A keynote from a recent Marketing 2.0 conference in Singapore. The most important element of any brand engagement is relevance. Examples and guidelines on how to ensure your brand uses social practices to truly engage and bring value to your customers/audience.

1. Where Brand and
2.0 connect
April 2009
Brett Jackson
Qais Consulting

2. I am going to speak about one thing today

3. Relevance

4. Would you speak to a friend in
language they didn’t understand?

5. Relevance - Why
• New information and information sources are still exploding
• Time is short and attention spans are dwindling
• Irrelevant communication has become the ultimate disrespect
• Delivering relevance requires time and thought. Striving for relevance will
push you to truly listen and explore your communities. People recognise this
• Consistently delivering relevant communications is really, really hard. You will
get match fit, fast

6. Relevance - Why
• Gen Y & C:
• savvy and cynical
• think they know your brand and market better than you do, they’re
probably right.
• will make up the majority of your market soon if not already
• Marketing is expensive, so why not do it right

7. There is a tidal wave breaking,
right now

8. 18 to 26
year olds

9. Relevance - Why Now?
The “command and control” days are gone
The social web has provided the most
powerful opportunities for building community
and conversation in history
The relationship between brands and people
has changed forever
The people have won

10. “It's not about technology and
wanting to be online constantly.
It's about wanting to belong and
be connected constantly”
Johan Jervoe
Corporate VP of global marketing,
McDonald's

11. "Brands are like people.
They get stuck.
They have habits that are hard to break.
They don't always see their blind spots, and
they loose touch with their core essence.
They resist change.
They become irrelevant"
MultiChannel Marketing Apr 2008

12. Relevance not just of core content,
in every aspect of your communications.
Their tone, function, language, context,
timing and gestures.
No matter what medium.

13. The next point might seems obvious
but....

14. A marketers job is to understand their
constituents and communities better
than anyone else.
The marketers who do this best will
succeed.

15. Relevance - How
• Engage in honest dialogues, don’t insert unwanted monologues
• Create opportunities to discuss and communicate with your customers, they
will tell you what is relevant to them
• Enable and enrich the communities of people that form around your offerings,
a testimonial or review from a real person is worth 100x anything you can say
about your brand
• Speak in a real voice - everything else is ignored

16. Relevance - How
• Learn what is of real value to your audience and deliver it, before the other
guys do
• Research, think and avoid assumptions - test and re-test
• If you don’t know, ask somebody that does

17. The 4 P’s
Where are the people?

19. Dell - Hell to Swell

20. 2005 - Dell Hell
Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis blogs about the poor
product and service he received from Dell.
Dell’s response = 'we don't respond to bloggers’
This response caused inflamed the situation, Jarvis
created an ongoing series of blogs, coining the phrase
“Dell Hell”. Jarvis ranks higher than the company in
Google searches for “Dell Computer”
Dell closes it’s online forums
With sales and brand damaged Dell finally acknowledges
the reality

22. 2006/8
Michael Dell personally oversees the revamp of
Dell’s social marketing agenda
one2one blog launched
Direct2Dell blog launched
IdeaStorm released - crowd sourced innovation
system - Dells running Linux are released 3 months
later
Dell are a foundation member of the BlogCouncil

23. The present - Dell Swell
Jeff Jarvis made finally peace with Dell in his blog
Dell are now considered to be one of the most
savvy and connected corporates and their social
program is a benchmark. They use 2.0 more and
more effectively than most organisations
A recent blog post on Target which mentioned Dell
Hell was replied to by Dell within 15 minutes of it’s
posting.
Dell “gets” 2.0 now

24. The present - Dell Swell
Dell has been using Twitter to
announce sales in their outlets
and have made $1 million
USD through this channel in
the last 18 months
Last month they started
offering exclusive discounts
to their Twitter followers

25. Points of relevance
• The web has a long memory and Google is a reputation meter.
• Large companies can embrace and win with Web 2.0 even after the most
inauspicious of starts
• Small scale experimentation is vital to find out what works for your companies
DNA
• Allow your customers to tell you what they think and want

26. Atlassian - Organic marketing

27. Atlassian Software
Enterprise software company
Started in 2001 on a credit card
Based in Sydney, Australia
Disclaimer: I used to work for them

28. challenges and requirements
• No advertising
• No sales force
• No marketing dept till mid 2008
• Established commercial competitors
• Rapid growth of open source competitors
• Servicing global market from Sydney, Australia
• purchasers are hidden within organisation

29. Blogs

30. Transparent
forums and
feature requests

31. Twitter

32. Twitter

33. Surveys

34. Codegeist

35. Metrics

36. Outcomes
•Cumulative revenue of 100 mill USD to date
•Staff of 200 across 4 countries worldwide
•Over 14,000 customers in 100+ countries
•Market leader in 2 product categories

37. Points of relevance
• People respond to honesty and transparency and will defend the brand if they
believe in it
• There are numerous ways and opportunities to build conversations, you need
to be identifying them all the time
• You can’t drive a social strategy without having the internal people who buy
into it
• It doesn’t have to cost much
• you can’t fake it
• Think about your measures, check them constantly and redefine them as and
when necessary

38. adidas - what women want

39. challenges and requirements
• adidas wanted to reach out to it’s female customers within the social media
realm
• online has not been a strong communication channel for adidas in Singapore
• adidas wanted to redress concerns that it had missed opportunities to
connect with female consumers in the past
• adidas did not want us to “sell shoes”
• Our part of the campaign had to “sync’ with the larger global initiative

40. challenges and requirements
• What we did had to resonate with busy women
• the campaign would try to lead people to make healthy choices in their spare
time
• The solution had to be very simple and immediate to use

41. Activities - pre solution
• Research
• Conversations
• Environmental scans
• Profiling
• Identifying where, when and how women were spending their time
online
• Looking at the tone and focus of their conversations

42. '$AB$%-)"?:57:%5<
?*975$@8 ;(<)+($4 =%7$+%>5
A. Embed widget
(Calendar) into blog
Forum Seeding
B. Share Me Time Event
(Invite friend to join me
for my Me Time activity)
Blogvertorials
C. Share Application with
FB Group + FB FB Friends (Share
Application Pages Button)
D. Me Time Event
Reminders via emails
Facebook
Seeding
E. FB Newsfeeds
*EDM & Paid Media are
not included
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45. C&57&"@+%@D"()"985"EF):%95G""
Sharing Events H*I()"()"985"J5&(*7@5"
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$@,:%9K

46. Debra Li: http://olimomok.livejournal.com/465000.html

47. Application Canvas Page – Conversion Rates
As of 1 March 09
• Total Canvas Page Views (Installation Prompts): 11,160
• Total Link Clicks (Accepts): 3,701
• Conversion Rate:
! Total no. of Link Clicks/Total Canvas Page Views x 100%
=! 3701/11, 160 x 100% =! 33.2%
!33.2% accepted the application upon installation prompt

48. Forum Conversations – FlowerPod

49. Blogs Analysis
• Blogs have connected to ‘Me myself’ concept and to
utility of me time calendar
• Blogs were written in a personal and heartfelt manner
which drew high level of responses
• Added great credibility from user perspective

50. Results
No. of Page Views of "Me, Myself" FB page
Application
launch on Feb
18th
- 535 Most Bloggers
have entries up
on blogs by then
432

51. Results 359 Fans as of
27th Feb, and
Number of fans on "Me, Myself" FB page increasing
Application launch
on Feb 18th
- 190 Fans

52. Results
Summary of Blogvertorials Performance
As of 1 March 2009
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53. Results
Sharing Events Performance
As of 27 Feb 2009#2: Sharing Events
9%=5(4#5+"
• >%5?%&,>%5?+P"O85")*AH57"(L"*&57]9(]*&57")(,3@$,()&"985"
$BB+%@$,()"&5)9"4*7%)-"985"&B5@%354"B57%(4
• @%)(3(%5-,'"()*+A,O85")*AH57"(L",A5&"*&57&"@+%@D54"+%)D&"%)"*&57]
9(]*&57")(,3@$,()&"985"$BB+%@$,()"&5)9"4*7%)-"985"&B5@%354"
B57%(4

54. Points of relevance
• Delivering utility highlights that you are making the conversation about your
customers and their needs
• Small can be beautiful and powerful
• Finding new ways to speak to people is essential
• It’s rude to leave a conversation mid sentence. A social campaign does not
end at launch, you need to tend and care for that dialogue you began
• Making or doing something worth talking about is the goal. Test your
remarkable quotient all the time
• Be as clear about your goals and your audience as you can

55. some reminders

56. Break down
some walls

57. Do not rely on assumptions

58. Define exactly
who you are
speaking to

59. Listen to your customers

60. Get Social

61. Experiment!

62. Constantly re-examine
your measures

63. customers
aren’t
static

64. one size does not
fit all

65. create great experiences
get as real time as you can
speak with your customers not at them
take a breath - don't say it all at once

66. Thanks!!
http://friendfeed.com/rooms/relevance
brett@qaisconsulting.com