 GMT

The Google Grant is a free search advertising programme that affords charities and non-profits nearly $10000/month in Google Adwords budget. At Chameleon Net we provide Google Grant help and assistance to charities like The RNID, The Anthony Nolan Trust and Friends of the Earth. In this series I hope to talk about how your charity can apply for, and get value from the Google Grant. In our experience The Grant is a fantastic channel for revenue generation whether you’re a small charity or a major UK non-profit.

Sponsored search results are a form of advertising delivered via Google AdWords. They look like this:

You find these ads at the right hand side of top of a search engine results page (SERP). Your ad’s position is determined by the relevancy of your ad to the keyword searched for, and your bid for that particular keyword (aka search term or query). If your ad is clicked, you will be charged by Google. However, a Google Grantee receives $10000 of clicks a month for free.

Just think of all those terms you’d love your charity to rank number 1 for… a Google Grant would allow you almost unlimited budget to chase that coveted top spot.

So how does your charity go about getting one? A Google Grant application can take a long time - sometimes nearly 6 months! (Charities who have utilised our services have found we speed up this process dramatically). A Google Grant application falls into 2 stages:

Proving your eligibility to Google
Submitting a well structured and targeted set of AdWords campaigns

Passing stage 1 is fairly simple, and most charities should be able to get through this bit. The key thing is to prove you are a charity and that you actively campaign and have planned resource to manage AdWords on a regular basis.

To pass stage 2 is more difficult, and often this is where we see charities struggle, so you’ll probably need someone with experience to help you. You will need to submit an application that conforms with the extensive Google Grants checklist. Examples of the sorts of thing Google is looking for include an account that is well structured around keyword themes and relevant landing pages, applied geographical and language targeting, and keyword bids that utilises multiple match types to ensure ads are only delivered where they are appropriate.

To someone with a good amount of AdWords experience, creating and submitting an account that meets The Grant guidelines is not a difficult task, but we’ve seen many charities have their attempts rejected by Google, and as the Google Grants team is made up of volunteers it can take a long time for the resubmitted account to be evaluated. Ultimately, it is in a charity’s best interest to get the account right first time, so make sure you have access to knowledgeable AdWords resource before applying.

Next time...

...I’ll be looking at setting up your account in more detail and some of the areas you should target first with your Google Grant for maximum RoI.

Rich will be talking in detail about maximising RoI from search marketing at our FREE seminar “MoneyTalks” on April 22nd. You should sign up for a place here!

Are publishers getting the most out of social media?

danm@chameleonnet.com (Dan Martin) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:53:25 GMT

In case you missed it, here’s my article that appeared in the 5th February issue of the Bookseller, entitled ‘The Long Game’:

There is an interesting discussion taking place at the moment on how useful social media is as a marketing tool for those in the book trade.

While many in the sector feel that the potential of sites such as Twitter and Facebook to fuel sales of books is limited, others see social networking playing a huge role in publishers’ and booksellers’ marketing strategies.

Many readers agree with this latter view, with many having acted – and spent money – as a result of recommendations made across the social networks.

One crucial factor that is extremely important in this equation is that social media is a communications mechanism in which you can have a constructive dialogue with people. Sales and marketing impact can be a consequence of an effective social media engagement strategy. That is to say, sales and marketing results are a secondary, but still very much ‘real-world’, effect of social engagement.

Fortunately what most people on both sides of the debate recognise is that social media as a marketing channel is still in its infancy. Couple this with the fact that technologies, particularly those that integrate different channels, support digital products, and are based on mobile devices, are still young, and what you have is a vibrant and constantly evolving environment.

The challenge of influence
As many brand owners now recognise, social media has deprived them of the ability to reliably control the conversation. No longer can they dictate the agenda as they could with TV, radio, press ads and the first generation of websites. One of the first rules of embracing social media is to acknowledge, and embrace, this loss of control.

At first glance, the social media landscape appears as a bewildering array of separate channels offering access to distinct audiences. Your average Twitter user, we are told, is older and more likely to be male than his Facebook counterpart, though the age gap is closing. Bebo and Piczo by comparison are significantly more popular than Facebook amongst the under-18s. Within these communities a range of forums, groups, fan pages and other facilities is to be found, allowing like-minded individuals to connect and share their views on a range of interests.

Participating in – and influencing - these threads, as well as contributing to conversations taking place on one’s own website, is a challenge for even the most assiduous of online marketers in the publishing sector. Even more disturbing is the potential risk that something might go wrong in the communication, making the community turns on its host.

The publisher, with its access to authors, critics, readers and the wider public, is in an ideal position to build and place itself at the hub of this resource. One way to mobilise this advantage is to create a distinct online destination that enables conversations about authors and publications taking place across the internet, and externally-created user generated content, to be brought into a single site.

We are increasingly seeing organisations appoint Community Managers, staff occupying a role that encapsulates a participation-rich model of interaction where book clubs, blogging and forum discussion can all be steered by the Publisher. This role fits perfectly with such ‘destination sites’.

And far from competing with the established channels such as Facebook and Twitter, your sites can connect and draw content in from them. This enables readers to stay a part of, and post content at, the sites they are most comfortable with and still be part of the conversation on your site. It is also possible, meanwhile, to create a social media environment within an existing website that connects to social network sites in a way that’s appealing and seamless to readers, for instance by allowing them to log into your site with their Facebook credentials.

The idea of a social media focal point, either within your main site or as a separate destination site, creates opportunities for publishers and booksellers of all sizes to get closer to their target audiences, develop brand identity and grow their online presence. For publishers, it also re-invigorates their original role – that of a creative selector, an authoritative commentator, a lens for talent – something that is hard to find amongst the sheer quantity of content that exists online.

And it doesn’t need to be prohibitively expensive. Many publishers have already invested in interactive functionality within their websites – and many more are gearing up to do so in the knowledge that the initial outlay will generate valuable dividends, and be offset by repeated PR campaigns in support of an extensive backlist and constantly flowing number of new publications.

Linkage
None of which means, of course, that publishers should abandon their existing activities on social media sites. Quite the contrary: the interactive element to their own sites will benefit from the linkage between their presence on Facebook, Twitter, LastFM, Bebo, You Tube.

All of which means that, a concerted social media strategy, supported by your own tailored web presence, offers an excellent way to bring authors and readers closer together - with the publisher and/or bookseller at the heart of the dialogue.

And a final cautionary word - it is, however, a mistake to expect an immediate and direct increase in sales as a result of engagement. Consider engagement the initial goal and decide how much you value it. Using interactive channels to show a human face, join in conversations, get to know communities and add value to users’ experiences takes time. The rewards however, such as trust, customer loyalty, consolidated brand positioning and the resulting sales uplift are similarly long term.

data.gov.HOORAY

richardk@chameleonnet.co.uk (Rich Kirk) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:51:37 GMT

Today marks a watershed moment in UK government digital policy. With the launch of data.gov.uk, the government has instantly become more accountable, more transparent and more democratic. Finally the huge amount of data generated by the public sector has being harnessed in such a way that it becomes of real use to citizens like you and me, through the medium of web-based apps.

Data.gov.uk will host a growing number of datasets covering all aspects of public sector performance. These can be used to:

Build web applications that make useful information accessible and relevant to anyone.
Examine the performance of public sector services both nationally and regionally.
Create visualisations that accurately illustrate how social issues affect different areas and groups across the UK.

Data Visualisation has been a tactic I’ve been advocating to clients throughout 2009. In a world where we are all bombarded with information on a constant basis, visualising large amounts of data in one diagram can often help you cut through the noise around your chosen subject and instantly get your audience to understand your point.

Here’s an example: how confused are you about the differences between the parties in the upcoming election? Most people can grasp that the biggest issue facing the economy is our national deficit and how to cut it, but if you were to listen to Brown, Cameron and Clegg waffle on about “real terms increases” and “public spending efficiency savings” it would take you a fair while to work out what their real policies were. Instead, why not look at the visualisation below culled from party policy documents? It certainly helped me get a clearer idea of who I’d vote for.

The other great reason for making this data public is the applications it can power. The government has realised it will make more progress by crowdsourcing the development of these rather than by paying for them to be built. Some great examples such as ‘PlanningAlerts’ already appear on data.gov.uk, and some other ideas of ways to use government data can be found here.

Credit to MPs like Richard Allan and Tom Watson who pushed for this sort of approach to be adopted by the civil service and have worked to make it a reality. With this agenda receiving nothing but rave reviews from the tech media and now also mainstream outlets, it’s not hard to envisage a world 5 years from now in which open data (not just from government but from private companies as well) shapes news stories, informs our everyday decisions and allows real political dividing lines to be drawn for all to see on the issues of the day.

Releasing datasets, doing data visualisation and building apps are all great ways of driving online PR and building inbound links to your site: this has obvious knock-on benefits for SEO etc. Get in touch if you want to know more.

BBC blog on the same topic here

Top Tips For Charity Digital Marketers: Jan 2010

richardk@chameleonnet.co.uk (Rich Kirk) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:54:16 GMT

Two weeks into the New Year and already Christmas feels a lifetime ago. For many marketers, January is a quiet month, with conventional wisdom saying that apart from a few obvious products (gym memberships, savings accounts etc) acquisition / sales will be average at best given the previous months gluttony.

However, January is a really exciting month for charity marketers, especially those dedicating time and resource to the web. We run the pay-per-click search advertising for several charities, and we always see an uplift in the number of donations made in the weeks following 1st January. These conversions will usually originate from a brand keyword search, or a search on the issue your charity is associated with, suggesting that these January donors are aware of who you are and / or what you do, and have been triggered by the passing of the New Year to give you some cash. Whether this is driven by Christmas guilt or a desire to start a new year on the right foot matters little, what matters is that as a charity you take advantage of it.

Here’s our top tips:

Defer December spend: that Christmas campaign you were thinking of running? Save it! People are stressed, busy, preoccupied and generally frazzled in the run up to Christmas. Your message may achieve greater penetration and be afforded more thought in the New Year

Target your warm leads: cross reference the following:

newsletter subscribers
people who’ve signed your petitions
people who have fundraised for you
people who have sponsored your fundraisers

with your list of regular givers. Those people that aren’t giving via direct debit are a good group to target with email, social networking or even offline material around the 1st January.

Ramp up your PPC budget for the month and spend it effectively: Have you checked your AdWords scheduling recently? Do you know if your daily budget enables your ads to be shown 24 hours a day? Do you use bid adjustment to spend your budget at the most profitable times of day? Failure to do these things may mean your organisation misses out on a great deal of potential regular givers through a lack of visibility in search results.

For many charities, January will be a peak time for getting people to sign up to do various fundraising events in 2010. The London Marathon is one particularly lucrative opportunity. As a result however, competition in search results amongst charities is extreme. First page bid estimate for “2010 London marathon” in Adwords right now is $1.25, and $1.50 for “london marathon charity”. Maybe 1 in 100 people who clicked on your ad for that term would download an application, so now is the time to investigate the long tail of keywords for events like this, especially if your budget is not very big. Keyword research should inform not only your PPC campaigns but also SEO. Whilst there is little point aiming for a top 3 spot in the “London Marathon” SERP, you could get a real win optimising around “run the London Marathon for charity”.

Finally, a word on improving website performance, with special regard to acquiring regular givers. Recent research shows that the way you present amounts of money on your site affects the number of people who convert. 3 price formats were tested in the study:

Dollars and cents numerical format with a dollar sign ($00.00)
Numerical format without a dollar sign (00.)
Scripted or written-out prices (zero dollars).

It was found that adopting option 2 led to significantly more acquisition. Even if you have the most convoluted CMS, testing this would not be a great deal of work. We recommend trying an A/B test using Google Website Optimiser if you want to improve your site's performance: delivering a percentage increase in donations would be great way to start your organisation’s year!

Of course, our top tip is to get in touch with Chameleon Net if you think we could help you with search marketing or website improvement!

‘Tis the season to be social

richardk@chameleonnet.co.uk (Rich Kirk) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:26:34 GMT

This week will go down as another milestone in the development of social media, with a major news story being shaped by hundreds of thousands of web users across popular networking sites.

Unless you live under a particularly well hidden rock, you’ll know that right now, across the nation, a campaign is being waged to ensure that “Killing In The Name” by Rage Against The Machine is Christmas #1, and that “Geordie Jer Mcelderry” and his X Factor overlords are left crying into their turkey dinners.

The scale of this challenge is worth thinking about: The X Factor final was watched by 18 million people. Mcelderry’s record should clear 500K copies this week, as the faceless masses up and down the nation rush to buy “wor Jer” for their Nan. Other record companies like Universal, with endless resources, don’t even bother to compete.

So how have a husband and wife team managed to mobilise around 1 million people and leave the most powerful man in music helpless?

• Audience - Tracy & Jon are tapping into a rich seam of support; those that Tommy Morello called “the silent majority”, who dislike the constant stream of manufactured pop X Factor spawns. Brits have always loved an underdog, and many people find the arrogance of the X Factor winner expecting a #1 reason enough to get behind an alternative. The group’s core is urban, young, and in the main educated, loyal to music outside of pop, and are perfect for amplifying the campaign’s message as they are extremely social literate.

• Community - The inclusiveness of the campaign allowed it to develop momentum. Most people will join the facebook group before downloading, and the activity of this group clearly communicates the “wonderful dose of anarchy” RATM4XMAS represents (e.g. “just went to HMV and hid all the copies of Joe’s single”). You’re not just downloading a record, but being a co-conspirator.

• Product - Whilst the song might not be “Christmassy” enough, its popularity proves how good a choice it was. The infamous final refrain is a perfect rallying cry for the target audience, and it’s been popular with fans of alternative music for nearly 20 years - meaning a large potential support base. The juxtaposition of KITN and “The Climb” by Mcelderry is almost hilarious - listen to them back to back and try not to snigger. Finally, by linking up with homeless charity Shelter, RATM4XMAS exhibits a softer side and broadens its appeal and advocacy base dramatically.

The tactics which have naturally occurred in a group this dedicated are staggeringly sophisticated. Here’s a few I’ve observed:

• Reputation management: constant messages are posted reminding people about messaging should they get on radio or TV, many of these read like a set of brand guidelines.

• Crowdsourced marketing collateral: banners, profile ribbons, videos, posters, tee shirts, email copy; you name it; someone’s created it! A huge collective body of marketing material now exists, with specific messaging for different target groups, and is distributed across various platforms round the web.

• Buzz monitoring: The Facebook group’s wall reads like a newsfeed on the campaign - each new TV appearance, radio phone in or article is seized upon, including the already infamous “radio 5 incident”. Unhelpful or critical articles are quickly highlighted and people head off to register their disapproval at source.

• Online PR: Journalists and radio / tv presenters email addresses are added to the wall regularly and members are encouraged to get in touch with these people, urging them to spread the word through their shows or columns.

• Measurement and forecasting: several members have taken it upon themselves to research past Christmas chart battles and armed with this information plus current sales figures have forecast the trend in sales for both records until Saturday - for instance recent years have shown a surge on Saturday mornings in single sales and action is already being mobilised to counter this.

• Social optimisation: members are encouraged to use the share facility to ensure that the campaign appears in as many users feeds as possible.

• Focus on conversion rate: the ratio of group members to download sales is under constant scrutiny, with the groups profile photo currently geared to make members who haven’t shelled out yet do so. Active members use white label message content to send reminder messages to random group members about the need to buy the song.

Whatever happens on Sunday (here’s hoping Rage win out!) it’s clear this Facebook campaign represents a watershed moment in the battle for dominance between two marketing channels: TV and the high street vs. collaborative social networks.

So if you’re looking to improve or launch a social engagement strategy, you could do worse than learn from the elements that make up Jon and Tracy Morter’s success.

Liveblogging

richardk@chameleonnet.co.uk (Rich Kirk) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 10:48:43 GMT

I have been on leave recently, spending some time on the Isle of Skye in the Hebrides. I went up there to try and finally knock off the traverse of the Cuillin Ridge, which I would heartily recommend to anyone who likes the outdoors, vertical drops of dizzying proportions, and/or bad weather.

The traverse is something my Dad had wanted to do for years, and with him being 50 this year, I had arranged for a guide to help us. This was my 5th attempt and my Dad’s 7th or 8th; around 90% of attempts fail due to awful weather, navigational difficulties and/or lack of fitness, so I was anxious to give ourselves the best possible chance.

Hiring the guide was not cheap and so I’d done it as my Dad’s 50th birthday present. I’d also got contributions from a lot of his mates to help with the cost. Herein lay a problem; how to give something back to everyone who had donated cash so that they felt involved in the trip? I decided to live-blog the 2 day traverse, so people could chart our progress from their desks or mobiles whilst we were away.

Using the Wordpress app and my iPhone, I was easily able to update my Dad’s birthday blog from the mountains with notes and photos of our progress, even though I only had fairly weak GPRS signal at best (the O symbol next to the normal phone signal symbol on your iPhone). If I can get signal in the Cuillins, which are about as remote as it gets in the UK, then liveblogging must be possible across almost all of the UK!

Happily the whole thing proved to be a real success. I thought only 10-20 people would be interested in the blog, but over 200 absolute unique users were recorded on the site in a period of 3 days.

Being new to live-blogging, I found the main benefits were:

It has left a record of events that is more genuine and ‘raw’ than a circular email sent after the event could be.
People are interested in something they can see developing; most people would have found out through word of mouth we had completed our challenge and then not been as interested in a subsequent email account of the trip.
Liveblogging seems to be bleeding edge enough to genuinely capture the interest of family / friends
Liveblogging and allowing opportunities for realtime feedback ensures the audience feels involved; sending a report after the event implies they missed out.

For digital marketers looking to generate interesting content and create buzz around a website liveblogging seems to be a great solution, why sit at your desk and force yourself to write a blogpost when you could be more interesting in less words by sharing your thoughts or experiences live from an event you / your company is involved in?

Top tips for your live blog:

Alert potentially interested audiences about the broadcast in advance, and also send a reminder email / tweet at the start of the broadcast, or just after your first live entry has been posted.
If you are using Wordpress make sure you use twitter and facebook blog widgets to auto-update your wider social networks with an “I’ve just posted xxxx” link whenever the blog is updated.
Keep checking your comments / feedback, if your audience is debating the content of the liveblog, reflecting that in future posts will make them feel even more involved in the event.
Try to keep in mind the wider purpose of your liveblog and website and whilst you have an elevated level of attention from them, ensure you suggest things like donating / signing up / purchasing from you.

In case you missed the link earlier you can still check out the live blog of our trip here.

Analytics > Assumptions

richardk@chameleonnet.co.uk (Rich Kirk) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:58:42 GMT

Last week at Chamtech09 (our digital trends seminar in the City) I spoke to two great audiences on the need to do away with decision-making and assumptions when it comes to creating online content. I argued that simple analytics data and customer feedback should drive the development of a web presence, and that a marketer’s focus should primarily fall on turning more visitors into customers; getting more visitors should be of secondary importance.

It was great to speak to a bunch of people who could obviously see the benefit of this approach, and I hope that I’ll be able to work with as many of you as possible in the future.

In this post I wanted to expand on a few points I raced through on Thursday, especially around the development and operation of a Google Analytics (GA) strategy.

“The numbers in my GA reports don’t add up”

There are numerous reasons why GA might not track an individual visit. The most common ones are:

User has no java support enabled so GA code is not read (>5% of web users)
Users are blocking the first party cookies GA needs to place on your computer (>5% of users)
Code is not implemented correctly on certain pages of your site (Best practice = implement it once in a piece of content that is called by every page e.g. the footer)
Code is being interfered with by other javascript on the page. Fix this by ensuring the GA code is called before these other scripts.
Browser fails to execute the code (increasingly problematic as mobile browsers are susceptible to this)
Pages are failing to load properly.
User bounces before page load completes (often explains why your adwords clicks > visits from adwords). This problem is increasing due to mobile browsing growth. Bloated sites often designed for computers rather than mobiles and the 3G network are especially vulnerable.

A common problem arises around unique visitors (aka “the hotel problem”) and it can be seized upon by people looking for a reason not to invest time in GA as an example of its “inaccuracy” (I know, I’ve been there!). Luckily, the problem is fully explained and illustrated on Wikipedia, as is the issue of total visitors not being equal to new visitors + repeat visitors.

Link tagging

You can track the RoI of every link you put on the web by attaching a source (e.g. person / dept), medium (e.g. email / banner ad / social campaign), campaign (e.g. twitter competition / april newsletter) and an individual content tag to each link. GA allows you to analyse the behaviour of users via the individual link they arrived on. Very quickly you can start to attach a pounds and pence value to links, campaigns, marketing channels and people within your organisation. Who doesn’t want to do that?!

You can create these links really easily in excel spreadsheets as they all follow the same pattern (links broken down by section for easy viewing, obv. this would be one URL string normally):

www. ursite.com/?

utm_source=xxx

&utm_medium=yyy

&utm_campaign=zzz

&utm_content=123

In each case you would want to make the utm_content tag an individual descriptor for that link. E.g. if I was going to send out a Chameleon Net newsletter containing a link to our blog the link would be (again, broken down for easy viewing):

http://www.chameleonnet.co.uk/blog/default.aspx?

utm_source=chamnet_marketing

&utm_medium=email

&utm_campaign=june_newsletter

&utm_content=blog_home

Within the GA dashboard, under traffic sources > campaigns, you can quickly compare the successes and failings of different source, medium, and campaign tags. Then you can easily drill down to the individual content tags for more granular detail. For each tag you’ll be able to see a host of metrics, most importantly goal conversions, but also bounce rate, time on site, and of course visits/visitors/unique visitors.

Pretty neat huh?

“My goals are hard to track”

A number of Chameleon’s clients are charities or NGOs, whose website in many cases provide information rather than make a sale or get an email sign up. For these organisations simply getting someone to read a page is the goal online; the real conversion, i.e. that person taking action, occurs offline in the real world. Goal tracking still has a lot to offer, and maybe you need to think about how your site and your offline conversions interact: e.g. display a unique phone number so you can track how many calls your site is generating.

Another idea might be to flip the situation and instead of focussing on where people are going within your site look at where they are coming from. If you have particular traffic sources that send traffic which tends to bounce out of the site straight away, isolate that traffic and look at its top landing pages. There may well be an obvious disconnect between the content on those pages and the traffic source / audience.

Alternatively, you can look to diversify the traffic sources for your site. Social networks are the web’s watering holes and you can easily (and cheaply) search for and enter conversations around your campaigns. We advise on developing landing pages aimed at audiences you don’t normally target and the process of entering these online conversations. GA will be able to let you know if you’ve developed a new audience and whether they are exploring your site beyond the landing pages you have set up.

**********

Phew, long post. Hope these tips help you and your digital marketing teams.

Remember; your site is made up of sources, (your audiences: get granular by using segmentation) behaviour (the content they browse) and most importantly; defined goals. Without goals your site has no purpose: identify the pages that your user sees when they’ve done what you wanted them to do, then work back through your funnel.

Hit me up in the comments below if you've got issues you want answering!

Focus On... Website Conversion Rates

richardk@chameleonnet.co.uk (Rich Kirk) — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:02:33 GMT

Conversion Rate: The fundamental KPI of your website

In an increasingly competitive online environment one metric all digital marketers should be focusing their attention on is the conversion rate of their own website. By conversion rate we mean the number of visitors who complete a desired action vs. the total number of visitors.

E.g. If your site sells CDs, and you get 100 visitors, of which 2 buy CDs, then your website conversion rate is 2%.

What we’re talking about is “how many of your visitors do what you want them to do?"

It’s important to decide on a purpose for each piece of marketing collateral you produce, from a button to an entire website. All of your efforts should be focused towards making as many people as possible who view that piece of collateral fulfill its purpose. Everything has a conversion rate, and not only can you measure it, you can give it a pounds and pence value as well.

In order to increase your conversion rates, you need to work towards what we call a “conversion culture”. In a conversion culture:

You are committed to using analytics, testing and customer feedback to inform decisions about your website’s content, and not the opinions / assumptions of internal staff.

You accept that a website is never finished and can be constantly improved via tweaking.

Why should I bother focusing on Conversion Rate?

Mainly because it allows you to generate more customers without any extra advertising spend. You should make the most of the content and visitors you already have, rather than spending more or diversifying in order to boost revenue. Even if you do this you aren’t improving profitability.

Increasing conversion rate rather than marketing spend means revenue from new sales goes straight into your bottom line. Think about it; you haven’t spent anything more on advertising, the cost of sales or overheads… you’ve just made more revenue from what you already had.

The profit generated by increased conversion rate may allow you to open up new advertising channels not currently feasible. More channels means a more stable business. This is especially true if you are currently reliant on search engine traffic alone.

Selling online is a ‘winner takes all’ environment. Customers may spend a long time choosing where to buy, but very small things are going to make them choose one site over another – and it’s only the winning site that gets the cash. This is known as the ‘slight edge’ and it’s usually got more to do with the buying experience than an item’s price. Increasing conversion rate = gaining the ‘slight edge’ over your competitors.

How can Chameleon Net help me improve my Conversion Rate?

We suggest allowing us to perform a conversion rate audit on one of your key customer journeys, from a landing page to completion of the desired action. Using your analytics tools and other tracking software we can provide a report which will list out where your UI could be improved to make the buying experience easier, and also highlight which pages in your customer journey need the most urgent attention.

Why Chameleon Net?

Although focusing on conversion rate is a relatively new online trend, usability and improving customer experiences have been right at the heart of our offering since we were founded 10 years ago as a bridge between high-minded website designers and technical back-end systems developers.

Several members of staff are accredited by Google for the use of Google Analytics, having passed the recently introduced examinations in the subject, and we have experience of using Google Website Optimiser; a new tool allowing you to quickly perform split and multivariate tests of new content in order to determine whether your new content outperforms older material. We've used this knowledge recently to help a major UK firm in the tourism sector double the conversion rate of their B2C booking engine.

International Student Recruitment for HEIs

surajs@chameleonnet.co.uk (Suraj Shah) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 15:23:14 GMT

How to digitally attract, engage with and recruit international students, while mobilising your existing students to help with language translation, to overcome cultural barriers and give them valuable online marketing work experience.

There are websites, blogs & social networks such as facebook and twitter, all crying out for your prospective students' attention. I'm sure you'll agree that there is simply a lot of noise that they are exposed to. For prospective international students, that noise online is amplified, as you are competing not just with other UK Higher Education Institutions, but also the hundreds of institutions around the world.

Play this slidecast (7 mins 37 seconds) to get an insight into the 3 stage process to run an international Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign at your university that spans across 12 to 24 months. The campaign involves forming a team of International Student Ambassadors, the creation of an optimised online destination, and digital community engagement to attract visitors to your new online destination and raise it's profile in search engines.

The slidecast also touches on a handful of tips to run a successful campaign and gives you a glimpse into what's involed in a 3-month international Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign if you want more rapid results.

International Student Recruitment for HEIs

View more presentations from Suraj Shah.

Twitter For B2B Websites

richardk@chameleonnet.co.uk (Rich Kirk) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 11:27:39 GMT

Like everyone in the digital marketing space, here at Chameleon Net we are twitter junkies. Even our table football has its own feed! The phenomenal growth the service has enjoyed over the last 5 – 6 months means that Twitter is the platform switched-on marketers are buzzing about right now. However, as with any service growing at an exponential rate, there are problems. This recent article warning of a “Twitter bubble” summed up some of our fears about the service and the industry springing up around it. The challenge Chameleon faces is to make Twitter part of the range of e-marketing services we offer to clients, in a way that can best guarantee a good ROI for both our clients and ourselves.

Many of our more forward thinking clients have expressed an interest in developing a Twitter account, and as a result this week we launched Drivers Jonas on Twitter. DJ is a commercial property consultancy turning over nearly £100m per year and employing over 700 staff, yet they remain remarkably agile when it comes to marketing their website. We're excited about this project because we feel that with the right aims and expectations, a B2B Twitter feed can easily harness all the best aspects of Micro-blogging.

As a B2B company Drivers Jonas is using Twitter to provide the company with a more human face than their corporate website can, as well as develop their reputation as a ‘thought leader’ within the property industry. We believe that in time, being active on Twitter will help Drivers Jonas unearth business leads, connect and interact with potential new recruits (especially undergraduates), as well as doing more routine things like publicising DJ events. One thing Drivers Jonas recognises is that Twitter isn’t a marketplace in which to sell, it’s a watering hole at which they can meet their stakeholders; something I believe is vital to good big-business tweeting.

We’ve also envisaged that in the absence of a DJ blog (which would be time consuming and difficult to operate in line with internal compliance procedures) the Twitter feed could be used as a rapid response in the case of a major PR event. This flexibility is something many B2B companies would love to have; for some blogging is the answer, but for marketers at larger companies getting sign-off for a controversial blog post is ‘worst nightmare’ territory. Twitter restricts you to 140 characters, and at the same time, restricts the barriers to getting a message out into the public domain.

I hope to blog again with more on this project as it develops, as I think it will provide some interesting insights into ‘corporate tweeting’. In the meantime, if your company thinks they could benefit from being on Twitter, but want a helping hand building a business case and launching an account, get in touch.

Seminar on Digital Student Recruitment - an overview

surajs@chameleonnet.co.uk (Suraj Shah) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:36:38 GMT

Chameleon Net held a seminar on Digital Student Recruitment for the higher education sector yesterday, Tuesday 24th February 2009.

Drew Davies, Head of Online Marketing at Chameleon Net spoke about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategies for student recruitment.

Helen Aspell, Head of Digital at the Equality and Human Rights Commission and former Head of Digital Marketing at University of Southampton, spoke about User Experience, the heart of an engaging digital presence.

Drew Davies then spoke about Protecting Your Online Brand, where he shared a case study of the work Chameleon Net has done with Barnardo's UK on their opinion-polarising "Break the Cycle" campaign.

> > >

The seminar was well-received with feedback such as "Very useful & thought provoking", "Excellent - one of the best I've been to", "Impressive venue and tasty danish pastries in the break!", "Stimulating & Exciting", "Very well organised & professional", "Engaging & felt very current" and "Very interesting, frightening & enlightening!"

More on Chameleon Net's work in the higher education sector can be found at www.chameleonnet.co.uk/education

The Rise of Twitter

rossm@chameleonnet.co.uk (Ross Miles) — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:22:22 GMT

Social Media is a fast-growing and rapidly evolving beast, and the latest website to be the darling of the Google Generation is micro-blogging site Twitter. The idea is simple, you have 140 characters, including spaces, to answer the question- What are you doing now? This however, as with all things Web 2.0, doesn’t tell the full story. Twitter acts as a bulletin board as well, where titbits of information, via links, can be shared between users. UK Celebrities such as Jonathon Ross, Stephen Fry and John Cleese are all advocates, and Barack Obama used it during his election campaign to motivate the masses (he has over 144,000 followers). Twitter has seen its popularity grow 10-fold in the UK in the past year and traffic rise 750% in the US where it is know a more visited site than Digg. As I write this blog post just under 2 million tweets are being submitted worldwide every day!

Whilst to ‘outsiders’ it might seem a trivial and almost pointless service, only for users with high levels of deluded self-importance, but Twitter played notable roles during a several significant events in the past 4 months. The part Twitter played in providing break-neck speed updates on the Mumbai terror attacks in November led Forbes Magazine to write Mumbai: Twitter’s Moment. Before News services had broken the event on television Tweeps such as @rakesh314 posted “I'm hearing news of gun-firing in Mumbai. Can anyone confirm?”. Updates from people involved even led to an internet myth that the terrorists themselves were following events on Twitter itself to counter the actions of the forces sent in to stop them.

The much more recent plane crash into the Hudson River was another example of Tweeps providing a rapid reaction. One Twitterer, @jkrums, took a picture of the half-submerged aircraft with passengers standing on the wing from a passing-by ferry which quickly went viral and eventually landed him an interview on CNBC. Others tweeted about how they stood watching the drama from their office blocks. What was the most notable though was the integrity of the tweet-reporting which cited accurate numbers and stories relating to the event as information about what had happened disseminated among users.

As great as all this impartiality and interactivity sounds, how can Twitter serve the business community? And that’s exactly the point, this notion of impartial interactivity. Twitter provides a transparent window into an organisation for the consumer, a portal in which to directly interact. Several brands are using it as such a device to. @ScottMonty is the face of car manufacturer, Ford, on Twitter (who have multiple employee accounts) and says “It’s part of a larger social media strategy to humanize the Ford brand and put consumers in touch with Ford employees”. Lisa Kim @AmericanApparel is the Website Manager for American Apparel and is another advocate of Twitter as a way of increasing customer care, “We saw a tweet from someone who received less than stellar customer service at a store in Canada & we got in touch with them to sort it out.” Children’s Charity Barnardo’s used Twitter alongside their blog to engage the media storm around their controversial ‘Break the cycle’ ad campaign (managed by Chameleon Net) so successfully that Barnardo’s own staff kept abreast of the situation by following the charity’s own Twitter feed. Higher Education Institutions are now looking at using Twitter as a Personal Learning Network in which students can ask questions of their peers and teachers in order to increase feedback and accessibility.

Twitter is quickly evolving to become fundamental in the development of any digital strategy and with its thrust into the UK lime-light thanks to varying celebrity endorsements, its popularity is only set to grow. Businesses need to educate themselves and start twittering soon or risk being left behind by more media-savvy rivals.

CREDIT TO:

http://www.brandrepublic.com/Revolution/News/875017/Celebs-start-tweeting-Twitters-UK-popularity-rises-10-fold-year/

http://nielsen-online.com/blog/2009/01/16/tweeting-the-us-airways-flight-1549-plane-crash/

http://popacular.com/gigatweet/analytics.php

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2008/12/twitter_the_mumbai_myths.html

Audio Books – Who’s Listening?

jeremyd@chameleonnet.com (Jeremy Davis) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:12:18 GMT

My Dimbleby mission continues. Seriously, David, look over your shoulder and you will see me there…albeit with the need of the Hubble telescope.

I was invited to be a panel member for The Bookseller’s “Audio Revolution 2008” – a one-day Publishing industry seminar focussing on all things audio book-related.

My session was the last of the day and I must say that it showed in some of the faces but nonetheless Jo Henry chaired an interesting discussion about how audio books could/should be marketed.

I was representing the web marketing side of things, with Tony Lynch of Gospoken making an excellent case for the viability of audio books on mobile phones and Madeline Milne of e-Music discussing the success of their subscription-based download model.

It was difficult to do justice to this very broad topic in fifty minutes and I was very surprised at how few questions the panel got from the floor. I think this represented a general feeling that I got from the afternoon. No one was really talking about marketing audio books. By which I mean getting them out there and selling them.

I spent the afternoon thinking that audio books are like this little-known secret and it surprises me that the industry isn’t shouting about them more. I mean, they are really great!

I was speaking to one of our recent recruits at Chameleon Net – young, early twenties, bright – and, as if it was the most normal thing in the world, he said “I don’t like reading books, but I really like audio books. I wouldn’t read a book on the train but I just put on an audio book – it’s great.”

And there it was…a new market for publishers. So why, I wonder, isn’t the industry shouting from the rooftops about this amazing format that means people who don’t like reading can enjoy books? I mean, some people are just mainly auditory – that’s how they like to learn and that’s how they like to consume information.

Surely the industry should be running massive campaigns about audio books?! Publishers should be giving some away as tasters…get people using them!

I think if the publishing industry could unite, get over all the internal issues like audio book rights, royalties, investment in recordings, etc and just get the message of audio books out there, the response would be huge! Just get people aware of them, using them, liking them. There’s a market out there and most of them don’t think about audio books. And they are not all old women and travelling sales reps.

So, “quit your whingeing” I hear you cry “and do something to help”. Ok then, I will. Here are my top ten tips for marketing and selling audio books:

1.   Get all over social networks – they are still the fastest growing sites in the UK and your target market is using them every day. Sometimes for hours and often when they should be working. Create groups, use Facebook advertising, run competitions, give-aways (i.e. free downloads)

2.   Use ePR (or an agency that knows how to use it :)) to target key influential bloggers and get them blogging about you and your products. Credibility online is everything and all votes are not created equal. Make powerful friends and work together.

3.   Get all over search engines. By which I mean Google. They have nearly 90% of UK searches and 94% of people use it, all of whom are qualified as having an informational need (otherwise they wouldn’t be searching). Where else would you want to advertise? Do this by PPC ads and also by optimising for organic search results (see below).

4.   Optimise for natural search. This gets its own number coz it’s so important. It’s by far the best ROI when it comes to search engine marketing and every day that you don’t do it and your competitors do, the lower you will show up in the searches. In natural SEO, doing nothing just means you keep getting lower. More of this below….

5.   Use metadata: use target key words to describe your audio files and make sure they are on optimised pages: page titles, H1 tags, alt tags, copy, etc. SE’s can’t listen to audio books (yet…I’m not kidding, speech recognition software is getting better and Google may soon be able to index the spoken word) so give them lots of thematically-relevant content to help them.

6.   Think Accessibility. Audio books have a perfect market in people with visual impairments. Make sure your site works for screen readers. If you’re not sure, get an audit (“from us” is the answer to your next question).

7.   Speaking of sites…get a good one. There’s no point spending time and money marketing products if your site is rubbish at converting visitors to customers. You’ll lose sales and damage your brand in the process. Make sure your site makes buying mind-numbingly easy. Joyful even. People should leave your site happier than when they arrived. If not, your site is letting you and them down. I mean, nobody likes to be made to work hard to buy something – it’s just not polite.

8.   Don’t worry about DRM. There are so few audio books out there that there is not much of a market in illegal copies 9unlike music). It’s about creating the market at the moment – better to have a million audio books out there with 10 per cent buying them than ten thousand with 100% of them buying. DRM can always be adopted later.

9.   Create added-value content. Like extras on DVDs…publishers can offer something more than the retailers…exclusive interviews with the author, an introduction, an otherwise unpublished epi/prologue, etc. This will really help the ePR and build buzz.

10.   Sell ‘em direct. Find out what your customers like and talk to them about it. Don’t let Amazon have all the fun.

Of course audio books are part of a seismic shift in the Publishing sector that is happening in order to adapt to digital content and multiple delivery platforms and formats.

For an excellent analysis of these changes, I recommend Sara Lloyd’s insightful article “A book publisher’s manifesto for the 21st century”.

If you are a publisher and want to know more of our thoughts on this and other Publishing-related topics, you may want to attend our free seminar: Quick Web Wins for Publishers, on Tuesday 25th November at London Chamber of Commerce, EC4. There’ll be exclusive content and an opportunity to ask us questions.

The President of New Media

stephen@actualmarketing.co.uk (Steve Thorn) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 11:33:27 GMT

The President of New Media

Maybe it’s my age but for the first time ever I’ve found myself following the developments of the US Presidential Elections.

With just five days to go, the coverage on the BBC has been up to its usual standards, but I’ve been intrigued enough by the characters of the main players to have a look at their websites and see how they’re using the web to spread their message.

Arriving at the McCain site, www.johnmccain.com, I was greeted with a streamed video of the hopeful candidate that opens with the words (rather worryingly seeing as he’s also a Republican), “The last eight years haven’t worked very well have they?”

Unfortunately there isn’t a Sarah Palin gallery online (I did search for one, perhaps another indication of my advancing years) and I got quickly bored with the site and wandered off into the Web to see what else I could find. The most engaging item was the Republicans’ YouTube video satirising the ‘holiness’ of the Obama campaign (see more at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/) being currently embroiled in a row over copyright.

Heading on over to the Democratic camp, I found www.barackobama.com much more new media savvy with lots of exciting, dynamic web content including BarrackTV, the RoadBlog, Obama Mobile, the choice of sixteen social network links and a button inviting me to ‘Donate Today and receive a free Obama car magnet’!

Obama has also used new media to target likely pockets of supporters including the Latino vote - www.vivaobama08.com features perhaps the only Mariachi song to include a mention of healthcare legislation.

All good multimedia stuff. Not only that, but whatever the outcome Barack will go down in history as the first President to use video game advertising to spread the message (‘Guitar Hero’ and ‘Burnout Paradise’). This is aimed at a target audience of 18-34 year olds in 10 key States before the election.

And finally, a 10-second search on YouTube came up with the song “I’ve got a crush on Obama” which has so far received 10 million views. A truly terrible video, only lifted by the magnificent lyric halfway through: “You’re into border security, let’s break the border ‘tween you and me”. Enjoy. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=wKsoXHYICqU

The Blogosphere: Friend and Foe

lucie@actualmarketing.co.uk (Lucie Bickerdike) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 10:57:30 GMT

Like Suraj, I’ve been thinking a lot about online PR recently.

Public Relations traditionally holds a reputation management role, making sure its organisation is kept in the public eye, regarded positively and protected from the damage caused by public criticism. Crucially, the internet offers companies the opportunity to engage with their target audiences in new and exciting, more productive ways – but it also gives consumers a platform from which to vent about poor experiences, and negative reports can spread like wildfire. I need say no more than ‘Dell Hell’.

This topic was touched upon by one of the speakers at a CIPR conference I attended this week, and the Q&A session was indicative of how wary much of the PR industry still is on the subject of online PR. One exec said that her company had so far omitted any online activity from their communications strategies, but that they had realised they really should get involved. However, her particular organisation was subject to a certain amount of public criticism. Her question was this: if we begin communicating with our audience online, will we be opening ourselves up to more criticism and will we in fact be focusing people on the negative story?

Of course, the answer was this. People are talking about you online, positively or negatively, anyway – would you rather stick your head in the sand and let the conversation go on without you, or engage in it and take some control of the messages being circulated?

I think an important point to make about PR is that it’s not always just about the protection and management of company reputation. Yes, a company’s reputation is arguably its most valuable asset – after all, consumers listen to each other and if they’re all slagging you off you’re unlikely to make enough money to survive. But PR can also be used to communicate with customers on a more equal level, where you’re not trying to impose your own interpretation of their needs upon them, but really listening to them and building their feedback into your product or service.

The internet offers some exciting possibilities for companies wanting to place customer requirements at the centre of their business. If you do it right, you can get valuable feedback from your target audience that would cost you thousands in focus groups and surveys. Perhaps this is the most valuable PR opportunity presented by new media at the moment.

The fact remains that organisations can no longer hide from the fact that the web now has the power to make or break them. The ‘blogosphere’ should be ignored at their peril.

Digitise or Die (or “Much Ado About Digital”)

jeremyd@chameleonnet.com (Jeremy Davis) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:12:00 GMT

In my ongoing mission to become the David Dimbleby of the Web Industry (and beyond?) I recently spent an afternoon chairing a “Question Time” style event for movers and shakers in the UK publishing industry: “Digitise or Die” was the inaugural annual event run by The Bookseller, the leading trade publication for the book industry, with the sole intention of focusing on the issues facing the book business in the digital age. And issues there are.

Pretty much ever since Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440, the only way you and I could get our hands on a book would be if a Publisher printed it (the only way to create multiple copies on anything like a large scale) and a bookseller sold it to us. Simple. Oh yes, and of course and author needs to write it.

So, publishers find authors, groom them, coach them and generally hone their talent so as to (hopefully) create not only a great piece of writing but also a rampant commercial success. Of course the publishers would have to kiss a few frogs but hey, sometimes when you get your prince he turns out to be a darned good catch (JK Rowling, Terry Pratchett, Dan Brown anyone?)

So, that model’s clear: Publisher finds the creative talent, publishes the work, markets it, sells it to retailers and then you and I buy it. Hang on a minute…that sounds familiar…creative talent…publisher…seller…consumer…Ah yes I’ve got it! It’s the music business!

And that is essentially the problem facing the book business – how to not do what the music business did. In the digital age the roles are unclear: anyone can be an author (just add talent), publish a book, mass produce it, reach an audience (if it’s any good) and distribute it worldwide, absolutely free.

Perhaps books are just content, and the web is very good at distributing that for free. So who’s going to pay for it? Yes, the book business is probably going through its biggest change in over 500 years, when Gutenburg, quill in hand, said to himself “there MUST be an easier way of doing this!”. Anyway, back to my Dimbleby impersonation....

With research done and cue cards in hand, off I went. There were several speakers in the morning and then my session was in the afternoon. Tension was in the air…what does the future hold? speakers included Jason Hanley from Google (who are digitising content at a rate of knots) and he aptly demonstrated the speed at which the internet, in only 15 years, has been able to reach an audience of 1.5billion – way faster than the decades it took TV or radio to reach anything like those numbers. Yes, the internet is REALLY good at delivering content.

All in all the event was developing a fairly dramatic atmosphere and like any drama there had to be a bad guy. And there was. Enter, stage left, Andrew Keen, self proclaimed “Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley” and both irreverently funny and deadly serious all at the same time. And his message? That book publishing is finished as a business, either for the publishers or the authors. Content has gone digital and digital content (as the music business is finding out to its cost) is largely free on the web.

As a popular author himself he should know – most of his money, he says, comes from live appearances (c.f. Madonna, Rolling Stones?), not book sales. Although a word of qualification here: as far as I know Andrew has one popular book to his name and that’s hardly a career. Most creative artists would expect to have to produce a substantial body of popular work before they can think about retiring…but I digress. And so to the afternoon session....

In front of an audience of book industry bods I chair an interesting discussion that ranges from the role of the author to the role of the high street bookseller. My fellow panellists included Andrew Keen, Kieron Smith (MD of BookRabbit.com) and Yang May Ooi, who introduced interesting ideas about how the nature of storytelling has changed with the digital age – maybe the book is a format from another time.

Our session was then followed by an excellent presentation by our very own Drew Davies who gave the audience a whistlestop tour of effective SEO techniques.

One thing was very plain throughout the day: Change is afoot. There is fear. There is excitement, anxiety, confusion and (as in all times of change) opportunity. My sense is that there will indeed be winners and losers in the publishing sector over the next few years and the landscape may look very different.

When the dust settles we will see who grasped the opportunities for delivering high quality digital products in a way that consumers want. Content is here to stay and if it’s good enough I think people will pay for it too. The challenge that faces the book business (and the music business) I think is how to position itself so that it adds value, not just the mechanism for distributing content. Value is always attractive....

Next question…ah yes…the man at the back with the yellow tie…yes you, sir!

How To Manage Your Online Reputation

surajs@chameleonnet.co.uk (Suraj Shah) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:29:44 GMT

When you offer a service or sell a product, either people are talking about you, or no-one is. If they’re talking about your brand, it may be positive or it may be negative. If no-one’s talking about you, perhaps they should be.

There are many examples where a brand’s reputation has been massively damaged, simply because a negative mention of a brand snowballed and was not spotted in time.

One such example is when a blogger from America bought a computer from the large computer manufacturer Dell in 2005 and paid for a four year home service support plan. Soon after, when the machine needed seeing to, Dell told him to return the computer, which left him without the machine for 10 days. When he wrote a short blog post about the poor service, it generated over 200 comments within a few days. This then resulted in 10 follow up posts and over 2500 comments that sparked so much opinion that it led to the phrase “Dell Hell” becoming a household term. Imagine is this post had been spotted in time – perhaps the massive damage that the brand received could have been limited.

Following an internal training session on Brand Identity Tracking run by our Head of Online Marketing, Drew Davies, I thought I’d write and share a few notes about how to discover what people are saying about a particular brand, how that can be tracked over time, and how the information can be used to improve brand identity.

Why Do Companies Choose To Track Their Brands?

Companies generally want their brand tracked for predominantly one of four reasons:

New product / service: The company is launching a new product in the marketplace and wants to see the attention the brand will be getting online over time.
Bad reviews: A brand has been getting bad reviews on the web, and the company would like to see the extent of that damage done to the brand.
Good reviews: The brand is already receiving positive reviews on the web, and the company would like to see what is being said and use it to create more products and engage with the happy consumers.
No reviews: The brand has been around for a while, but the company feels that nobody’s talking about it, and so that company wants to see where their competitors are being talked about and work out how to enter those forums.

How To Benchmark Your Online Reputation

We use a three step process here at Chameleon Net to benchmark the online reputation of our clients’ brands:

Step #1: GATHER – scouting the web for mentions of specific keywords relating to the brand in question, and recording how positive or negative the conversations are about the brand. Keywords here would include variations of the brand name, categories, and competitor brand names where appropriate.

Step #2: ANALYSE – working out what the comments mean according to pre-defined metrics, and benchmarking this information over time and against competitors.

Step #3: ENGAGE – making amends where there are grievances about the brand, and reinforcing positive comments about the brand on behalf of the client.

Tracking Your Online Brand Identity – For Free!

There are already a number of free tools that companies can use to find out what people are saying about their brand online. Tools offered by Google include:

Google Search: visit http://www.google.co.uk, type in the name of the brand into the search box, and see a list of the websites that mention your brand.
Google Blog Search: visit http://blogsearch.google.com, type in the name of the brand in the search box, and see a list of the blogs that mention your brand, along with the date of when it was mentioned.
Google Alerts: visit http://www.google.com/alerts and sign up for alerts that will notify you by email about the latest web and news pages that mention your brand.

Limitations of using these free tools for tracking your online brand identity

If you have a good internal team who have plenty of time on their hands, information on conversations about the brand can be gathered fairly simply using the free tools listed above.

However, although the tools are good for finding the raw data, that’s where it stops. The next step is to analyse the gathered data with metrics to make sense of it, which requires a natural human touch.

Recently we tracked the brand identity of one of our clients in the not-for-profit sector who wanted to see how they are perceived online. We benchmarked our findings over time, and against similar charities in the sector.

Engaging: handling negative comments

So what happens if you discover negatives comments about your brand? What can you do to recover from an online reputation crisis?

The article at http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2008/01/five-steps-for-recovering-from-an-online-reputation-crisis.html suggests the following steps:

Respond from the top
Admit your mistakes and apologise
Host the conversation
Seek resolution
Turn detractors into evangelists

To recover from even the severest of mistakes, base your crisis communication on sincerity, transparency, and consistency.

Engaging: encouraging more positive comments

Suppose you find positive mentions of your brand at the websites and blogs that you find, how do you leverage that?

Simply go to those websites and say “thank you” in the comments section. Then suggest other innovative ways that your product or service can be used.

Engaging: starting a conversation

Sometimes, you’ll look around the web and find that no-one’s talking about your brand. What can you do there to create positive exposure?

Well first highlight where you want to be mentioned, and then build an innovative ePR campaign to get more people talking about your brand.

Chameleon Net ran an ePR campaign to launch ‘The Survival Kit’ – a cookware kit developed in a collaboration between Jamie Oliver and Tefal. Get in touch with us to request our ePR case studies.

Is ‘Online Reputation Management’ ethical?

Some may refer to this process as controlling their message, while others may look upon it as ‘gaming the system’. What do you think? Is online reputation management ethical?

Chameleon Net Site Evolves.

daryli@chameleonnet.com (Daryl Irvine) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:01:21 GMT

This month we have re-launched our very own Chameleon Net website with a brand new look. When I came on board as Creative Director at the beginning of 2006 one of my first tasks was to undertake a re-working of the 'then' current branding. Far from throwing away everything that had come before and creating something completely new I wanted to capitalise on everything we had already achieved as a company, and the recognition we already had within the new media sector. I saw it more as an 'evolution of the brand' and in approaching the recent re-design of our website I really wanted to stay focused on the principle of evolving our online proposition rather than going back to the drawing board.

Our development team have spent a lot of time creating a flexible, scalable .NET and XML based solution that is robust and easily maintainable. Likewise we have invested many man hours, creating relevant copy to achieve a very search engine friendly, accessible site. So the design brief was quite simple; Bring the website in line with the current branding and communicate our design abilities without effecting any of the underlying code or foundation work already undertaken.

Interestingly enough this scenario is not uncommon among many of our clients. There are of course occasions when their current solution is too old to cost effectively salvage technology, but many of our projects have involved existing systems or required collaboration with an in-house IT team to effectively re-skin their offering. With contemporary standards based development techniques like CSS ( custom style sheets ) we can 'skin' just about any system.

So back to the new Chameleon Net offering. We have added a dynamic Content Managed Flash Banner to our homepage and in the long term we will be re-tasking this space with multiple promotional panels featuring video, animation and motion graphic work from the design team. We have further utilised flash, and specifically siFr, to convert structural headings ( H2, H3 etc.. ) into our brand font on the fly, whilst retaining an accessible, standards compliant layout for users without the plugin.

I hope you like the new look Chameleon site as much as we do, and if you have any comments or ideas I would love to hear from you.

Free PPC Audit

donnaa@chameleonnet.com (Donna Adams) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:25:51 GMT

We are currently running a free offer!

If you are running a paid search campaign on Google Adwords then you might be interested in our FREE PPC audit.

The audit will include bespoke advice on your Google account structure, the quality score and tips on how to make the most of your paid search spend.

Take a look at the audit page for more information.

Also if you're new to Google sign up for some free adwords vouchers here.

Email Marketing - A Misconception?

kelm@chameleonnet.com (Kel Miah) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:10:05 GMT

It is a misconception that email marketing is solely deployed to promote a company and/or its products to random people.

Email marketing can be used for:-

Welcoming people
Gathering more user information
Engage with past/present/future customers
Cross and up sell
Maintaining customer loyalty
Asking customers to refer their friends and family to a service or product

As an example I recently purchased a printer online from a well known company, part of the transaction involved me giving my email address. A few months later I got an email from this company asking me if I would be interested in purchasing ink cartridges for my new printer, they enclosed details of their latest offer on ink cartridges. They had obviously done their research because a few days after receiving the email my printer indicated it was low on ink! So I found the email they sent, followed the links and purchased a new set of ink cartridges as well as some more paper.

This example demonstrates how the company engaged with me, gathered information about how frequently I require new ink, cross and up sell a relative product and ensured I did not defect to a competitor when purchasing my ink cartridges.

Email newsletters and email updates are also valuable methods of retaining customer loyalty and brand awareness. Newsletters and updates can be sent, daily, weekly, monthly, or a frequency defined by the user. These newsletters and updates are also a useful tool t remain engaged with a user even once they have completed a transaction with a brand.

Another form of email marketing, known as “Triggered Email Marketing” is what one of our clients has implemented on their e-commerce platform. The basic idea is, when a customer wishes to purchase a product which is out of stock they can click a link called “Alert me when back in stock”, so that when the product is back in stock the user will receive an email alerting them about it with a direct link to complete the purchase. John Lewis also have this feature enabled on their website they have dubbed it the “£4 million button” because this feature has generated £4 million pounds worth of sales since its implementation.

Email marketing does not have to be about random people receiving random sales emails. Email marketing can be very personalized and tailored to individuals, no longer is email marketing a “one size fits all” method of direct marketing it is much more 1 to 1. Also, to generate sales an email does not necessarily have to directly promote products or services.

Chameleon Stands Out....On Facebook!

donnaa@chameleonnet.com (Donna Adams) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:02:47 GMT

Having just got back from my round the world, (well, Vietnam and Cambodia ) charity travels. I arrived back at work and like any good employee, headed straight for Facebook.

I am really excited about Facebook this year (especially now I’ve posted the video blogs from my trip.)

Actually it’s the advertising on Facebook that’s really caught my eye.

I’ve been checking out Facebook’s advertising interface and the list of targeting parameters is endless, gender, location, relationship status, political views, workplaces and stated interests to name but a few! And, for each parameter you add, a calculation is made on how may people you will be targeting. The whole process is quick, simple and so very attractive to the eyes of an online marketer. – You can even choose your favoured pricing model (CPM / CPC.)

Seen as Facebook advertising is still relatively new I predict that costs will be low and conversion rates will be good. Mix that with the fact that campaigns are highly targeted and you’ll be bound to see some great ROI.

In order to jump on the Facebook advertising bandwagon you’ll need a Facebook Page. I have just set Chameleon Net up with our very own page – Take a look.

It’s important to remember not to just use the page as a stepping stone to allow you access to the advertising features. A page must be managed and kept up to date. Once you have your page Facebook users can become fans of your company, service or product. The Page then acts as a great way to interact with, and contact your customers and also spread the word amongst their friends.

As with a Facebook profile, Facebook pages also have many features such as adding RSS feeds, linking del.ici.ous accounts, galleries, videos, events etc.

I really urge you to take a look and try out Facebook (I didn’t mean for that to rhyme!)

Check out the Chameleon Net Facebook Page for inspiration and if you need any tips, why not post a question on our discussion board.

“Facebook” ad platform to be popular in 2008

kelm@chameleonnet.com (Kel Miah) — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 11:00:02 GMT

2007 showed phenomenal growth for “Facebook”, by the end of the year it had 7.6M active UK users, that’s 12.5% of the population. With so many active users participating on the social networking site some form of advertising system to target these users was inevitable.

Social networks such as Facebook create groups of niche users by gathering some personal information about them, such as hobbies, interests, marital status, and age. This information is primarily used to provide users with a compelling and interactive experience, but they also help build an advertising profile.

What these niche groups create is the opportunity to target very specific audiences with relevant ads which they may find interesting. As an advertiser you would expect more ROI or a higher click through rate if your ads were being served to pre qualified traffic.

Facebook’s ad platform consists of 3 major types of platforms, Facebook Pages, Facebook Social ads, and Facebook Beacon.

Facebook Pages - allows brands to have profile pages on in the same way that users have them.
Facebook Social Ads - allows advertisers to use the full range of profile information to target people by age, gender, relationship status, location, and so on.
Facebook Beacon - is a widget-like system being adopted on 44 third party partner sites. Activities on sites using Beacon will flow back into a Facebook user's News Feed or Mini-Feed, allowing their friends to know some of what they did at that site.

The basic principle of the advertising platform is similar to conventional platforms, using Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Impression (CPM) pricing models.

I can imagine a lot of UK advertisers experimenting and trialing the Facebook ad system, and just as Facebook demonstrated phenomenal growth in 2007 I believe their ad system will prove very popular in 2008.

I expect users to be highly receptive to these form of ads, my first impressions are that the ads to not lower the user experience and because the ads are highly targeted the users see them less as advertising and more as recommendations.

If one of the user’s hobbies is listed as reading comic books and Formula 1 racing, then ads for Formula 1 merchandise and reviews about the newest comic book will be seen as recommendations rather than traditional advertising.

Online Marketing Predictions for 2008

andrewd@chameleonnet.com (Drew Davies) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 14:57:44 GMT

With some major shake-ups in the Online Marketing world over the last twelve months, 2008 looks set to be a balance of new strategy and contingency. As PPC advertisers grow in number, an increasingly crowded marketplace will force some to experiment with more niche engines to ensure a return while the search engines will all be tweaking their natural algorithms every which way they can (Google patenting new image reading technology for example). 2008 is going to be a year of surprises, but let’s see if we can foresee a few trends:

Email
With the effort and skill it takes to ensure email lists are clean and the communications get through, we might see more companies providing an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) / blog alternative to email broadcasts allowing technically savvy recipients to source the info as they want it, avoiding “inbox overload” with a demographic quick to unsubscribe.

PPC (Pay Per Click Advertising)
Yahoo’s much needed PPC Platform update last year has paved the way for Advertisers - distrustful of the clunky old system - to head back for a look, especially if they’re finding it increasingly expensive over at Google. Yahoo’s new Platform is in some ways a carbon copy of Adwords, however there are cheap clicks for the diligent, and the similarity between the two systems will make it easier to duplicate PPC campaigns across the Engines.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
Future Proofing for SEO has always seemed an oxymoron, but 2008 will be the year sustainability gets serious. Forward thinking companies with a history of search engine marketing should look at their on-going strategy to ensure a synergy between process and results. Can in-house or agency teams make effective changes quickly (especially after Algorithmic updates)? How will new copy evolve and be optimised? What are the long term link-bait goals?

Link Building
With Google stepping up the war on link buying, Link Builders will branch off into two camps – increasingly covert campaigns on one side and transparent link strategies on the other. Covert will mean closed door link “arrangements” between sites, especially in engineering those all important editorial links. Of course there are high risks to this approach, which leads us nicely to the more ethical option…

ePR (Online PR)
Already a vital tool when building online influence for our clients, 2008 will see ePR recognised as that must-have ingredient when sourcing links from highly credible websites and blogs. Avoiding the money-for-links trap, ePR puts the emphasis on relationships and trust, connecting key influencers with content and opportunities for mutually beneficial results.