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marketing bootcamp – tough love for leaders
Last week was the first Marketing Academy bootcamp…
Inspired. Exhausted. Thoughtful. Excited. My #marketingacademy boot camp feelings!
— Laila Takeh (@spirals) May 24, 2013
What is a marketing bootcamp?
I was lucky enough to be selected from around 600 applicants as one of 30 Marketing Academy scholars. The selection process was rigorous; written application, employer endorsement, showcase piece, telephone interview, four psychometric tests and a panel interview!
There are three bootcamps in the 12 month scholarship. The other elements of the scholarship are mentor meets, lunch and learns, faculty days and coaching.
The bootcamps are two or three intensive days of active learning with all scholars in attendance. This first one was mostly led by @thelivingleader but we also heard from @gailgallie, @olibarrett and @petermarkey.
What did I learn?
Lots and lots and lots. Here’s a few of the easy to share bits:
- Leadership: A real leader is one that develops other leaders. Authenticity is key.
- Communication: Giving info isn’t the main leadership communication style; other key ones are seeking clarification, supporting, building.
- Networking: Don’t ask what someone does – find out about them as a person first. You can spot something useful to share by email later.
- Personal development: Focus on what you want to grow, if you focus on the negatives they will grow.
- Your vision: If you vocalise your ambitions as if they were already true – it makes them easier to achieve.
- Confidence: You can’t control how people feel, only how you treat them. So focus on what you give, not what you get.
- Pull and push: When leading there are times to push, and there’s a moment to switch to pull. If you keep pushing results will diminish.
It’s going to be an amazing year of learning – I’ll try to share it with you along the way.
the future of digital jobs
Discussing digital transformation often ends with the inevitable question… what happens to the digital roles (your job!) when the transformation is finished?
I’ve written about whether digital team’s will continue to exist before so I won’t go into detail again. But recently I spotted this salary benchmarking report by Propel which I thought gives some useful insights.
I particularly like the chart about new vacancies by role type. What this data makes me think is:
- there’s more growth in digital marketing roles than ‘back office’ tech and services.
- specific digital strategy roles are perhaps being subsumed into overall strategy roles.
- technology is more consumerised and development is getting slightly ‘easier’ to do and project manage with less-specialist roles.
What does it make you think?
practical mobile tips for non-profits and charities
I was one of the keynote speakers at Media Trust’s Go Mobile conference this week, a few people have asked for my slides and notes so here they are…
Notes:
Mobile is here
You have to think mobile for all of the experiences you are designing. It’s not going away and it’s not ‘on the horizon’, its well and truly here.
But it’s still evolving
Mobile compatibility is still not entirely standardised, it’s a bit like the www in the 90′s. Adoption of different devices is also changing rapidly. For example, in just the last year the UNICEF UK website has seen a big growth in iPad that has caught it up with iPhones, we also saw Google Nexus 7 appear as well as others.
Case: UNICEF UK Mobile Website
To make sure we had a mobile compatible site as quickly as possible we launched an interim mobile website of just a few key pages and the donation funnel. We’re working on optimising the whole of the site. To keep costs lower and give us increased technology flexibility we’re using separate ‘layers of tech’ to do the transformation rather than having a fully responsive site (for now).
Case: UNICEF Sweden website
Our UNICEF Sweden office, on the other hand, have created a fully responsive website. They were on the brink of a full website rebuild so it made sense to invest now and go ‘mobile first’. The site is designed for smartphones first and PC desktops last. They had to make some hard decisions on how to streamline content.
Forget about ‘mobile’
It’s easy to get obsessed about mobile devices, really what this change means is a change of behaviours. Remember behaviour first when you are designing user experiences. People are now using multiple devices, we don’t live in single screen households.
Time of day
This graph demonstrates a clear difference in behaviour that mobile has created. UNICEF UK non-mobile traffic peaks during working hours while traffic from mobile devices is consistent throughout the day, even into the early hours. This pattern is important when you think about how people are interacting with your brand.
Case: UNICEF UK Speak Up for Children
I’ve learnt the behaviour lesson. We (with an amazing group of partners) did a brilliant mobile campaign called Speak Up for Children, it was a great success in the end, but we failed at first. The original concept was to create the biggest voice petition in the world. It seemed to make sense that a mobile campaign should use the voice feature of your mobile phone.
We quickly learned that very few people wanted to interact this way, it was just a bit too intrusive / embarrassing. So we paused the campaign and replaced the petition with a simple email address entry field.
Case: Syria Emergency
We also know that SMS giving is really effective. It enables the immediate emotional response of a supporter who wants to help, it also gets funds for emergencies quickly. We even include the SMS giving number in search adword campaigns. You should be prepared for SMS giving no matter what charity you are.
Apps are hard
Finding a concept that works as an app is hard. UNICEF offices around the world have tried and success has been limited. You need an app that fits with an individual’s life, if you wouldn’t download it – don’t build it.
When I worked at the British Heart Foundation we created a recipe finder app, it worked because it was something people could use repeatedly and it fitted with our brand.
Email is important
Increasingly, email is consumed on mobile. If you have an email marketing programme or email newsletter it should be compatible with mobile now. Even if you have to create plain text emails, it’s better than emails that don’t work on a mobile.
It can be easy (sort of)
If you have very limited resources it can be very difficult to go mobile. But there are lots of platforms which are now mobile compatible which you could design your experience around. For example; using twitter, facebook and justgiving could give you a campaign experience which is mobile compatible without you needing to convert your own website for a bit longer.
And that was it!
15 mins really isn’t very long to talk about mobile. I didn’t even touch on UNICEF use of mobile in the field, there’s a bit about that in this innovation presentation.
The night before barcampnfp
I’ve been involved in barcampnfp for about a year and a half now, once as a helper and twice as the London lead organiser. Every time I learn something new, or more accurately, lots of new things.
There’s something special about an unconference format which means you learn something every time no matter whether you’re a newbie or old hand. Often it’s something I didn’t even know I wasn’t aware of. That’s why I’m really excited about tomorrow, not for what I know is going to happen but what I don’t know.
We’ve got some brilliant people on the participants list and lots of plotting of ideas for sessions already happening on the hashtag.
Watch this space #barcampnfp and hopefully our live notes will work too: bit.ly/bcnfpnotes
what’s in a hashtag?
This week I talked at #gagldn about the UNICEF #sahelNOW campaign we did earlier this year. It was an intense period where we worked hard to ‘do the basics brilliantly’ and break the media quietness around the emerging crisis in West Africa. Here’s the slides. Happy to answer questions, drop me a comment!
p.s. we all agreed you can’t do a campaign just based on a hashtag!
barcamp non-profits october 2012
Last week was the second London Barcampnfp. As one of the co-organisers I don’t want to say too much as a few of our lovely participants have already done a much better job than I would:
- @b33god on Paper hack
- @Charitychap on being a newbie to unconferences
- @LondonKirsty brilliant Storify of the day.
- Fellow organiser @PresleySylwia gives her thoughts on the day.
[I'll keep adding to this list as new posts appear]
My key take-out is; get the right people together and wonderful ideas are inevitable. But we need even more people, including more non-charity people as well next time!
So please spread the word, February 2013 here we come…
digital stats – integration’s worse enemy
I love digital analytics, but the perceived concreteness can lead to some tricky situations…
Unless you’re only using one channel to showcase your brand (if you are I’m intrigued to hear why!?) your audience is almost certainly seeing you in more than one place. This creates a challenge for Google Analytics and other similar tools. While its easy to generate ‘last-touch’ reporting this doesn’t give you a true sense of why someone responded.
We talk a lot about this at work. We were quite aware during our East Africa emergency activity that integrated channels and messages perform best.
So we’ve been building up our understanding of multi-touch attribution, including using tools like Ignition One. But this doesn’t help if/when you include offline in your media mix. You still can’t fully understand what the impact of the full mix is.
The tricky situation this puts you in is particularly relevant if you’re still trying to build the business case for integrating digital. Individuals can interpret last-touch reporting in terms of ROI (return on investment) on a purely channel by channel basis. This can mean investment is skewed, and integration completely overlooked.
Unless you invest in regular market research studies I’m not sure there’s a real-time answer (until we all get micro-chipped!). So next step for us will probably be considering what ‘closest guess based on historic data’ models we can devise and use.
Where are you with your attribution models? Be great to compare notes!
what does a digital first organisation look like?
I often mull over whether my digital transformation work will ever been done (in a good way), and what it will look like when we get there. I was thinking this over while scanning through a e-consultancy report on the evolution of agencies. There were a couple of role descriptions which I think go some way to painting a picture of digital first organisation structures:
‘T-shaped’ people
“staff who have a strong, vertical digital skill, but have either a breadth of experience outside of this vertical area or at least a useful level of understanding and empathy with other vertical digital channels and, notably, with traditional marketing practice and techniques.”
Chief creative technologist (More on this theme in the excellent chiefmartec blog)
“The three main areas of focus for the role are:
1. Helping the Chief Marketing Officer translate strategy into technology and vice versa
2. Choreographing data and technology across the marketing organisation
3. Infusing technology into the DNA of marketing – practices, people and culture”
I’m still undecided whether digital teams will cease to exist entirely. I certainly think there will be fewer titles with ‘digital’, ‘web’ or ‘online’ within them. Like the descriptions above, digital and non-digital staff will have more rounded skills-sets all around.
the future of digital giving
This week I was one of a few charity and digital industry types at a roundtable discussion on the future of giving technology hosted by the Guardian. It’ll be written up by the Guardian as an article in mid-May but while my memory is still fresh I wanted to capture a few of my personal take-outs.
- Technology adoption by charities:
- Charities are behind the curve in contrast to commercial, partly due to expense of adopting the new while its less consumerised and partly because the technology expertise is missing in many charities.
- There’s also the technology industry view that the charity sector doesn’t have a strong business case for investment (see previous post by me on Spring-giving).
- Innovation in charity sector:
- Some interesting models exist but often innovation comes from the ground up, but only where those ground staff are empowered to express their ideas.
- In smaller charities the silos that stifle innovation don’t exist (mostly).
- Giving trends:
- There’s a question over whether digital channels are fund-catching Vs fundraising.
- No charity wants to swap a channel which has a higher average gift for one with a lower average gift so sometimes a more convenient channel is a less effective one for the charity.
- We need to separate the process from the reason, people don’t give because you have an SMS number they give because of the cause and key messages.
- Some insights from experiences shared:
- SMS giving has meant a lower average gift for certain charities, choosing ‘slumps’ as focus point for using SMS calls to action is a good mitigation.
- Unexpected ‘social media’ response as seen with the tragic case of Claire Squires mostly demonstrate that giving is easier than it was before. They pose speed of response and decision-making challenges.
digital marketing optimisation event notes
Notes from Brand Republic event 17 April 2012
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Digital strategy
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“Understand people’s lives if you want to understand how your brand fits in #dmoevent
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“We can’t treat the online world and the real world as seperate – J Gatward, Britvic #dmoevent
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“Use 1-9-90 influence model. 1 really strong endorsers get them to influence 9 others and make those 9s feels like 1s #digitaloptimisation
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“Jonathan Gatward, Britvic UK: create hackable content for your brand #dmoevent
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I like this one a lot ‘you have to embrace complexity, it’s actual not complex anymore’ #digitaloptimisation http://twitpic.com/9atmer -
“One of the final takeouts – don’t forget to do internal marketing as well as external. It’s important for buy-in #dmoevent
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Campaign examples
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“With competitor as event ‘owner’ for Olympics, Britvic goal to own the legacy instead with ‘transform your patch’ #digitaloptimisation
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“Partners needed to take digital promises into the real world #dmoevent
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“Pepsi Super Bowl saw over half of the adverts were ‘shazamable’ with shazam tv app #digitaloptimisation cc @willlord
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“Debenhams beta with content network audience retargeted using tracking on brand site, 1month 3k sales #dmoevent
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“MediaCom rep in audience says ‘t in the park’ press ad with aurasma worked really well due to video rich content link #dmoevent
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“Aurasma – results very small but can get very good PR (Debenhams experience) #dmoevent
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EA campaign…
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“Waterloo takeover by battlefield 3: 17 sites, some posters started to get stolen. That’s a great KPI!! #dmoevent
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“4k downloads from QR code, Wifi (90% of downloads) NFC in the 2 week campaign #dmoevent
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“Over 9k interactions, over 900 email addresses collected from an interactive digital 6sheet display in cinemas #dmoevent
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“Digital out of home learnings – wifi 92% of interactions and consumers still getting used to the approach #dmoevent
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Search – PPC & SEO
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“86% using mobile search while watching TV, debenhams see peak for apps around 10pm. Parts of day strategy important #dmoevent
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Debenhams using hydra platform to integrate PPC and SEO activity, but only a week in at mo #dmoevent http://twitpic.com/9atw8o -
“J Stephenson, Debenhams. Paid Search Mob Stgy: separate mob campaigns on tablets and mobiles for more control and better targeting #dmoevent
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Email
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“When and whe emails are checked makes a big difference – optimise for this #dmoevent
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“Progressive disclosure using CSS to include expandable areas in emails can help – works on most devices #dmoevent cc @teminamoledina
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“Open rate significantly improved by using social info in subject line eg ‘share with your 123 friends’ #dmoevent cc @teminamoledina
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“Optimise for snippets- gmail and outlook summary that appears before open. Use gif with alt being tagline #dmoevent
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“Segment by most responsive and target them with a social campaign to help optimise a launch #dmoevent
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“You can download the @BrandRepublic event slides by @marcmunier on email marketing here – ow.ly/akzAQ #dmoevent
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Mobile
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““Mobile technology changes so fast. Be aware, but check whether it is relevant to you” @bansahaUK #dmoevent
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“80% of ftse100 companies do not have mobile sites & 65% fail to use device detection #dmoevent
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“Get that @magusblog report about FTSE 100 mobile websites here: magus.co.uk/knowledgebase/… #dmoevent
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““Companies that optimise their mobile sites outperform those that don’t by 80pc” Tom Golden Magus #dmoevent
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“Responsive web design not widely adopted at all – tech challenges still a barrier at mo but this does seem to be the future #dmoevent
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Most #mobile sites are full of #usability errors #dmoevent #ux http://twitpic.com/9audwu -
“BMI baby being taken to court by @RNIB for #mobile website lack of #accessibility #dmoevent #ux
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Social media and insights
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“We’re speaking after lunch at #dmoevent on turning social data into social insight. Find out more about our thinking: (http://bit.ly/ztKbI1)
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“Value in social media is in the insights it gives into customers thinking #dmoevent
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When you make a promise always deliver on it. The effect of not is amplified through social like BA eg #dmoevent http://twitpic.com/9awicv -
“Pre-TV buzz is created by a digital debut – and TV debut is amplified by this #dmoevent
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RT @spirals: Sum up – use insight to plan, optimise, create .. #dmoevent http://twitpic.com/9awjmx -
Video
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“Not about keeping people in a single environment anymore. It’s about streamlining the experience for the user #dmoevent #ux
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“Successful video strategy is based on views, consumer engagement, and finding your video dubbed into Russian! #dmoevent
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“Exclusive video content might be all you need to make an audience feel valued #dmoevent
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And just for the heck of it – a few comments from the twittersphere…
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“@ActonPies @brandrepublic seems it went well – liking the skysports twitch pick up #DMOevent #PWNEDonwardsandupwards
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“So I think that went alright – lot of fun. Thank for having me @BrandRepublic #DMOevent
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“@ActonPies great energy presentation at @brandrepublic #dmoevent really enjoyed it!
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“Seeing nothing but positive comments for @marcmunier ‘s presentation at the #dmoevent – nice work! @pure360 #emailmarketing
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“At the Digital Marketing Optimisation event in London. Some interesting insights into digital and it’s future #DMOevent
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#dmoevent
