Introducing Internet Safety School for Parents and Carers

Our mission here at Wild Orange Media has always been to help everyone benefit fully and safely from all the good things that our digital world has to offer.

Yet one of the greatest threats we see in our internet-fuelled world today is to the safety and wellbeing of children.

Left unattended, with unrestricted access to the internet, a child has little hope of protecting their innocence. It’s only a matter of time before they are exposed to scenes that used to be kept firmly out of the reach of prying young eyes. The internet is wonderful thing, but very little of it is truly suitable for children.

That’s why our company citizenship programme is firmly focussed on making the online world a safer place for children. But instead of working directly with children, we’ve chosen to give our time to educate parents and carers about the dangers their children may face online. Over the years we’ve given dozens of talks at schools and community venues and we’re really pleased to now share some of the slides we talk through at our brand new ‘Internet Safety School.’

Internet Safety School, Staying Safe in a Digital World for parents and carers from Wild Orange Media Ltd

But there’s one thing we’d like you to do to help. If you understand how parental controls and restrictions work on popular devices like PCs, Macs, smartphones and gaming consoles, why not help out a friend by giving them advice or offering to set things up for them? Or how about simply having a conversation with someone you know to find out if there’s more they could do to keep their children safe online? Your help could make a huge difference to a child’s life.

If you’d like to know more about our ‘Internet Safety School’, please visit our company page in LinkedIn. Just hit this link: http://www.linkedin.com/company/wild-orange-media-ltd/products

Three Charms But Four Alarms

Work, Rest and Play (Mars)

Power, Beauty and Soul (Aston Martin)

Soft, Strong and Long (Andrex)

 

We humans love seeing choices or lists presented in groups of three. Three gives a natural balance to things, as does five or seven.

But three really is the magic number for marketers and copywriters.

A recent study for the Make-A-Wish Foundation sought to find the messaging sweet spot for securing charitable donations. They randomly assigned a different set of reasons to research participants, each of which was designed to persuade them to part with their hard earned money.

One group received two egoistic reasons to give, another received two altruistic reasons to donate, and a third received all four reasons combined. Those in the last group, who were presented with four reasons to give, were less likely to donate than the other groups who received just two. It seems that at a count of four, the attempt to persuade had been too obvious, resulting in the participants actually being dissuaded to donate.

In another test, subjects were shown ads for a brand of shampoo that carried between one and six benefit claims. Those who were given an ad carrying just three claims rated the shampoo more highly than those receiving more or fewer claims. Again, it would appear that one or two benefits are not quite enough to persuade us, yet four or more start to feel like desperation, resulting in scepticism that throws into doubt the veracity of all of the claims.

So, next time you’re trying to persuade someone, keep your list of reasons why they should believe you to three. Simple. As. That.

Source and further reading: Influence at Work blog

Content 1 Advertising 0 – Why Great Content Wins Today

(This post by Allister Frost was first published on the Emarketeers’ blog)

Content, content, content… It seems everyone in marketing these days is talking about content. The stats prove it too with the number of Google searches for “Content Marketing” soaring 10-fold in the last two years.

And I’m a believer. I believe great content strategy should now lie at the foundation of every marketing plan. It is more important than SEO, PPC, CSR, or any other abbreviation you may know. It is the very essence of great marketing today.

To explain why, I’d like to you to come on a journey with me. A journey back to a simpler time, when computers didn’t yet rule the world.

Come on a journey with me…, to a time when the only compositions produced by One Direction are safely contained in their nappies.

Let’s go back a full two decades to 1993.

Welcome to a post-recession Britain where unemployment and social discontent have brought waves of rioting to cities across the country. Hip-hugging, high-waisted denim jeans are all the rage, Wayne’s World picks up best soundtrack at the BRIT Awards and the only compositions produced by One Direction are safely contained in their nappies. Even Tim Berners-Lee is probably wrestling with his TV remote trying to find his ideal holiday on Teletext.

Aside from the macro-economic similarities, to be in marketing in 1993 was a very different affair to the modern day. Broadcast media channels were largely limited to TV, radio, outdoor and press. And if a potential customer wanted to find out what a company had to sell she had to phone up to request a brochure or to book a visit from a salesman (yes, it was nearly always a man).

All of which meant that companies could often maintain a firm grip over what customers knew about their business and the products they had to sell. Opinions could be controlled and shaped with advertising and clever PR.

The printed press, at the very height of its powers, put its journalistic focus onto naming and shaming heavy-handed corporations and government officials. Only rarely would its attention fall on the minutiae of individual customer complaints, usually to share the news of the discovery of a cornflake bearing an uncanny resemblance to Sylvester Stallone.

Fortunately, smart marketing teams developed a neat way to discretely deal with unhappy customers (and who wouldn’t be unhappy to spot Rocky in their cereal bowl?). The inbound customer service phone line was born and the complaints of a generation of dissatisfied consumers were quietly paid off with the promise of money off vouchers or refunds.

It was a golden era of control for the marketing manager.

To coin a phrase: Marketeers had never had it so good.

Jump forward twenty years to 2013 and things are very different. With a multitude of digital avenues to consider—alongside the traditional analogue channels that still attract huge audiences—choosing where to place your message for the best results has become a marketing minefield. And while the fortunate marketeer with a generous advertising budget can still buy a substantial presence in paid media channels, there’s no longer any guarantee of control over what the masses ultimately hear about your brand. Today’s marketing manager now also has to compete with the voices of millions of digitally-empowered consumers. And most of the evidence now suggests it’s a battle we cannot win.

In their armchairs and bedrooms, coffee shops and trains, anyone with Internet access can now publish their opinions to a worldwide audience. This daily chatter, about the things that really matter to ordinary people, courses through social networks, discussion forums and review sites. These voices have ushered in a new marketing world order, where everyone’s opinion matters and the casting vote falls to those we trust the most.

You already know the bad news. 84% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know, while only 62% trust TV ads (source: Nielsen, Sept 2013). These are stats that should be etched into every marketer’s brain. People trust people, they don’t trust advertising, marketeers, salespeople or spin.

This isn’t a new phenomenon.

People have always trusted the people they know more than strangers or fancy advertising messages. But what has changed is the nature of the people we trust. In 1993, the people we knew comprised those we grew up with, lived near or worked with. In 2013, the people we know—or feel we know—now encompasses our extended social circles online and almost any human-made content we find on our personal journeys through cyberspace.

The intimacy of our online experiences can now create instant trust in content.

We are witnessing this remarkable shift playing out before our eyes. The intimacy of our online experiences can now create instant trust in content. When our internet journeys lead us, sometimes serendipitously, to useful content or advice, we are highly likely to consume and believe it. Our behaviours have changed a great deal from the passive consumption of advertising messages during the broadcast era. Today we know how to seek out the information we need and intuitively—although not always accurately—know what we can trust.

Fortunately for us marketeers, human brains are wired to work this way. Logic tells us that not everyone on a review site can be wrong. Or that if a friend of a friend once “Liked” a brand of dishwasher tablet, that brand must be worth considering next time we go shopping. These cognitive biases allow us to make sense of a rapidly changing world, to adapt quickly to new forms of information and not feel overwhelmed by the data. This brings both great responsibility and opportunity to everyone in the marketing profession.

And that, in a nutshell, is why great content really matters.

We are long past the day when organisations could rely on advertising alone to cut through the clutter and get our brands in front of the right people. Control has shifted from the few to the many. Today we need new skills to produce useful, creative content of many forms—blogs, videos, diagrams, reviews, photos, stories, whitepapers—and deliver it to places where it can be discovered, trusted, consumed, and shared. Crucially, our content must bring utility to people’s lives, answering questions they ponder or providing relevant entertainment that intensifies their relationship with the brand.

How do we do this? Join my exclusive Emarketeers webinar in December to find out. More details below.

 

WANT MORE? SIGN UP FOR OUR FREE CONTENT MARKETING WEBINAR

Allister Frost will be discussing this and all things content marketing on a special free webinar for Emarketeers on Friday 6^th December at 1pm GMT. Registration is now open at http://www.emarketeers.com/events/how-social-content-can-elevate-your-brand. We hope you’ll join us there.

Selecting A College With Gen Z And Its Parents

While preparing for my keynote address at The Association of Colleges’ Annual Digital Engagement and Marketing Conference in December I’ve recently been pondering some of the digital challenges facing education establishments.

Selecting a college and course to study is up there with the most important decisions of our lives. But what has the greatest influence over this decision these days? Do advertising and shiny prospectuses play the same role as in the past, or are we more susceptible to outside influences like what current students say and the daily chatter on social networking sites?

Today, anyone under the age of 18 belongs to a tribe that sociologists refer to as Generation Z. These young people have never lived in a world without computers. They are a highly-connected, technically savvy, and hyper-informed generation. These are the main constituents of this year’s student intake; a collective of purebred digital natives, who demand flexibility and choice in all aspects of their lives.

So when the time comes to select a college for further education, how do these young people decide? And will their parents or carers also turn to the same sources for advice?

For parents supporting a college selection decision, conventional guidance likely still holds considerable influence. Open days, brochures and course catalogues, will all play their part in guiding the decision. But so too will online channels like the college website and other sites that feature high in search engine results pages. This means review sites, college comparison tools, Ofsted reports, press articles, Wikipedia, and student forums are all likely to play a role in the choices parents make.

For the students, search engine results are also likely to dominate their research, and particularly those sites that render well on mobile devices. But so too will a largely hidden world of online chatter with peers. And it’s this loose, free-flowing banter that will likely have the greatest impact on each student’s final personal preferences, almost irrespective of the official literature a college may publish.

The task then for colleges looking to attract the best students and enhance their reputation, is to understand the full breadth of online and offline channels that are being used to inform decisions today, and to ensure that appropriate content can be found there. And then, by bringing together well-worn marketing techniques (like college prospectus and open days) with emerging digital channels (like chat forums and review sites), education establishments should have a better chance of persuading both parents and prospective students that their college is the right choice.

This means printed prospectuses that feel alive with up-to-date content, filled with the real voices of students speaking their minds. It calls for Open Days that encourage real-time feedback, opinion sharing and reviews. And teaching staff who embrace emerging digital channels and add their perspectives to the online debate.

Done well, the end results should feel accessible to all generations, yet be as authentic and trustworthy as the most socially-driven content on the web today.

It’s a daunting task, but one that every college must undertake. In the intense battle for relevance and standout, those who embrace the future today will be best placed to survive the longest.

I’ll be discussing this and crisis management in my talk in December. And we’ll also be looking at the future of digital marketing and some of the emerging techniques that innovative college marketers will be experimenting with very soon.

Want to learn more? Join me at The AoC Digital Engagement and Marketing Conference 2013 in London on 4th December to explore this topic further. Registration is now open on the AoC site. I hope to see you there.

Mind The Gap – Consumers 1 v Marketers 0

We live in a fast-changing world. Which means the longer you’ve held an opinion, the greater the chances your views may have fallen behind the times.

The latest fast.MAP Marketing Gap study (the 9th annual edition) shows once again how disconnected some marketers’ views are from those of their customers. Let’s take a look at some of the findings:

MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS

Overall, marketers expect around twice as many people to be “happy to receive” marketing communications than consumers claim. Across the 29 industries examined, the most welcomed sector for email marketing amongst consumers is ‘competitions’, appreciated by 32% of consumers. The least welcome are mortgages (6%) and loans/credit cards (7%), the appeal of which was over-estimated by marketers by more than a factor of two (at 15% and 18% respectively).

In fact, 58% of consumers now state they would prefer not to be contacted at all, through any channel, by companies they have no relationship with. Marketers again underestimate the extent of consumer rejection by almost 25%, believing that only 44% of consumers would feel this way.

TELEPHONY

No surprise that all forms of telephony marketing (landline/mobiles calls and SMS) are uniformly disliked, being welcomed by no more than 4% of consumers in any category. Yet marketers still over-estimate consumer willingness for telephony by between 100% and 400%. Two people in three would opt-out of text messaging marketing completely if there were a “Text Preference Service” that operates like the existing Telephone Preference Service,

Almost half (45%) of consumers now claim to hang up straight away when they receive a marketing or sales call, that’s up from 36% in 2011. Almost 1 in 10 (the mischievous 9%) will leave the phone off the hook to tie up the call centre line!

DIRECT MAIL

Around a third (32%) of consumers will open direct mail from any company (down from 38% in 2011), but marketers under-estimate this at 24%. It seems the general public is still more likely to open direct mail than the industry believes. It’s not all good news though; almost one in four consumers (23%) say they now don’t open any direct mail, up from 13% in 2011.

Interestingly, marketers also routinely overestimate the value of creativity in some channels. For direct mail materials, a third of marketers (33%) think interesting packaging will ensure it gets opened, but only 18% of consumers agree. Similarly one in four marketers (25%)  think design can increase open rates, but only 9% of consumers share this sentiment. An attractive envelope can motivate 10% of consumers to open a direct mail pack, but that is well short of the 18% estimated by marketers.

REVIEWS

Many businesspeople are terrified of negative consumer reviews, with marketers estimating that 23% of people share negative experiences through review sites. But the reality is that only a tiny minority (4%) of consumers behave this way.

With this in mind, surely marketers must have a clear grasp on the channels consumers most want to use when dealing with a customers services team? Again, the opinions of marketers seem well wide of the mark, with 21% thinking people would most prefer to use the phone, while in fact 32% of consumers would now most prefer to use email. Twitter, Facebook and LiveChats are also less likely to be used by consumers seeking customer service assistance than marketers believe:

SHARING

But, thankfully, everyone’s sharing content online these days. Except they’re not. More than half of all consumer (54%) say they don’t share any content online, but marketers estimate this amount at just 24%. And amongst those who do share content, most do so to entertain or make others aware, quite different and more altruistic motivations than those cited by marketers:

DEVICES

At least we know which devices consumers use these days. Most people have a tablet and smartphone, right? Nope! The laptop and desktop computer remain by far the most popular tools for internet access, underestimated by marketers by 45% and 30% respectively . Now we know why those fancy tablet and smartphone apps alone were not enough to hit last quarter;’s sales target.

COUPONS

How much must the face value of a coupon be before it will be redeemed. Marketers, it seems, have more expensive tastes than the average consumer. 81% of consumers will happily redeem a 50p (UK pence) coupon, up from 74% last year. But only 23% of marketers feel that a 50p coupon is sufficient to encourage redemption. Sometimes, it doesn’t take a huge reward to incentivise buying behaviour:

And while we’re on the topic of coupon discounts, only 20% of consumers claim to have used Groupon in the last year, well short of the 50% estimated by marketers. Similarly, newspaper collectible offers like The Sun Holidays and Daily Mirror LEGO are only used by 7% of consumers, against a 21% prediction by marketers. Most consumers, it would seem, simply cannot be bothered with collecting tokens any more.

PRICE PROMOTIONS

Consumers love price offers, far more than most marketers realise or are prepared to admit. A staggering 85% of consumers would be happy to switch brand if an alternative brand offered  a ‘Buy One Get One Free (BOGOF) deal, but only 42% of marketers believe this could happen. Even a 10% price advantage would be enough to switch brands for 68% of shoppers, far more than the 24% claimed by marketing professionals.

CSR

A quarter of marketers believe that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is unimportant, but only 7% of consumer agree, with the majority (60%) saying they feel it is very or quite important. Proof, if it were needed, that consumers expect companies to do the right thing and be held to account if their actions don’t benefit society as a whole.

 

SUMMARY

I’ve shared a lot of data in this blog post. The headline findings though are consistent: many consumer attitudes are changing very rapidly and marketers are often out of tune with real world consumers.

The only way to find out if your long-held opinions may have passed their expiry date is to stay closely connected to your customers.

• Don’t stick your head in the sand and fall into the trap of believing accepted wisdom

• Don’t lose sight of the realities of the modern world; some things change quickly, others take a little longer to become mainstream

Get out and speak with your customers, live in their shoes, see how they live their lives.

The opinion gap between consumers and marketers is as big as ever. What will you do, right now, to close the gap in your organisation?

Visualise Anything – This Is the Average Man’s Body

Technology is so powerful these days we can visualise almost anything we can imagine.

But data visualisations don’t have to be dull. Pie charts, graphs and flow diagrams all have an important role to play, but sometimes a picture truly does paint a thousand words.

That’s why I love this article from The Atlantic. From readily available BMI (body mass index) data, graphic artist Nickolay Lamm has rendered visual representations of the average man living today in the USA, Japan, Netherlands and France.

The results aren’t exactly a beauty pageant (get to the gym Mr USA!) , but they do instantly show how geographically dispersed societies create humans with noticeably different physiological characteristics.

And those differences would be so starkly brought to our comprehension without such clever visualisation skills.

What data do you hold that could be visualised to bring a story to life online?