Testament to the changing times

Recently watched a presentation where the measure of an individuals connectedness was “if they had every been dumped by tweet”.

This lead me to explore how popular “mobile dumping” had become.

Img via I guess you don’t want to talk to me anymore.

Add to Friends – mobile + Facebook

Continuing down the theme of blurring boundaries between “virtual” and “real” world experiences have a look at this:

Provided you have QR code recognition software installed on your phone, you can now see and “friend” someone based on their personal QR code. While really only applicable to geeks, the fact that these sort of innovations are taking place bodes well for social computing and social networking.

Probably the better thing to do would be to connect with Twitter …

Using Social Maps to provide context for brands

Currently working on how to present social media and related marketing activities to clients and have come across this excellent tool from Ahead of Time.

The definition of a social map (as borrowed from their document) is

“A Social Map is a visualized Analysis of a digital identity of a person, brand or company. A Social Map shows exactly where a digital identity is created, formed or discussed and sets each element in context and proportions.”

Link to their whitepaper here.

Direct Response Radio to Internet advertising – does it work?

I was driving along today and got stuck in traffic. Getting stuck in traffic is very rare as I don’t drive around all that much.

I decided to turn on the radio to listen to traffic reports. The first thing that hit me was an ad-break advertising a number of products and services. Apparently it is true, you can automatically tune them out.

But then I heard something very interesting .. or rather I didn’t.

I was expecting to hear a call to action like, call this 0800 number now. Instead, the ads’ sole call to action was visit a website.

They repeated the web address three times, and I thought I had remembered it.

Got to my desk to type it in, and experienced a blank.

Next step, do a Google search, but now I couldn’t remember the name of the company and so I couldn’t remember what to search for!

So why would you spend all that money making an ad, putting it on the radio and then having me forget ?

Well a couple of things struck me :

1. It was smart to drive all the traffic to a website as it means there is no extra expense of having a telephone centre to respond to the calls
2. There was a wasted opportunity by not reminding listeners that they could search for the product if they forgot the web address
3. Radio is a great direct response (DR) generator, but you have to allow the consumer to react to it immediately otherwise they will forget.

This got me to thinking about how I would have changed the ad to make it more effective.

My solution, get them to TXT a number in response to the ad and allow the advertiser to make a call back. There are three key benefits to this approach:

• Interested consumers can act on the ad instantly
• The TXT engine will send them a TXT back thanking them for their interest and giving them the web address in the message
• The lead can be actively followed up with a phone call.

[insert clever flow diagram when I get graphics package]

For a small business owner this is a perfect solution for lead generation and management.

OK so it might increase the cost by requiring a follow up, but it will be more effective in the long run.