Simon Lilly's Blog

Email marketing on ice at Ben & Jerry’s

// July 8th, 2010 // 6 Comments » // social media, web thoughts

Speculation over the past 18 months has been rife that email marketing is dead. Dead is probably far too harsh a term, but I think most progressive digital marketeers would agree that the sooner bad email marketing dies the better! By bad I mean, un-targeted, badly designed, sliced-up image-laiden email messages that can only be summarised as e-mail fail.

So when one of the guys in our team got an announcement from Ben & Jerry’s, that they were stopping their monthly customer email, I thought it would make a brilliant blog post on a big company making a massive digital marketing mistake…

On closer inspection, it’s actually an extremely very well planned and executed piece of digital marketing. Take a look: Ben & Jerry’s is Moo-ving

Here’s 3 reasons why I think they did the right thing:

1. They asked their subscribers what they wanted…

Asking their audience what they wanted, before making a decision like this, is the best way to decide. By asking their customers and then referring back to that in their communication it’s ten times harder for their subscribers to do anything other than just go with it.

2. They exited in style…

Ben & Jerry’s emails have always brought a smile to my face (and they’ll be missed), but the excuse that their ‘hooves simply weren’t built to type quickly‘ is light-hearted, tongue in cheek, but basically says that they only have so much digital marketing resource and they are going to move it to where their customers want it to be.

3. They left the barn door open…so the cows could come home

Digital marketing is always changing and they’ve cleverly not ruled out future e-mails – ‘it was too hard to say goodbye to e-mools altogether, so we’ll still send you the odd email on special occasions‘.

So the future for Ben & Jerry’s lies in the social media playground of facebook and twitter, considering all of the above I like their thinking.

P.S. Ben & Jerry’s got a great ‘festival themed’ homepage at the moment, well worth a click (and turn up the speakers!)

Are you the next Mayor of your local Starbucks?

// May 17th, 2010 // No Comments » // social media, web thoughts

Mashable today covered a story that users of location-based social networking tool Foursquare could qualify for discounts at Starbucks. Social-media savvy customers simply need to regularly check-in at their favourite Starbucks. If you are the person that checks-in most at a particular venue then Foursquare rewards you by making you the Mayor of that location. Starbucks is one of the most pro-active brands in the social media space and is rewarding it’s Starbucks Mayors with a discount voucher for a Frappuccino.

The strategy behind this is a simple one, a check-in on Foursquare is the equivalent of a status updates on Facebook or a tweet on Twitter, in that the message is instantly transmitted to your Friends / Followers. This kind of thirst quenching viral promotion via social media puts your brand at the forefront of the customers mind and is another fine example of digital viral marketing.

Is location the next big digital marketing trend? For some food-retail businesses the answer probably is an immediate yes, for the rest of us it’s a case of watching, listening and learning.

10 Ways to Deal With a Social Media Explosion

// March 28th, 2010 // No Comments » // social media, web thoughts

What is the best way of preparing or repairing your brands reputation when big news breaks online? From a secretive new Apple product launch to a damning piece of negative press, once it appears online, its only a matter of time before the waves start to hit the social media shores.

I’ve taken 10 key learnings from a number explosions that I’ve observed and been involved in over the past few months and wanted to share them with you.

1. Predict

If at all possible, thorough preparation for a big online news event can be priceless. Creating a set of frequently asked questions can be a extremely valuable resource when composing blog comments, Facebook replies or Twitter tweets. If you have the luxury of a PR team then these guys can be invaluable at helping prepare.

2. Prepare

Can your blog cope with a traffic spike or do you need to use a plug-in like WordPress’s Super Cache to take the strain? If you have a good relationship with your host, let them know before that traffic is coming so that they can have support available if your hosting does start to slow down.

3. Plan

Big announcements usually have a time that they go live. Make sure that everything you need to be is in place before the event. This allows you to totally focus on dealing with the positive feedback and/or negative fallout that the announcement may bring.

4. Filter

If you are expecting feedback from your announcement/release then carefully prepare your feedback channels. Make sure comments are enabled on blog posts, create a Facebook Note that all of your comments can accumulate in and consider setting up a dedicated e-mail address for feedback to be sent to. Setting the channels up effectively means you have less places to monitor and messages can be communicated quickly across fewer places.

5. Observe

You don’t always need to rush in and react to the fallout from an announcement. More often than not there will be positive and negative messages – look for trends and themes, especially in the negative comments.This will help when composing replies.

6. Respond

Preparing a reponse that answers a number of concerns is more efficient that addressing each one seperately. That said, your reply strategy should be dictated by the volume of responses, ideally you would reply to each and every piece of feedback individually, but sometimes that just is not possible.

7. Trust

This one involves a leap of faith that some people may not be willing to take. If you are confident in your brand (and your customers) then have faith that the loyal and passionate customers will see the positive side and hopefully they will make up a large volume of the social media buzz.

8. Listen

Even if you aren’t planning to respond to tweets on Twitter, still listen to what people are saying. You might find it useful for coming up with answers or even predicting the questions that haven’t been asked in other channels.

9. Rotate

Dealing with an onslaught of feedback via Twitter, Facebook, the Blog is tough going. Creating unique, well crafted responses quickly and efficiently is time consuming and mentally tiring. Make sure you have more than one person fire-fighting otherwise the quality of responses may drop over time.

10. Evaluate

Don’t wait until the explosion has passed before you begin to evaluate. Keep notes of lessons learnt during quiet periods. There can be a huge amount of activity in a short period of time and this stop-start nature will mean that recalling all the occurrences in detail will be challenging.

Now you know what to do, find out what not to do…

5 Things to Avoid During a Social Media Explosion

// March 27th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // social media, web thoughts

The spotlight turned back on to social media management recently following the way that Nestle handled the ‘social media explosion’ that occurred on their Facebook Page. Greenpeace created a video about Nestle’s use of palm oil in Kit Kat’s and how it directly endangered the lives of orangutans. This video quickly went viral after it was removed from YouTube and the main focal point for the public’s rage was the Nestle Facebook Page.

Below are 5 things to avoid doing when the going gets tough.

1. Moderation

Don’t delete peoples comments, unless they are totally irrelevant or break the terms of use of the environment you are in. On Facebook there is a Report function that might be advisable to call upon rather than deleting a comment. The removal of comments is both frustrating (for posters) and confusing (for readers).

2. Composure

Remain calm and collected, don’t rise to any comments that are obviously posted to generate a reaction. Never reply in anger.

3. Change

Resist the urge to edit or tweak your original statement, treat a post in social media like you would a blog and use strike-throughs and updates to modify a message.

4. Haste

The immediate reaction to a social media onslaught on your Facebook Page or Blog is to quickly reply to each comment or query. The danger here is that the quality of your message will be effected. Slow down and where possible compose responses that meet the needs of a number of commenter’s into a single reply.

5. Abandon Ship

I’ve seen on more than one occasion a brand’s Facebook Page that has been abandoned after an explosion. If the situation is not managed well the community of ‘fans’ that remain may be very jaded and any communication that the brand communicates might be met with negativity. The only way to resolve this would be to back track and clearly address the root cause of the original problem and hopefully move forward from there.

I hope you’ve found these 5 pieces of advice useful and it would be great to have any additional words of wisdom added in the comments below…

Facebook Mail to rule the webmail world?

// February 6th, 2010 // No Comments » // social media, web thoughts

When was the last time you logged into your Hotmail account? Not recently I would imagine…Facebook’s latest project is looking to make your Hotmail holiday a permanent thing.

TechCrunch has released details of a project codenamed ‘Titan’ that may well change the face of e-mail marketing. Facebook are planning to launch a full functional email solution much akin to Gmail or Hotmail in the coming months. So what will it include?

• Access from the walled garden of Facebook or via POP/IMAP (Outlook/Express/Live Mail can be used to read your email.)
• A unique @facebook.com email address. Probably based on your Vanity URL

The quick win could be for Facebook to utilise it’s Microsoft connections and base their email solution on Hotmail, but knowing Facebook they are going to develop this themselves.

If they do develop something unique to themselves from the ground-up then we could have a whole new email client to deal with – more testing of e-mail rendering and spam scoring is guaranteed…

So where does this fit in the webmail landscape? I think Gmail has a hardcore, committed following that love the labelling, organisation and simplicity of the conversation based layout. The big threat ironically could be to Microsoft and it’s Hotmail solution. This has become a spam filled webmail system that people are using as a rubbish bin for unwanted email. If a new solution was introduced that offered better spam control, a great user-interface and was hosted on a website you visited almost daily then I think the winner is clear to see.

This project is one that all digital marketers will have to watch closely.

Read more about this at AllFacebook in their 5 Features Facebook Should Add To Their New Email Product

iPhone 3GS Launch and Twitter

// June 9th, 2009 // No Comments » // e-commerce, social media, web thoughts

After following a couple of liveblogs reporting on the Apple WWDC last night and the launch of the new iPhone 3G S I turned to the retailers websites to find out how to get hold of one. Neither the O2 or Carphone Warehouse website had been updated to reflect the announcement. For neither site to even have a holding page or even basic information for about 3 hours after the announcement surely was a missed opportunity. It may well be the lock down that Apple puts on the information it announces at these conferences, but the time delay still was pretty bad.

So in my time of I need I turned to the ever-reliable Google for the latest information and it was after a number of searches that the weakness of Google for breaking news was exposed. Saving the day came Twitter! Yes there was alot of noise on there from people, like me, despairing over the lack of information available, but eventually the O2 and Carphone Warehouse twitter streams started to post information. O2 broke first with estimated pricing, but then around 9pm left a message saying they were finished for the day. Carphone Warehouse then picked up and exceeded O2′s early strong position with Twitter user ‘@guyatcarphone‘ posting useful links and responding to peoples enquiries.

Around 11pm the retailers websites kicked into life with the bare essential information, tariffs appeared on O2′s site, then Carphone Warehouse again outdid them with a simple, but effective iPhone 3G S pre-registration system.

All in all, an interesting launch to follow online and Carphone Warehouse clearly went the extra mile in providing the personal touch for the UK early adopters amongst us.

Friday Focus: Facebook Pages

// April 24th, 2009 // No Comments » // social media, web thoughts

If you are involved with a brand, business, band or think you’re in a line of business where you might have ‘fans’ then setting up a page on Facebook can be a very rewarding adventure. As a first step into social media it’s potentially a great way to develop an online community, but don’t assume that if you build it they will come. Once the Page is ready to go live you will need to use your full armoury of marketing channels to put up signposts to your fantastically polished Page.

Please also be aware that developing content and keeping on top of your fans questions and queries can become a full-time job, build in management and review time in your work schedule. There are some great resources below that make essential reading before you click the ‘Publish’ button…

Facebook’s very own guide – giving you background information, how to prepare and a step-by-step guide.

A handy 10 page Facebook Pages PDF (updated March 2009) also from the Facebook team that gives you an extra level of information, from Page publishing through to looking at user statistics.

Following Facebook’s recent overhaul Mashable pulled together a superb Guide for Social Media Marketers – highlighting the opportunities and challenges of setting up your first Facebook Page.

Mashable is a superb social media resource and their 5 Elements of a Successful Facebook Fan Page post really supported that position.

If you are seeking inspiration Peter Kim setup a very useful Wiki packed full of social media examples. Sort by type, find Facebook Pages and there are some good examples there.

Probably the best way of researching is to dive into Facebook itself and search for brands, most of the big boys have pages, with varying examples of how to and how not to setup a Fan Page on Facebook – Skittles, Maltesers and Innocent all offer good, simple examples.