Tag: Chris Sykes

- by Chris Sykes

2013 a year for social detoxing?

If you’re reading this, Happy New Year to you. We hope 2013 will bring you good health, happiness and prosperity.

Most of us returning to work will admit to the traditional clichéd festive excesses – too much food, too much drink and too much time spent with certain irritating family members. How many of us though will admit to binging on social media this Christmas? Did you lock your smart phone away in a drawer or were you Tweeting and posting under the Christmas dinner table and throughout the Queen’s speech?

Social is becoming a bit of an obsession (for some it’s verging on an addiction) and if we are not careful, our on-going consumption of real-time content will inhibit and affect our lucidity and the way we process information. Like the old sayings go; ‘anything in moderation’ and ‘quality over quantity’.

As marketers we need to be aware that we don’t lose the true art of conversation and one-to-one communication. Nor do we want to risk social content overdose. Thanks to our smart phones and the telcos this will be increasingly difficult but new innovations such as content filters and blockers will come to market this year that will enable recipients to better control the content they see and consume. So delivering too much could see your real-time stream switched off.

Use social wisely but don’t ruin the opportunity it presents by overindulging or force-feeding your audience.

- by Chris Sykes

The office party, the company smart phone, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. A cocktail for fun or disaster?

The office Christmas party is an annual highlight for any company with a reasonable headcount. More usually means merrier and messier. We’ve all I’m sure, got hilarious and mouth-dropping tales to tell from parties gone by. Office parties, particularly those that don’t involve spouses and partners, produce a plethora of memorable incidents and moments, usually at somebody’s expense. And in my experience, no one is immune from embarrassment whether self-inflicted or not.

The best parties are the liveliest, where hair is let down, inhibitions are lost and the dance floor is crowded. In these scenarios, many make mischief, a few will over indulge and one or two may undergo a remarkable change in personality turning them into love machines, hell bent on pulling whoever they can. Then there are the ‘pick a fighters’, the chest pokers and the cry-babies. There will undoubtedly be some pukers and if you’re really ‘lucky’, the pass-outers.

Needless to say, you have the potential to capture some post-worthy content on your smart phone – The quiet guy who works in the IT department swinging his trousers ‘round his head to a 80s classic on the dance floor, the girl with the boob job in accounts flashing her augmented reality, or the classic pass out ‘n’ puke shot – another ruined Karen Millen dress.

Now I know I may be generalising and exaggerating but even the most innocuous event uploaded to Facebook or Twitter could land someone in a bit of bother. Many law firms’ Christmas message to business owners warn of the perils of partying with your smart phone.

Here’s one such statement verbatim – “Party-goers with company smart phones should be extra careful this Christmas season – using the phone to Facebook pictures could breach their employment contract. Posts to social networks via company smartphones can contravene the terms of job contracts and could lead, in extreme cases, to people being fired.”

Ooer! They continue:

“Sharing confidential company information knowingly or inadvertently could also kick-start disciplinary proceedings for the employee, potentially leading to dismissal depending on the gravity of any repercussions. While useful as an incentive, BYOD (bring your own device) and CYOD (choose your own device) schemes have blurred the lines between people’s professional and personal lives further and this has increased the risks for employers.”

We`ve been warned!

- by Chris Sykes

Is Marketing Automation taking the Marketing out of Marketing?

With a Marketing Automation application you can streamline your communications, enhance your CRM programme and generate more leads. It can also help you get to market quickly and will deliver a good degree of insight for future campaign planning – sound like a familiar pitch?

The fact is, any Marketing Automation application is only as good as the person or people using it. Before the Internet and email, the telephone was the preferred mass sales tool. It’s not the quality or the functionality of the telephone that dictates whether a call will be successful. It’s not the script that will close the sale – it’s the skill of the person at the other end of the line who can quickly direct the conversation towards a positive outcome.

So if you think about your Marketing Automation tool as a phone, the role it plays is significantly reduced and the dependencies that are formed from repetitive processes diminish. What I mean by that is the over-reliance and assumption that the application itself will result in a lead and that proactive marketing becomes lazy marketing.

Now I get a lot of emails – a lot! There is a growing proportion of spam and unsolicited emails from B2B and B2C entities peddling their wares. I can see they use a mix of marketing automation and email broadcast systems. Those that don’t automatically get trapped in my junk email folder are deleted, not because I’m against email marketing – I’m against bad email marketing. We’re busy people. We get lots of sales and marketing content thrown at us every day. We want communications and offers that are relevant, appealing and worthy of our attention.

How can you achieve this?

Well you can test multiple subject lines, use a variety of templates, cut your content by 50% (yes 50%), ensure your templates are well-designed and are compatible with all the mainstream email browsers and are optimised for mobile devices and tablets. Ensure the integrity of your data – I still receive emails addressed to ‘Active Image’- the name Volume traded under from 1992 to 1997 before I incorporated the company and changed the name. Don’t assume the data sitting in your system is up to date or relevant. Before ‘unsubscribing’, I used to get emails offering me discounts on agricultural machinery. I don’t own a lawn mower never mind a combine harvester.

But as a marketer myself, the biggest frustration is receiving emails that smack of sheer laziness and are devoid of thought and creativity. Emails on a Monday morning, emails on a Friday afternoon, business emails over the weekend will get immediately deleted. And with many of us receiving emails via our smart phones, they are more easily to delete there and then.

Email marketing is a numbers game and Marketing Automation tools help you manage the high volume’s you need to deliver leads back to the business. They are however, no substitute for brains -they can breed laziness and apathy, and in the long-term deliver poor ROI. Don’t fall into the trap.

- by Chris Sykes

Blog off!

Blogging has been around since the nineties; lauded as a vehicle for online self-expression.

 

Today blogging is a major publishing platform that comes in many forms – social, video, micro etc. Having recently come across some interesting stats on the state and scale of blogging in 2012, I’m compelled to question its future role and effectiveness. So to some of the stats: WordPress and Blogger account for approximately 78% of all blog posts. Apparently, there are 500,000 new posts a day on WordPress alone! It’s also estimated that there are 31 million bloggers in the US – sounds a lot but statistically, that’s less than 10% of the US population.  66% of all blogs are in English, so where does that sit with the global population? And finally on the stats front, 65% of businesses admit to the fact that they haven’t posted a blog in the past year. Outside of the most popular and established bloggers and the most popular sites like NBC, Techcrunch and Mashable – how big is your audience really? I can hazard a guess that it takes me more time to think about and write a blog than the total amount of time it’s read. Is this a realistic synopsis for the majority? I can also bear witness to many happy industry bloggers (self-appointed experts) who are relentless in their posting but rarely receive a comment – take the hint! Personally, I get much more feedback from a Linkedin status update but please don’t let Linkedin descend into a blogging platform, which it pretty much is. So next time you think about posting a blog think about reach. If you scaled Ben Nevis, stood proud on the summit and preached to the world you might find a bigger audience?

- by Amanda Phillips

Meet Volume`s New Managing Director

Hello, I’m Amanda. I have just joined Volume today as Managing Director.

When I say I joined today, actually I ‘joined’ about 4 years’ ago when I was asked to become one of Volume’s advisory board, an initiative set up by founder Chris Sykes to start to raise the game of what was, even back then, a very impressive digital marketing company. That role then lead to me becoming a regular coach to the senior management team, which both helped me understand Volume better, and allowed me to effectively become one of the ‘gang’.

So, it felt an entirely natural move to become more of a permanent fixture, especially when Chris outlined his ambitions for the next 3 years for the company, and knowing what I already knew about its innovation in technology and the depth of skill and talent within the agency.

My role will be to build upon the agency’s strengths by introducing a strategic planning component to our offering, to attract clients both within the tech sector and outside into new areas for the business, as well as supporting the team with their existing clients, and lead the operational management within the agency.

In terms of strategic planning, my perspective on this has changed over the last few years. As competition has become more fierce for clients, planners need to find better customer insights to help brands stand out from the marketing cacophony and to deepen the relationship bonds. How I do this is to apply what I learnt about behavioural psychology from my academic studies, to marketing communications and planning. We have to understand the human, not just the customer, if we are to create innovative insights. This then aids the creative process and the subsequent outputs.

I also feel passionately that B2B marketing should have the rigour, creativity and originality that B2C has enjoyed all these years – and I intend to work with the teams, and Max our new creative director, to further develop the agency’s marketing activities on behalf of our clients, both to increase the return we create for clients, and to enhance the agency’s excellent reputation.

But that will all start tomorrow. Today, I am meeting the new faces that I don’t already know and finding a little place for my packed lunch in the fridge. After all, I’m the new girl.

View Amanda on LinkedIn

- by Chris Sykes

The social science behind social media marketing

Before you consider social media as part of your marketing mix, you have to understand the underlying behaviours of your potential target audience – both in respect of how they consume and use social media but also explore what we know about ‘humans’ in order that we can use that knowledge to achieve a higher return on investment.

In essence, we need to get business professionals or dare I say it, ‘consumers’ to use their email less, and to switch to using social channels – from which they get a more rewarding and relevant experience – tangible benefits even!

As well as making sure your social media real estate and resources are in place to provide dynamic content, dialogue, support and measurement, so there are no black holes or barriers to adoption, we also need, though, to explore the psychological and behavioural barriers that potentially still exist, in order that social media communication campaigns are focussed on the right messaging, target groups and communication challenges.

For example, one of the key barriers is many people’s view of Facebook, Twitter et al. For many business professionals, they represent a symbol of youth and naivety. We are, as a species however, always prepared to dramatically alter our behaviours where we see a benefit to us. In order to persuade people away from off-line communications, we need to re-associate them with less desirable outcomes, and associate other forms of interaction (social media interaction) with more positive outcomes.

What can you do that could be ‘status’-enhancing for the individuals on social networks. The theory behind this is ‘competitive altruism’ i.e. how we use our conspicuous displays of pro-social media behaviours to improve our reputations. We are increasingly sensitive to our social professional reputations. You can see this every day with frequent status updates and changes to your connections’ professional credentials ‘experience’, ‘skills’, ‘endorsements’ and ‘recommendations’.

So, we know that just giving people ‘content’ won’t cut it. It is what type of information and what type of influence we try to create, knowing the behavioural barriers that will make the difference, especially given that we are also battling against life events such as unemployment, job changes, promotion, children, relationship breakdowns etc.

The question is then what do we know about social media and the behaviours around its usage and influence that would help make a campaign successful?

We do know that people have become increasingly detached from over-arching institutions which at one time used to provide the context for communicating messages. The internet and social media is a multi-directional flow of information that allows us to share opinions and has, to some extent, replaced this institutional-speak.

Trust is often built on effective knowledge transfer and so we can create this feeling of inter-connectedness to one another within these virtual social communities. It is like we are creating our own ‘inner circles’.

This is particularly important when you want to use social media to communicate with customers. In this way, it can be used as an accelerant for messaging, to make what might be weaker ties between people seem stronger, and to provide a way to distribute leadership thinking in a way which would not physically be as possible.

We can use social media to support and provide a virtual ‘venue’ for marketing activity without anyone having to set foot outside their door.

In short, social media is now one of the main ways to engage with customers and, against our backdrop of understanding of human behaviour we would be well placed to create an effective behaviour change campaign.

- by Chris Sykes

Are Marketing Agencies the BPO partners of the future?

Today’s mega businesses will soon be shadows of their former selves. Don’t get me wrong, the successful mega business will still deliver revenue and profit growth, will likely be moving into more diverse markets and operating within emerging economies. Physically however, they will be smaller, leaner and agile. Shrinking headcount and reducing office real estate are key corporate priorities. We can see this trend particularly in the IT and Telecoms sector, financial services and professional services. You could say that the large organisations of the past are becoming ‘virtual’.

Flexible working will become the norm, driven by mobility and the Cloud. Business professionals’ lives are becoming intertwined with their private and social lives. And in our new social world, is anything private anymore? All this is helping to shape the mega business of the future and those that are slow to change particularly in vulnerable sectors will simply disappear. We’ve already said ‘goodbye’ to many mega brands now relegated to the past – Sony Ericsson, Saab, Kodak, Woolworths and Lehman Brothers etc. Although we’re busy saying ‘goodbye’ there will be far more ‘hellos’.

So what does this mean for us working in the marketing industry? For a start, Sir Martin Sorrell regularly lambasts ill-informed journalists who announce him as ‘CEO of the world’s largest advertising agency WPP’. His stark retort is ‘WPP is a marketing services company’. You see, he knows that advertising as we know it is dying. He also knows that there are now great opportunities for agencies that structure themselves to provide a broader set of marketing and sales support resources.

As the corporates get smaller, so will the marketing departments. Ask any marketer working for a large entity, I would bet most would say they were ‘resource light’. Most would also agree that the expectation and pressures on the marketing organisation are greater than ever before. Delivering more with less is never easy at the best of times and if you have to periodically cull heads or are prevented from hiring, what can you do? The answer is out source.

We’re seeing a growing trend whereby programmes and campaign management is being outsourced. The role of the account executive and account manager is shifting to managing and running more than just the front-line campaign. The large CRM and marketing automation applications used by the corporates dictate processes and the management of those processes becomes a core responsibility of the agency.

We’re seeing this particularly in channel marketing. The channel is where the future growth of a company lies for the very reasons outlined in the first paragraph of this blog – expanding the channel, training the channel, retaining the channel, communicating to the channel and measuring the channel are all responsibilities we now undertake. For the client, it means they can focus on the more strategic elements of the role. They’re not restricted or slowed down by managing large teams and agencies because they are working to a defined set of KPIs. This facilitates a more diligent approach and therefore delivers higher performance and value back to the marketing department.

Large businesses becoming virtual will only mean a heavier reliance on world-class marketing services companies to support, deliver and manage marketing and sales processes. In our industry this can only spell good news.

- by Chris Sykes

The Consumerisation of B2B Marketing

So what do we mean when we say the ‘consumerisation’ of B2B marketing? B2B marketing is now driven by buyers and not organisations! Professionals will choose what to interact with and where to access content. Unless content is atomised, energised and optimised, many campaigns will be simply lost!

We’ve all seen the research we’re being continually fed into today’s increasing mobile dominated device landscape. Focus is turning to the creation of innovative assets that are relevant and engaging – content that is served up in bite-size and engaging chunks for easy consumption across social media platforms, digital channels and mobile devices.

Some stats to digest

According to Canalys, in 2011 smartphone shipments topped PCs by 73 million units. Gartner stated that Q2 2012 was the seventh consecutive quarter showing a decline in PC sales. Gartner also estimates tablet computer sales will explode across the next four years selling 60% as many units as PCs by 2015. That’s over 300 million units! Microsoft also gets in on the act saying that by 2013, Tablet sales will be circa 180 million units.

Professionals now expect a mobile interface and the latest major Operating Systems will start to deliver more on that expectation. Our behaviours, navigation and interaction instincts are also changing: we now touch, pinch, swipe, drag and drop. The vast majority of us smartphone and tablet users, 81% in fact access work email on them. Internet access and social media are the top two uses of a phone and email usage will overtake phone calls on smartphone devices.

The net, net of all this is that marketing content has to adjust to the device and lifestyle. IT in the workplace is becoming consumerised, with many companies allowing employees to choose their preferred devices. This is leading the consumerisation of B2B marketing.

Tablets and smartphones have very different screen real estate and navigation to the business desktop and notebook devices. In fact, phones are getting bigger rather than smaller as screen sized is preferred over form factor and weight – that was the old mobile world and goodbye Nokia and Sony Ericsson. Business data and content are increasingly consumed on the go, so content too must go mobile.

Content is changing from words and images to interactive graphics and video. ‘Empathy’ videos can convey a strong business message in an ‘advert length’ clip for a B2B audience. Business professionals favour short form content over longer programmes, as 42% of video is consumed at the workplace in ‘snackable’, short form clips. Here’s a good example.

So what did we learn in that minute?

We learnt quite a bit about Dave and ‘his views’ as a typical B2B prospect. His attention is limited and is continually multi-browsing and multi-tasking. To attract his attention content needs to be ‘atomized’ from more traditional locations and that the messages fed to him need to be precise, engaging, relevant and compatible with mobile devices.

So with all this in mind, where does a B2B Marketer start? It doesn’t mean you start from scratch, you can re-energise and utilise existing content. Old assets still fit the desktop environment but can be repurposed for easier consumption and mobile device. Messages can and should be replicated across different channels maximising content creation ROI. Content must be creative and engaging or expect to be ignored.

- by Chris Sykes

Oh two!

O2’s recent network problems naturally infuriated phonaholics who were left in a blind panic and desperate state of perceived isolation when the network went down and up and down. It was obvious the drama and sequence of events would be played out across Twitter. O2 subscribers vented their Roth and frustrations; many breaching the grounds of common decency
Why is it deemed such behaviour is acceptable on a public platform? Such rants in the middle of the street could see the perpetrator charged with a public order offence. If I sent such content via my work email, I’d be fired – but hey, that’s the nature of the beast I guess.

‘Human’ twitter

Anyway, for this post that’s neither here nor there. What I have observed over the past 24 hours is O2’s measured and ‘human’ Twitter response to such abuse. This has created other streams deflecting attention away from the original subject. This shows an organisation that is in touch with its social-self and one that is reasonably well-equipped to deal with a reputation crisis over social-media. If we compare O2’s response to Blackberry RiM’s after it suffered a similar fate, it shows O2 is leaps ahead. It also helps to get the message across to large organisations that they need to invest in proper resources, training and procedures to deal quickly and adequately in such scenarios. Despite the still many news-worthy corporate social-media faux pas, there’s still a sense of denial from many executive management teams that they need to get serious about social-media. If you upset your customers they are going to tell you and tell you in the most public of forums.

As disruptive as a network outage is for people and businesses that genuinely rely on their phones, here’s a small nod of respect to the O2 social comms team, who have dealt with adversity in quite a good way.

- by Chris Sykes

Technology or People?

I established Volume with the concept of embracing perpetual change and the understanding that change is our biggest challenge. As a futurist, I’m fascinated with tomorrow and how we can gain the most value and satisfaction from the virtual ‘relationships’ we now encounter and interact with every day. In the digital age, it’s easy to get lost in technology.

Is our world about technology?

Volume is respected for its creativity, innovation and marketing thought-leadership. Its results-oriented culture however, is not the sole driver of growth or success. Volume is about people: our people, our clients and their customers. Understanding technology is one thing, knowing what makes humans tick is entirely another. Combine the two, you get one heck of an agency.