I plan to thin out my bookmarks, remove most of my RSS feeds, read a book or two instead of blogs and take another run at blogging perhaps in a different form later.

G’Day for now

Here’s my view on what banks should be focusing on instead of getting distracted with blogs and social web stuff.

1. Get the basics right first - implement a CRM solution and start communicating effectively with your customers.

2. Find out what your customers want - don’t spend a cent until you have canvassed opinion from a cross section for your customer base, you might be surprised at what they have to say.

3. Support a customer opinion panel - qualified opinion from a cross section of the base is more valuable than a blog at this stage. Remember who is likely to participate in a blog.

4. What’s the point in preaching to the choir - it’s far more challenging to target new customers and segments than looking for congrats from diehards. Plus these people are not the future of your business.

5. If you are considering developing a social web strategy be objective and assess it like you would any other channel. Don’t be fooled by arguments that it is the new way to communicate, it’s authentic etc. The vast majority of people don’t have a clue about these technologies Geez for that matter most people don’t even use internet banking!

6. Be wary of theatrical tech types who are dismissive of stats - if they can’t back it up why spend the money. Last time I checked I couldn’t find one instance of an FI losing customers because they didn’t have a Web 2.0 product!

Don’t get me wrong (for about the 10th time) I love technology and think all this webby 2.0 stuff is interesting but when did it become essential to integrate the social web or a blog in order to create an effective marketing strategy. Honest to God if you listen to all the geeks out there literally wetting themselves about how essential and important this stuff is, you could be forgiven for thinking your brand could be wiped out if you don’t run out and develop a Facebook strategy - or thinking you’ll never get a job without 300 LinkedIn connections and loads of sycophantic personal recommendations expertly vetted by hang on a minute YOURSELF!

I might be a bit older than some and defintely not older than most but I do have the experience of working in the first dot com experience in late ‘99 / 2000 for a tech company in London, UK. Although not the same in scale perhaps and outright hysteria there are some parallels with what I see being said and boosted about the social web right now. It is utter nonsense to feel that you have to rush out and develop a Web 2.0 strategy despite what the boosters would have you believe, relax it’s just a channel and over time the channel will grow, evolve, normalise and then become mainstream if the market dictates. It is reassuring that I am not alone Tom Wolfe recently commented that he doesn’t read blogs anymore because of the narcissistic tone and lack of quality writing and here’s an interesting post from one chap who likens this to being a monkey on a treadmill.

Marketing is about identifying and connecting with all groups not just over excited tech types creating a job for themselves or techies promoting techies.
The other interesting thing is that when asked about metrics most of these social web experts don’t have an answer and actually believe that if you are asking about metrics, reach, usage or any other factors that we use to measure media performance then you just don’t get it. Coz the social web is so innately brilliant, so amazingly awesome that it just doesn’t require measurement and scrutiny. They use words like authentic, community, and engagement as if this had only just been invented or thought about. Do me a favour - marketers have been thinking about these basic elements since well marketing was invented durr.

My point of view is not to bash the technology which is impressive (ish) but that the numbers didn’t add up and the amount of hype and exposure SL was getting was out of whack with usage and membership rates. Therefore, from a Marketing perspective it currently was not a viable media choice. So after rocking the boat of a couple of people in Vancouver who felt it necessary to try and put me in my place and point out that we are all glimpsing the future of online collaboration and business interaction (I disagree) I felt the following seemed to provide some objective assessment of the SL hype.

Bottom line is that there aren’t enough active users according to an interesting piece in the LA Times to make it a viable marketing platform - Forrester reckons there are only 30-40000 active users at any one time. In addition, and perhaps to the discomfort of many of the ’social marketing experts’ who are boosting SL many of the real world companies are either deserted or closed down and many of the most popular destinations cater for all the real world vices - brothels, strip clubs and casinos.

No doubt certain people will keep promoting SL as an eco friendly way to do business, cut down on air travel etc. etc. and this may happen though one would hope not in its current form. Plus one would hope that Linden Labs can do something about managing their own carbon footprint. There are plenty of alternatives out there and it will be interesting to see whether SL is better off without real world companies and left to grow organically. As for the feeling that this is a glimpse as to how we can do business in the future I’ll stick to free video conferencing with Skype thanks!

Once you have spent time in Australia it really hits home how vast this amazing country actually is, in many ways it is much bigger and vaster than Canada. I know in pure land mass terms it is not but so much of Canada is unuseable land and perma frost and uninhabited. Although Oz’s population is considerably smaller they have great cities spread out in a different way to Canada with vast distances between each. Now the reason for mentioning this is to do with the different local culturalal nuances that exist. It is going to be fascinating immersing myself in the market and getting a chance to experience the Oz way of life. One thing I have noticed straight away is that the newspapers here are much better than Canada and similar to the UK - higher quality, more comprehensive, have  a lifestyle element and most importantly have decent weekend editions. Plus they have a dedicated financial news publication and personal finance sections that you can actually understand.

So far so good!!

But the purpose of my blog is to explore Marketing angles and what is strikingly apparent compared to the North American market is the relative lack of development of broadband. Most governments have recognised the need to facilitate access for all to broadband the enabler of the 21st century information economy. Amazingly Australia seems to have got itself in a bit of a pickle untangling itself from a duopoly 10 years ago and a distinct lack of progress regarding a digital strategy. Anyhow that seems to be a business opportunity so I’ll be posting more over the coming weeks.

In the meantime, it is refreshing to be in a market where marketers are not afraid to be edgy and in particular use humour to drive their message. In many ways Canadians and Australians are the direct opposite of one another which is interesting.

Consider how big the audience for Joost would suddenly become if it was delivered via set top box, as Techcrunch rightly says free is the killer price point. All we need now is for Apple to announce Joost on AppleTV.

1. Their recent launch of Street Level search was badly handled from a PR / communications point of view and the service is invasive in its current form. CNET has a useful summary here. 2. This much power over a sector has never been a good idea - will Google become the next Microsoft and evolve to being thought of in the same terms i.e. omnipresent but accepted sort of. There could be a backlash on the horizon.
3. I know they profile Gmail so they can target us with ad’s. But on the back of point 1 what seemed a couple of years ago as acceptable for a free email account with generous storage now appears a little more troublesome.4. Google stores too much personal search information and keeps it far too long on US servers.

There is no doubting that Google does great things but as the saying goes with great power comes great ahem revenues. But it does highlight the privacy question and in particular how our anonymity is being eroded. This may seem a strange observation for a marketer to make when knowing your consumer is paramount and new technologies are providing  us with unparallelled access to data. But there is also a social and ethical aspect to this that needs to be tackled as marketing does not exist or operate in a vacuum and needs the participation and consent of the population in order to work. Otherwise we start to battle against onerous legislation curbing marketing practices like telemarketing, guerrilla marketing and the like. Consumers need to feel confident that their personal information is being handled correctly, I am fairly certain that it is not as a couple of recent personal examples seem to indicate -

It seems now that whenever I go into a store to purchase something I am asked to part with valuable personal information  - name - why do they need to know my name, address, post code and telephone number. Hang on all I want to do is buy X, I haven’t opted into a privacy policy nor have I been told how my data will be stored or used. I think many  retailers are operating way out on the edge of what is acceptable and ethical practice and surely will get some push back either from consumers or Privacy Groups. I have a small group of retailers I gladly sign up to receive information from - Toys R Us, TJ Kids, Safeway, The Bay and Ikea are not on that list!

I have also spent some time recently trying to opt out of various promotional mailing lists for which I must have opted into when I bought something - I think. What seemed like a straightforward thing - click the link to unsubscribe has proved a real hassle. And the two worst culprits Zip the online DVD retail arm for Rogers and Dell. In the case of Zip several months after opting out and closing my account I am still having dialogue about the amount of personal information they want to keep about me and Dell continue to spam me despite the fact I have received various emails confirming that I am no longer on the database.

In my view the marketing function in all businesses has to place great value on the data and information they collect about their consumers and prospects. It is a privileged position and must be managed correctly. Transparency is key and consumers must be told when their information is being collected and how it will be used. If not then we face alienating people and undermining any trust. The holy grail for marketers is to have our  business bookmarked and a consumer opted into our CRM program, being active and spending regularly. If the current trend persists an accident is waiting to happen e.g. IKEA losing a briefcase with all their Canadian database and the sudden realisation by tens of thousands of customers that they have been unwitting participants in a very large database that has been compromised.