The homepage is the target of many an internal tug-of-war. In institutions or corporations, separate departments all want a piece of the home page pie. In smaller companies, product or service advocates lobby for their pet project to get room in the “spotlight”. Even in your own personal web site, it can be tempting to give everything at least a little attention on the home page because you don’t want anything left out.
The Modern Media Agency Series is supported by IDG. With the explosion of mobile devices, advertising dollars will begin to shift to mobile for tech marketers this year. IDG Global Solutions President Matt Yorke explains why these trends should not be ignored.
In the not-so-distant past, media agencies spent a client’s marketing dollars on a standard set of carefully planned options — print newspapers and magazines, radio and television. How quaint. In 2011, TV still reigns at the top of advertising budgets, but online media is on the rise, and it’s transforming the way media agencies plan and measure campaigns. Jump-started by the economic downturn and propelled by changing consumer habits, Internet advertising and social media have captured a growing share of the market and a disproportionate share of the industry buzz and innovation.
Gone, too, are the days when simply having a corporate Twitter account or Facebook page was an accomplishment in itself. Agencies are finding innovative ways to integrate traditional media with social media and mobile to create networks of brand “touchpoints” for consumers.
Mobile is in. Metrics are in. Recession cutbacks are out. The perennial difficulty of measuring the effectiveness of marketing is not gone, but it has evolved. With constant instantaneous feedback pouring in from across the web, the biggest problem is knowing how to analyze the deluge of data — and turn it into action.
Series Supported by IDG
The Modern Media Agency Series is supported by IDG. With the explosion of mobile devices, advertising dollars will begin to shift to mobile for tech marketers this year. Ad networks, ad exchanges and real-time bidding significantly expand marketing options and underscore the importance of data. IDG Global Solutions President Matt Yorke explains why these trends should not be ignored. Read more.
For one hour on March 26, millions of people will turn off their lights and sit in relative darkness. It may seem like a random way to support environmentally sustainable action, but Earth Hour — a global initiative in partnership with the World Wildlife Fun (WWF) — is hoping that one hour of darkness will lead to a whole year of change.
Begun in Australia in 2007, Earth Hour has grown exponentially. Last year, more than 125 countries participated in the self-imposed blackout. Even major landmarks such as Rome’s Colosseum, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, Toronto’s CN Tower and Egypt’s Pyramids went dark to support the cause.
This year, Earth Hour will take place from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m., local time, March 26. The various time zones will create a wave effect as countries show their support hour by hour.
Despite the international acceptance and support, Earth Hour has been plagued by accusations of poor effectiveness. Sure, it’s great for people to spend an hour thinking about the planet, but what happens at 9:31 when all the lights go back on? What kind of change can a one-off event really have?
Earth Hour, on its skeleton crew, has been trying to answer that question for five years. Now, they think they might have the answer in a new platform designed for and powered by its millions of supporters.
Beyond the Hour
“Beyond the Hour” is a platform that allows anybody to post and pledge his or her environmental actions and then share those promises and stories through social networks. With global scale in mind, the platform will be translated into 11 different languages.
Users can mouse over the dynamic images to preview randomly selected actions or search by a variety of terms, including location. If users see an action that speaks to them, they can join in by clicking “do this” to mirror the pledge.
An app version of the platform has already landed in the iTunes store for iPhone, with an Android version on the way. Both offer all the same functionality of the web app.
Earth Hour also created embeddable widgets to allow bloggers to share “Beyond the Hour” from their own sites. All of these projects feed back into the platform.
An Environmental Resolution for the Planet
Earth Hour co-founder and executive director Andy Ridley always considered the hour to be a valentine to the planet, or even a New Year’s Eve-type event. He hopes Beyond the Hour will act like a web portal for millions of New Year’s resolutions aimed at environmental living. “The plan was always to go beyond the hour,” Ridley said. “If you can prove that hundreds of millions of people care, what do you do next? There’s only a few of us [on staff], so we had to make it open source and hand it over to the people out there. The next bit is asking: ‘What does everyone want to do?’ ”
Just like a normal New Year’s resolution, that idea obviously has its pitfalls. Are you really going to go to the gym more this year? Are you really going to switch our your incandescent lights this year? However, while it’s easy to point theoretical fingers, Beyond the Hour has already racked up some extraordinary promises.
The government of Nepal has committed to put a complete stop to tree-felling in the Churiya Range, a vital ecological and sociological forest area. Mengniu Dairy, a Chinese dairy company, is doubling the number of milk cartons it recycles and increasing its use of FSC-certified packaging. Clover Moore, the Lord Mayor of Sydney, has committed to another six separated bike lanes (“cycleways”), installing LED lights in parks and streets and endorsing a tri-generation plant to provide low carbon energy. Credit Suisse AG is sponsoring an Earth Hour in Singapore and also promising to send staff to a Brazilian forest reserve to support field research.
It’s possible to get involved even if you’re not a major government or company. Chloe Nicol, a 7-year-old girl from Australia, is guiding her school to increase recycling and reduce energy waste. Ridley pledged to only drink local beer to help cut down on the cost, waste and emissions of shipping and transportation. It may be small, but those little promises can add up.
So What’s the Big Deal?
Earth Hour’s mission is not revolutionary in and of itself. Many other organizations and non-profits have tried to use the Internet for green causes. What stands out is how the project has evolved to embrace social media not just as a talking point but also as a way to extend its impact. “The big inspiration [for the campaign] was the frustration that we were not reaching out to millions of people,” Ridley said. “We were only talking to people that already sort of agreed with what we were saying.” The first year, millions of Australians joined Earth Hour but the idea didn’t quite have global appeal.
The team used social media to spread awareness but also to listen to the global conversation. Ridley explained that Morocco joined Earth Hour in 2010 thanks in large part to seven students. “They contacted us through Facebook and said, ‘We want to do this for the whole city.’ We basically sent a letter to their mayor and that’s a story that’s sort of been replicated across the world,” Ridley said.
Despite having an extraordinarily low budget (Ridley said a lot of the work is done by friends as favors), online tools have been a way to grow the campaign without blowing the bank. Ridley hopes the new Beyond the Hour platform will help make the goal a reality by empowering the Earth Hour community. “The holy grail for us is to start getting lots of content but [also] to start getting into the situation where the kid in Beijing can connect with the kid in Rio, using Rosetta Stone, to share what they’re doing in their home or on the street. You can scale that to cities and countries.”
The whole point is not to create a social media “event” or blackout stunt but rather to use the rally point as a launch pad for environmental conversation driven by social networks and tools like Beyond the Hour. It’s possible for social media to inspire change, whether you’re the government of Nepal or just looking to drink local beer.
Now it’s your turn: What do you make of crowdsourcing social good and do you think it’s possible for the community to organize itself? Sound off in the comments below.
Interested in more Social Good resources? Check out Mashable Explore, a new way to discover information on your favorite Mashable topics.
This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.
The instant popularity of Instagram’s iPhone app — now with more than two million users — and the cross-platform appeal of Picplz have inspired early adopter brands and small companies to explore the business potential of this emerging trend.
On the Instagram side, you have big names like Starbucks, NPR and Brisk Iced Tea, as well as smaller players like Hatchcraft, Photojojo and Charity: Water. In Picplz’s corner are the San Diego Chargers, Madison Square Garden, artist Trey Songz, DJ Neil Armstrong and the L.A. Lakers.
Here’s a look at how brands are using mobile photo sharing services, like Instagram and Picplz.
Photo Ready
Mobile photo sharing has exploded as savvy application developers exploit the continually improving camera quality of newer handset hardware and tailor experiences that promote instantaneous sharing of stunning photographs.
Instagram and Picplz have done a stellar job at adding to the intrinsic emotional quality of photographs with filters that allow the everyman smartphone owner to point-and-shoot-and-share and feel like a professional photographer.
What, then, is the appeal for businesses? Those who are trying mobile photo sharing services are still figuring that piece out, but several are showing a willingness to test the receptiveness of their fans and the users of each service.
Both Picplz and Instagram have responded to organic in-bound brand interest with business-friendly updates. Picplz now has an analytics dashboard that helps business users chart views, likes and comments for each photo. Instagram, on the other hand, has introduced hashtags, a community tagging feature that opens the service up to brand campaigns.
Pretty in Picplz
Under the leadership of Manager of Internet Services Joel Price, the San Diego Chargers have taken to Picplz. The team account includes a collection of photos, taken by Price, of team members, stadiums, staff members, travel highlights and behind-the-scenes shots of the team’s offices.
“We get a lot of views, and the analytics are great,” says Price, “but we don’t get a ton of comments yet.”
Recently, Price used Picplz to give fans a photo tour inside Charger Park, the team’s home office. The effort received an enormous amount of positive feedback, he says, with several commenters pointing out how nice it is to feel connected to the team during the off season.
The Chargers have two primary objectives for Picplz: To better engage fans and to monetize photos through sponsorships. The former, says Price, is about bringing fans closer to the team, and in turn encouraging them to spend more on merchandise and tickets. The latter is a bit less tangible, though Price hopes the team can creatively engage with sponsors and potentially recruit players to post sponsored shots on Picplz.
Price consciously chose Picplz over higher profile competitor Instagram to connect with Chargers fans on Android, iPhone and the web, among other things. “Instagram feels like an advertisement for Instagram,” he adds, pointing out that Instagram photos shared to the web are cloaked in Instagram branding.
Insta-Appeal
Starbucks, one of the first brands to set up an account on Instagram, is pleased with early results.
“We’ve been using Instagram for a couple of months and think it’s a fun, different way to share photos of what’s going on behind the scenes,” says Product Manager Brad Nelson. “We’ve also found a lot of people already sharing Starbucks photos, so it’s been a joy to look through those.”
Indeed. Look up the #starbucks hashtag and you’ll find more than 1,000 photos that users have tagged, all of their own accord, with the Starbucks label.
“While we are still exploring initial opportunities, we already have almost 5,000 engaged followers,” says Nelson.
Instagram may be limited to iPhone users, but the two million member strong community appears especially responsive to calls to action. Take, for instance, a hashtag campaign from Instagram user @JoshJohnson and startup Hatchcraft. The two partnered and challenged Instagram users to tag their best Lomo-filtered photos with #jjchallenge for a chance to win a bamboo shadow box from Hatchcraft. More than 2,000 photos then poured in with the #jjchallenge hashtag.
“We had been doing these weekly challenges for about a month previous to the introduction of hashtags,” says Hatchcraft founder Shane Rich. “The response was tremendous, as it made it easier to enter the challenge.”
Future Potential
As these services mature, so too will the brands who use them.
Price would love to see Picplz introduce branding options at some point. For now, though, he’s looking forward to the Chargers next season and plans to post more travel photos, share away game stadium walkthroughs and find ways to incorporate and reward fan photo submissions.
And Rich sees a future ripe for business potential on Instagram. “If any business is willing to get a little creative, put some time into connecting with the community, and have some fun with it, then they will be received well and their product or service will naturally begin to be seen in the same light.”
Interested in more Business resources? Check out Mashable Explore, a new way to discover information on your favorite Mashable topics.
The Digital Marketing Series is supported by HubSpot, which offers inbound marketing software that helps small and medium sized businesses get found on the Internet by the right prospects and converts more of them into leads and customers. Learn more.
If this year’s SXSWi conference is any indication, the foremost digital marketing trends of 2011 will be central to one theme: user presence.
Too often, businesses over-engineer their marketing efforts in an attempt to capture the attention of their audiences’ minds and wallets. But audiences are smart, and they’re immune to these efforts.
We no longer seek out information — we expect information to be seamlessly integrated into our everyday lives. Picking up on that trend, small businesses plan to increase spending on inbound marketing in 2011, according to recent reports. These efforts will include established initiatives such as Facebook campaigns and location-based advertising, but businesses will also experiment with a handful of new (and not so new) strategies. Here are five digital marketing trends to watch as the year unfolds.
1. Group Messaging
Group messaging has undoubtedly become this year’s location-based service. The clear front-runners are Beluga and GroupMe, both of which offer users a way to communicate in small, personalized groups of friends. So, how does this tie into marketing strategies?
What more can you ask for as a business than to have groups of customers already populated and organized by interest, age and location? The data that these groups provide is invaluable.
Much like location-based marketing campaigns in 2010, marketers will be anxious to find ways to integrate messaging and purchase points into groups. As Beluga co-founder Lucy Zhang explained on a SXSWi panel this past weekend, the primary use case for group messaging this winter has been to organize ski trips. Imagine the marketability of those groups looking for ski gear, lodging and restaurants.
2. Reputation Engines
Somewhere along the way, professional networks have begun to exist upon a foundation of trivial metrics. Our everyday lives have become inundated by these reputation engines: mayorships on Foursquare, the velocity of one’s HurricaneParty, number of followers on Twitter, etc.
Several recent companies such as BranchOut, Honestly.com (formerly Unvarnished) and Hashable, have attempted to bridge the gap between real-world reputation and online marks, but it is unclear whether or not these companies will successfully convey the appropriate balance.
Marketers would be wise to turn to a keen eye toward these networks because they represent the base of influence, both online and offline. Whether or not the algorithms are perfect, each social network exists to harness the power of relationships forged in real life — and serves as a prime audience for marketing.
3. QR Codes
Ok, so QR codes really aren’t new. Businesses have been generating QR codes for marketing purposes for several years now. But I have a confession to make — I simply do not understand the success of QR codes.
The technology itself is rather trivial and has been around for more than a decade, even though QR codes penetrated the mainstream market pretty recently. For example, on a recent shopping trip to Sephora, I noticed the use of QR codes to collect additional information about products around the store. Considering I am admittedly secluded within the tech industry, I was anxious to know just how successful a somewhat “nerdy” marketing gimmick could be on the average, everyday consumer. So, I quickly asked a nearby sales clerk, “How many shoppers do you generally see scanning your QR codes each day?” Her response: “What is a QR code?”
Now, it’s obviously not fair to judge an entire strategy on a single participant, but this is where my own confusion lies. QR codes are everywhere. And yet, it’s as though consumers simply decided not to question them. Has this been your experience?
Regardless of how many scans a QR code will garner, it certainly appears that we will see an increasing use of them in 2011.
4. Startups for Startups
A few months ago, a startup received more than 10,000 signups within two days, without ever disclosing what it even does. And thanks to LaunchRock, companies can now create a no-fuss landing page for their business in a matter of minutes, thus initiating the single-most meta business model I have seen this year. These companies collect user contact information, promising access to their beta if they agree to publicize their own sign-up.
Which begs the question, how much information is really necessary to market to an audience? Not much it seems.
Users are hungry to be early adopters. Even mainstream users are becoming increasingly savvy to the newest thing -– tech is sexy again, and smart marketers know this. In 2011, I expect to see similar efforts that reflect this startups for startups meme. Everyone wants a piece of the startup pie and schemes like Launchrock are certainly a great way to gain attention and gather data.
5. Q&A Sites
Quora, a Q&A site launched in 2009, has mostly attracted the attention of the technology and media industries, but it will likely inspire mainstream marketers soon. The site, along with some of its competitors, has become a useful marketing tool. The Q&A space is quickly heating up, with influential organizations like TED and Facebook getting into the space.
Q&A sites provide a platform where users can engage in simple dialogue pertaining to any question — businesses have the ability to seed questions, interject into negative discussions, establish credibility and respond to competitor questions.
Much like a company blog that is built to drive conversation around a particular brand and industry, businesses will continue to find avenues to market to targeted audiences, such as those found within each Quora topic.
Conclusion
Marketing strategy in 2011 evolves directly from the location-based marketing of 2010. We have found that messages are most successfully communicated to audiences that have already coalesced around common bonds.
What do you think? Will you be more likely to engage with brands that market through the aforementioned channels?
Series Supported by HubSpot
The Digital Marketing Series is supported by HubSpot, which offers inbound marketing software that helps small and medium sized businesses get found on the Internet by the right prospects and converts more of them into leads and customers. HubSpot’s software platform includes tools that allow professional marketers and small business owners to manage SEO, blogging, social media, landing pages, e-mail, lead intelligence and marketing analytics. Learn more.
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If this year’s SXSWi conference is any indication, the foremost digital marketing trends of 2011 will be central to one theme: user presence.
