Marketing is a dirty word

Image taken from a really good article at socialmediatoday.com

But it gets worse. Either HabitatUK was using an auto-tweet app to generate tweets with whatever was Twitter’s latest trending topics, or whoever it was who was tweeting on their marketing staff was completely deprived of good sense, because you can see above the True Blood tweet there is a tweet with the #Mousavi hashtag – they were blatantly trying to cash in on the conflict, killings and political unrest in Iran. As I type this, the HabitatUK Twitter account has had all evidence of it’s spam removed.

Honestly, I thought we’d all evolved beyond this. I thought marketers had a handle on how to properly engage through social media. No quick tricks, no smash-n-grab. I thought we were smarter. Better. I thought wrong. HabitatUK, this is one for the hall of shame.

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“1 in 3 smartphone owners currently use a Location Based Service at least once a month. An additional 20% of smartphone users said that they would be interested in using LBS if they knew more”

… that came from a recent post on the compete blog about location-based services on mobile phones. LBS’s are big, and will only become bigger as an ever increasing proportion of the population use smart phones. What the heck is a location based service, you might ask? Despite it’s cumbersome name, an ‘LBS’ is a service that uses information about your current location to deliver highly customised, highly relevant services to your smart phone / mobile PC, and is distinctly where the mobile web seems to be heading.

For example, you might be interested hanging out in an area for dinner, and decide to go and see a movie – if, say, Hoyts Cinemas were to do a LBS, it would likely point you to the Hoyts cinema nearest to you, and tell you what movies are playing, how long the movie goes for and how much tickets are. LBS is a big part of the future of mobile computing. As you can see from the graph below, there are core areas of LBS that remain untapped – in particularly high demand but low supply are LBS’s that deliver coupons / specials / giveaways.

From the above research, we see that people want ‘Special Offers’ out of an LBS, yet very few are currently using such a service. This gives us all the ingredients of an untapped market, wouldn’t you say (high demand coupled with low supply)? Well, enter MobiQpons,  who have recognised this opportunity. They are a location-based service that will give consumers exactly what they’ve been waiting for… using your phone’s GPS, MobiQpons will work out where you are, and send you vouchers for businesses within a 10km radius of your location. That’s fantastic news for marketers, but I see the real advantage being for local businesses / retail business. Think about it this way – how does a cafe stand out amongst all the other cafes on Chapel Street? Why not get coupons delivered to people’s mobile phones for a free upsize of your coffee… I know that’d get me coming to you rather than someone else. Then train your staff on upselling chocolate caramel slice, and you’re on your way to making some serious cheddar Or you might be, say, BigW. During Xmas shopping, you send coupons for $25 off Xbox 360’s – what better way to get people spending money with you rather than at KMart or one of your competitors’ stores.

Being a new service, of course, MobiQpons is facing a significant challenge before it can become a killer app – the test of it’s success will lie in it’s ability to get advertisers to provide coupons in the first place… no consumer wants to install an app that is designed to give them coupons if there’s no coupons to be had. The inherent difficulty of achieving that advertiser buy-in, of course, is that advertisers will want to use platforms that have high user numbers. Yet you cannot get users without the coupons, and you won’t get the coupons without users, and so on and so on. It’ll be interesting to see how mobiQpons go about addressing this. I’m guessing we’ll see businesses getting to use it as a free / cut price service for a limited time to build an advertiser base.

MobiQpons is so far only available on the iPhone. Blackberry and Android versions are coming soon, and hopefully they’ll see the light and develop a version for Windows Mobile too. If you have an iPhone, you can download mobiQpons via https://www.mobiqpons.com/ … it’ll be a handy little service if / when it gets up and running, so check it out so you can have the early adopter bragging rights

EDIT: 4/6/09 – I see from mobiqpons’ twitter feed that they have 1500 users so far, and are serving 20% off vouchers for Borders. Looks like a solid start.

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I wasn’t going to weigh in on the Foundry’s anti discrimination ad when I first read the post about it on mumbrella the other day, simply because I knew there’d be plenty of others commentating on it. However, I’m puzzled as to why there’s such a mixed reaction to the Foundry’s anti-discrimination pitch for the ABC’s show, the Gruen Transfer.

I’d like to take this opportunity to express my support for the Foundry, for Adam Hunt (the creator of the pitch), and for the ad itself. When we’re living in a world where Underbelly can show as much T&A as they want (not that I have a problem with that), coupled with copious amounts of bloodshed, it’s hard to believe that an ad about discrimination can cause such concern. The ad was intelligent, and extremely powerful, holding a mirror up to the ugliness that is prejudice. So props go out to The Foundry and Adam Hunt on this one… top notch job on creating a dialogue on a very important topic.

First off, massive props to Tourism Queensland for their Best Job In the World campaign. I slagged it off a bit when they had the fake tattooing video incident, but this campaign is now a benchmark marketing / PR effort and the team in charge should be given a gold ticket to Willy Wonkas chocloate factory. But there’s one thing I’m tripping on – why’d they choose Ben Southall? I could go into the numerous reasons why I’d never have picked him, but I’ll let youtube do the talking for me. The first video, Ben Southall’s winning audition vid for the Best Job in the World. The second, Jeremy from PeepShow’s Big Brother audition. Can you tell the difference? Cos I’m struggling to…

EDIT: 12/5/09 – the dude/dudette who put the second video on youtube has just disabled embedding… how very prattish of him/her. So if you want to view Jeremy’s Big Brother audition tape, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1fIHzynA04

I get asked alot when I’m talking to people who want to get more into consuming information on the net “what is RSS?” or “How do I Use RSS?” so I thought I’d so a quick blog post on it. RSS (an acronym for “Really Simple Sydnication”) is a great little web technology that allows you to have content from your favourite sites sent to your desktop – it removes the need for you to visit sites individually, meaning a great time saving, not to mention the reduced chance of missing out on news by forgetting to go to a certain site on a certain day. I make checking my RSS feeds a part of my morning routine because it means I start the day with all the news I need to know, without the hassle of trekking from site to site to get it – I simply open my “RSS Reader” (I’ll get to what that means), and I have all my news in front of me. Only around 11% of the online audience are using RSS, which I think is a great shame. The following is a quick introduction to RSS and how to use it.

How does RSS work?

The orange icon to the right is the RSS symbol. If you see it on a page, it usually means that an RSS feed for the page you are viewing is available – anywhere you see this icon, you should be able to ’subscribe’ to an RSS feed. This means you can have content from the site that is displaying the RSS symbol sent directly to your RSS reader (I’ll cover what an RSS Reader is in a little bit, but for now you just need to know it is software that will allow you to read the news items that are sent to you when you start using RSS). In a way, you can think of RSS as similar to email, in that content is sent to you, you don’t have to go to the site to retrieve new content each day. To subscribe to an RSS feed, you need to do one of two things:

i) click the icon on the page itself, which should take you to the RSS feed’s homepage which will give you an option to subscribe OR

ii) click the RSS icon in your browser’s menu bar (the picture below is where the RSS icon appears in Internet Explorer 8 – in firefox 3, the symbol is in the right hand edge of the address bar)

Clicking on either of these options will take you to the RSS feed for the page, and will almost always have a link that, when you click it, will subscribe you to that particular ‘RSS feed’ using your browser.

Um, what is a RSS Feed?

‘RSS feed’ refers to the combined list of content that is sent through to you from all of the different RSS services you ’subscribe’ to. Let’s say I subscribe to the RSS Feed of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Business Day section - ’subscribing’ to that RSS feed means that every news article that goes onto the Business Day homepage will be sent directly to me. If I subscribe to the RSS feeds of 20 sites, my combined ‘feed’ is made up of the news content that is being sent to me from all 20 of those sites.

OK, I’ve subscribed to an RSS feed, now what is an RSS Reader?

This is the bit that confuses most people – you’ve clicked the link that says “Subscribe to This Feed” but how do you then read the content? You CAN do it by just using your browser (open your Favourites folder and select the ‘Feeds’ option) but it is much easier and more satisfying to use an ‘RSS Reader’ (also called a ’feed reader’). The best way to think of an RSS Reader is like an email client – you know when you check your email in Outlook, or logon online to check your hotmail account? Well, an RSS reader is like Outlook or Hotmail, but instead of receiving emails, you’re receiving news items. Choosing which RSS Reader is best for you can be confusing aswell – whilst the most popular reader is Google Reader, I prefer FeedReader, as it starts up automatically when you start your computer, then automatically downloads any updates made to your RSS feeds overnight without you having to do anything. The other great thing about FeedReader is that is it is accessible when you’re offline (it is a desktop application, not a web based application like Google Reader). This means you can connect your computer to the net in the morning, download your RSS feeds for the day, then view them on your laptop when you’re on the bus / train / have a spare moment, even if you don’t have an internet connection handy.

The other great thing about FeedReader 3 is that, as it runs in the background, every time you click on the Subscribe button in Internet Explorer or Firefox, it will automatically add that RSS feed to the reader. Google reader requires you to manually update which RSS feeds you want to receive, which can be confusing for beginners. For my money, FeedReader is a better option for RSS beginners (or even intermediate users)  because it is so simple.

I’m still confused!

Let’s do a walk through on how we might subscribe to an RSS feed from a site we love. First of all, you will need to download Feedreader and have it installed, open and running (it’s completely free to install, but it is important that you make sure it is running before you subscribe, otherwise you will have to manually add RSS feeds you are subscribing to, which is annoying). The instructions I’ll be giving are based on Internet Explorer – other browsers will have almost identical steps and shouldn’t be too hard ot find.

Let’s subscribe you to Marketingisadirtyword.com to start off with (don’t worry it is easy to remove a subscription if you don’t really like my blog). The first step is to click the orange RSS logo in the menu bar at the top of the window.

You should be taken to a page that looks something like this – click the text that says “Subscribe to this feed”:

 You’ll then be shown the following popup window in Internet Explorer- Click the “Subscribe” button.:

 Then go to your open Feedreader window, and you’ll see the following dialogue box – click “Yes”:

After that, you’ll be able to view all the news articles that were added to that feed recently. The real value of RSS is found when you subscribe to a large number of feeds from other sites that you would normally have to go to one by one, and it’s easy to remove feeds from appearing in FeedReader, so don’t be afraid to subscribe to a whole bunch of RSS feeds and kill some of them off as you find them ill-suited to your interests. Below is a screenshot of all the RSS feeds I subscribe to – you can see how have all this information in one place can be helpful.

The greatest barrier to RSS adoption is that it can be confusing – if you’re still having trouble understanding RSS after this article, you’re probably not alone – you can contact me at the About Nick Ellery page if you’d like more help.