27 Jul 09 Social Media Marketing with Twitter: The EA Comic-Con
A Night with the Hottest Girl at Comic-Con. Dinner, Booty & More.
A viral social media marketing campaign by EA has lived up to its name and quickly become an infection that appears will require Electronic Arts (EA) to do some damage control.
The nature of the competition which is sexually suggestive, has received a barrage of negative sentiment fuelled by tribes on Twitter using the #EAFail and #lust hashtags. Some Tweeps suggest that EA has isolated their female market (about 40% of gamers are women:)
malinhanas: Wow. Considering 40% of gamers are women makes this idea even more ridiculous #EAFail #Lust
MelindaShore: still don’t understand who thought that giving away a woman like she’s an iPod or theatre tickets was a good idea #eafail
And while there have been several male commentators weighing in with negative sentiment, The primary target market for Dante’s Inferno, red-blooded teenage males, don’t appear to have even raised an eyebrow.
A Night with the hottest girl at Comic-Con. Dinner, Booty & More. Suggestive? I think so. EA have failed Marketing 101. They have over-promised and under-delivered.
The Competition Details. The culprit: "Commit Acts of Lust"Though the imagery is clearly platonic
The wording on the flyers ” Commit Acts of Lust” is contradictory to the imagery on display. The picture suggests just taking a platonic picture with a booth babe and keep your hands to yourself. However, the image caption is a little more provocative. While most people are socially well adjusted, some attendees will have no doubt interpreted this as an invitation to get up-close and a little too personal with the booth girls. But as some commentators point out, everyone may be overreacting:
Vegas comment on Mashable:
Ah c’mon, the average person that goes to comic con is too afraid of booth babes (they might be horny tho) and no sexual harassment will happen. At all
And Tom Gray adds:
EA chose the wrong words in promoting their contest but their audience isn’t Gloria Steinem it’s socially awkward, 15 year old Conner sitting in the basement with his equally socially awkward friends dreaming of the girls they’ll never get – at least until they become the next software/internet/social media gazillionaire.
The Apology
EA have responded to the criticism:
Thanks you for all of your comments and concerns around the Sin to Win Contest at Comic Con. We’ve responded here: http://twitpic.com/bi18o10:59 AM Jul 25th
We understand there’s a lot of debate right now around our “Sin to Win” promotion at Comic-Con and wanted to clarify a few things. We created this promotion as part of our marketing efforts around the circle of Lust (one of the nine sins/circles of Hell). Each month we will be focusing on a new Circle of Hell. This month is Lust. Costumed reps are a tradition at Comic-Con. In the spirit of both the Circle of Lust and Comic-Con, we are encouraging attendees to Tweet photos of themselves with any of the costumed reps at Comic-Con here, find us on Facebook or via e-mail. “Commit acts of lust” is simply a tongue-in-cheek way to say take pictures with costumed reps. Also, a “Night of Lust” means only that the winner will receive a chaperoned VIP night on the town with the Dante’s Inferno reps, all expenses paid, as well as other prizes.
We apologize for any confusion and offense that resulted from our choice of wording, and want to assure you that we take your concerns and sentiments seriously. We’ll continue to follow your comments and please let us know if you have any other thoughts or concerns. Keep watching as the event unfolds and we hope you’ll agree that it was all done in the spirit of the good natured fun of Comic-Con.
A Lack of Transparency & Authenticity
- The contest was not restricted to just EA’s employees, but extended to any booth babe at comic-con. I wonder if the comic-con organisers knew about and condoned the contest before hand? Furthermore, did the other exhibitors give consent for their employees to be roped into EA’s campaign?
- A hoax protest against the game outside Comic-con adds to the inauthenticity of EA’s tactics. Something that could lead one to argue that it is something that is ingrained in their corporate culture.
- In a social media ecosystem that demands transparency and authenticity to survive, their published apology leaves a lot to be desired.
Crisis Response Management
Everything is public. Comments can be picked up and quoted by any publication.This outcome shouldn’t have caught them with their pants down and they should have had a crisis response plan in place. The speed of propagation offered by Twitter means that you have to be on your toes and ready to react. Fast.
EA should have expected the campaign to be talked about when they chose a social medium like Twitter to run it. They should have known that more than just their primary target market for this game would get wind of it.
EA could have:
- Admitted they were wrong, rather than contend that their customers have misinterpreted the situation. The customer is always right.
- Responded to individual tweets and comments to show that they are actually listening to people rather than just saying that they were in a blanket statement posted on Twitpic (of all places.) In fact, one critic has made it easy for them and started an archive of EAFail.
A more transparent apology that addressed these points would have been better, but there’s no doubt that the final cut had to go through the legal department for approval first. They probably should have run the whole campaign past legal and HR first too.
Gary Vay Ner Chuck shows us Crisis Management practice:
Turning Negatives into Positives
Closing Remarks
- #EAFail will continue to live on in the Twittersphere, being used as a spammer hashtag more than anything else.
- The campaign is very obvious and lacks creativity. It was done in poor taste and with a lack of proper consideration for using Twitter as a platform to run it.
- The flyer is designed to get the participant’s mind racing and fantasizing of what could happen and succeeds.
- #EAFail or #lust never got on Twitter’s Top Trends.
- The unofficial The_Sims_3 account seems relatively unaffected, with very little negative sentiment creeping in. However, it’s important to note that the account is not controlled by EA which highlights how easy it is for someone to hijack the brand and run a smear campaign against them.
- A key marketing tenet is to under promise and over deliver. EA’s prize does the exact opposite.
The flyer says:
Front: Dinner and a Sin Ful night with two hot girls, a limo service, paparazzi and a chest full of Booty.
Back: A night with the hottest girl at Comic-Con, Dinner, Booty and more.
And then the apology says:
A “Night of Lust” means only that the winner will receive a chaperoned VIP night on the town with the Dante’s Inferno reps, all expenses paid, as well as other prizes.
They appear to have insinuated more than what is actually in-store for the winner.
- A relative handful of people are boycotting EA, but most seem to think there has been an over-reaction or are willing to forgive the indiscretion.
- The campaign has not appeared in Twitter’s Top Trends list (or on hashtags.org) nor has it made a dent according to Google Insighs.
- In the grand scheme of things, this will blow over within a couple of weeks, but for EA this is a stain on their permanent record and well, some people may just decide not to buy Sims 3.
In contrast, here’s a more successful Twitter campaign: Moonfruit: A Twitter Marketing Campaign Analysis
Tags: Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Twitter, twitter marketing
26 May 09 Marketing in a Recession: To do, or not to do?
As the recession settles in, most of us are shifting our focus to short-term growth. However, marketing is an investment, not an expense. The proven correlation between share of market and share of voice means that if you increase your marketing investment at a time when competitors are reducing theirs, you should substantially increase the long-term value of your brand. John Quench, a professor of Business Administration at Harvard supports this notion. Increasing advertising during a recession while your competitors cut-back is an opportunity to improve market share and your ROI.
But cash is tight right? You’re looking to cut costs, and that fat marketing budget seems like the perfect place to start slashing. Rather than cut back on marketing expenditure, it is better to optimize your campaigns by more effectively targeting your prospects. This requires running your business on customer intelligence. For pure-play online retailers, this is easy. All of your customer interactions are trackable and the data is mineable.
Amazon.com is the defacto example of this type of ‘data driven’ company. By leveraging their customer data, Amazon.com are able to up-sell their shoppers by recommending additional relevant products and also getting them to come back to their store with an effective customer lifecycle messaging plan. They are also not afraid to try new things. They have deployed applications on social networks like Facebook and Linkedin, launched a mobile phone version of their store and run text message marketing campaigns to support its launch.
Take extra care of your existing customers As the life-blood of any business, customers should be well taken care of in any case. Competitors will be slashing prices in an attempt to lure your customers away. Recessions are the perfect time for new start-ups to enter the market with a product offering that is better tailored to your customers current needs. It’s important to increase your service levels and adapt to the current operating environment in order to continue to succeed. People are looking for convenience, to save money and for convenience. What are you doing for them?
But not everyone automatically loses out in a recession. Read about why luxury brands and value players will survive remarkably well and why the real problem is with players in the middle market. For them, it becomes a case of catering to consumers current needs. For example, you might normally purchase Tide laundry powder. But feeling the financial pinch, you may decide to switch to a generic supermarket brand and save money. If Tide had offered a special or coupon which cut their price to match the generic brands, then they would have a good chance of retaining that customer. After all, why would they want to risk the consumer experiencing the lower-cost brand and finding it does just as good a job? On the flip-side, the consumer also takes a risk since they don’t know how the new detergent will affect their clothes.
Update: Indian Study Shows Recession Spending puts marketers ahead
Read more: Tactics for Marketing in a Recession
Resources I used for this post:
New Ad-ology Study: Reduced Advertising During Recession Negatively Impacts Consumer Perception
Should You Up Your Marketing During a Recession?
Marketing Your Way through a Recession
Tags: customer service, linkedin, optimize ROI, recession marketing
11 May 09 SEM Optimisation: 10 Simple Steps
Unintrusive and highly relevant, search marketing offers the most cost-effective and fiscally sound advertising options on the Internet. It works because your ad is only shown to people who are actively looking for what you sell.
While it is touted as being good for increasing brand awareness (through the content network) this should be treated as a fringe benefit. Paid search is a direct marketing channel, and it’s performance should be measured accordingly. How many customers did you get and how much did it cost you within a defined period of time (Usually 30 days)
You can measure everything on the internet so your web business should be driven by analytics driven-decision making.
The three primary pay-per-click (PPC) search networks are:
Google (including the Google Search Network and Google Content Network), Yahoo and MSN. This article will focus on the dominant network, Google, but the optimisation principles are transferable to the other two networks.
Campaign Creation
1. Understand the Business: What is for sale? Who is the target market and Who is the competition?
2. Determine marketing objectives. What are you trying to accomplish? Increase sales, attract new customes, reduce customer acquisition costs etc.
3. Define Campaign Goals. What are the KPIs you want to measure? Where possible, determine what these currently are and benchmark your progress from this point forward. Use tools like Adwords and Analytics reports to automate your reporting processes.
4. Manage Expectations: Ensure you know what the possibilities and limitations of the medium are and how pursuing one course of action may be counter-productive in another area. For example, a brand that wants to increase their visibility in the market place, should invest in the content network and image ads. However, this tends to be expensive and does not necessarily lead to sales.
5. Define your Campaign Structure
Campaign Level
Define who and where your target market is, your bidding strategy and at what time you want your ads to display.
Adgroup Level
Create a new adgroup for each keyword or keyword phrase. This lets you maintain finer control over the ad text that is displayed. The other alternative is to have tightly themed adgroups and then you can get the most benefit from Dynamic Keyword Insertion.
Keyword Level
- Pack thse into tightly themed adgroups. For example, “iphone” and “iphone 3G” should be different keyword groups.
- Choose keywords around your product and also questions that lead to your products.
- It’s important to target ‘long tail’ keywords and common misspellings that your competition has neglected making them a very cheap source of lead generation for you.
- Define negative keywords as appropriate (If you sell iPhones and don’t repair them, then make sure you define “repair” as a negative keyword like this: -repair
- One way to avoid dealing with negative keywords is to only use [exact matches]. This means exactly what you put inside of [] in that exact order will be trigger your ad to display. you will see a lot less impressions, but your CTR and Conversion ratio will both increase while your CPS will decrease.
6. Write your Ad-Copy
Headlines
People will quickly skim over the multitude of ads displayed. The headline is where you need to grab their attention. Include the keywords that they searched for. Having tightly themed adgroups (even just one keywords per adgroup sometimes) and using dynamic keyword insertion are powerful tools to employ.
Body
You grabbed someone’s attention with your headline and now’s your chance to convince them to visit your website. Repeat your keywords here. A user’s search terms are always highlighted in an ad, so this gets you extra attention. The body of the message is your only opportunity to convey your value proposition. You have to convince your audience that they should buy the available product (which is most likely a commodity and available from x number of other websites also) from your website and you’ve only got about 70 characters to do it in. No fluff allowed, just make your sales pitch.
Display URL
This is another opportunity to convey value to your audience. Show the viewer that will convince them that they will get what they want from you and then make sure you deliver on your promise.
Ad Variations
It’s important to try multiple variations of headlines and ad-copy. We all think we are creative geniuses when it comes to writing ads, but it’s always best to let your customers decide.
7. Landing pages (Destination URLs)
“At its best, selling is taking a doubt and turning it, jujitsu style, into a powerful push. Selling is making the customer feel better about spending money — or investing it — than he would have felt by keeping his wallet zipped.”
- Ben Stein
- Do not disappoint the user! Your homepage is not necessarily your landing page. If your ad promotes a specific product, then the deliver that product and an easy purchase path when they click on the ad.
- The goal of your landing page is to convert the lead into a sale. You should provide all necessary information that the user will need to make a purchase decision without making them have to leave your site to gather more information. If they do, chances are they won’t come back.
- The most critical information needed to make a purchase decision should be visible above the fold. Additional supplementary information should be geared towards turning doubts into incentives to buy. Make sure it is displayed in easy to navigate and easy to read, managable chunks.
- Your call-to-action button should dominate the page since this is what you want the user to do next. Furthermore, it should take them directly to a checkout page where you can collect their delivery and billing information. It’s important to guide the user through your desired navigation path by highlighting what you want them to do next, and also eliminate friction along the way.
- Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes (no pun intended if you happen to be selling shoes!) pre-empt any questions and present answers to them. Most importantly, adhere to the principle ‘Don’t make me think.’ Online shoppers are very impatient. They will buy from you only if they choose to and if the trust you.
Google Checkout
- Integrating Google Checkout into your ads is one way to bypass a landing page completely. You get the user to ‘add to cart’ straight from your ad. By reducing the number of steps to completing the purchase, chances are you are more likely to close the sale. This is a great way to distinguish your ad on search result pages.
Campaign Optimisation
8. Measure everything
Don’t look past paid services like: http://www.webtrends.com/Products/WebTrendsAdDirector.aspx
It’s easy enough to install the three lines of javascript tracking code provided by the search engine, after that,you need to define what reports you want based on the KPI’s you established earlier.
Measurement is too broad a topic to cover here and I will delve into it at a later date.
9. Reporting
Set up an automated email reporting system and use these to make analytics-driven-optimisation-decisions. Everything can be measured on the internet, so there is no excuse for wasted resources and making decisions on a hunch.
10. Optimize Your Campaigns
Managing the Budget
Display your ads only on the Google Search Network. Opt-out of the default content network placements. Using the content network, your ad will display on any website that has relevant content. These browsers may not be interested in what you are selling, but you get charged regardless on a CPM basis.
The content network now gives you the option to serve ads using Placements, so you can choose precisely which websites you want to display your ads on. While this is an improvement, it is still tends to deliver a lower ROI than the search network, but it could serve you well to increase your brand visibility which can have positive flow on effects for your search network campaign.
Competitors:
If you really want to, you can see what keywords your competitors are bidding on using keywordsy.com. This could help or hinder your progress depending on how you make use of it. it’s great if you are just starting out in a crowded space and can save you a lot of time on initially setting up your Adwords campaign.
Stop fighting for the #1 ad position.
It isn’t always the most favourable position because it is usually the subject of competitor ad-bashing. Aim for #2 or #3 instead. Sometimes the top 2 or 3 sponsored results are placed above natural search results rather than to the the right, where a lot of people are accustomed to look for ads while shopping. As such, many users suffer from a phenomenon know as ad-blindness. A benefits of the #1 spot is that Google search partners (AOL, Ask.com, Amazon, etc) typically only serve a single ad spot, which goes to the highest bidder.
Only bid on exact match keywords.
This means your ad displays less often, but it displays more often to relevant prospects. You also don’t have to agonize over what negative keywords to choose.
Ad-Scheduling:
Depending on what type of business you run, it makes sense to serve ads at certain times only. A blatant example is a hairdresser that is open 9am to 5pm and serves an ad encouraging you to call to make an appointment. There is no point serving ads after 5pm since no one will be around to schedule the appointment. Hot Tip: Schedule your ads to display at times when your competitors have switched theirs off. The lack of competition means that you can potentially secure a lot of low-cost traffic. However, remember that your competitors have switched off their ads at certain times for a good reason, probably because sales volumes aren’t very high at those times and the directly measured sales results look poor in comparison to other times of day. One man’s trash is another man’s gold.
Corroborating your Adwords reports with your sales reports will help you determine at what times and on what days you get the most conversions. Obviously people shopping for your product are most inclined to buy at these times, to make sure you serve your ads at these peak times, and turn them off at off-peak times, where the ROI isn’t worth it.
Increase your clickthrough rate.
Your ad position on Google is determined by: CTR X bid. Therefore, to increase your CTR, ensure you have improved your quality score. Your quality score is determined by how well your keywords match your ad copy. Improve this by being more relevant:
- Tightly themed ad groups
- Compelling ad-copy
Geographic targeting
Target your customers where they are. You can now even narrow this down to the city and post code. There’s simply no point showing your ad to people will never become customers.
Use Comparison Shopping Sites – Shopping.com powers Yahoo etc.
and get on google product search: http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/index.html
The Adwords API
This is a great tool to make your marketing department redundant. Once setup, correct use of the API means that new ads can be automatically created and published for products added to your catalogue. While making your entire marketing department redundant may be pushing it, the API can definitely save your business some personnel costs.
In closing, understand that search marketing today is not just about Google, Yahoo and MSN. Today you have to consider comparison shopping websites and social media opportunities. I encourage you to check out my posts on Facebook Advertising and Twitter.
Watch out for a future post which will reveal all you need to know about Optimising your website for maximising conversions. Find out how to minimize friction, close more sales and up-sell your customers. so your SEM efforts are not wasted.
04 May 09 Sheep Theory: E-commerce Product Placement
Soy milk does not need to be refrigerated until opened, so it never used to sit in the supermarket fridge next to the regular milk. Not surprisingly, it didn’t sell very well. Milk that’s not in the fridge? That’s just too weird for most of us used to buying fresh milk. Soy milk eventually got repackaged and put on a shelf next to all the other milk and hey presto, it started selling. And now on to product placement in the virtual world:
How do you decide what people see on your homepage? You let your customers decide.
Majority rules in the world of e-commerce. If a lot of people are buying a particular product, then it’s very likely that others will also want that product on the basis of what is effectively a very powerful recommendation from their peers. Roger’s Innovation Adoption Curve, while not created for this purpose, is still a clear illustration on how a little known product can be catapulted to stardom and it teaches a valuable lesson: Speak to a narrowly targeted audience of people who will want your product.
So, it makes sense to identify potential products that could fit the bill as early as possible and then give them some homepage real-estate. To do this, mine your data and display what other people are buying through visualizations of:
- Your daily / weekly sales stats. (Bestsellers)
- Things people desire (Wishlists)
- If Customer A buys product X, then display products Y and Z that Customer B,C,D bought who also bought Product X. (Keep up now
)
A note on product pages: The primary objective of the product page is to get the prospect to add the featured item to their shopping cart and then easily complete the order and pay you. However, the product page also offers ample opportunity to cross-promote and up-sell your prospect by enticing them with related products, thereby increasing your Average Sales Value. The classic example is Amazon’s Better Together feature which recommends the top 1 or 2 other titles that are commonly bought with the item in question and offers the entire bundle to you at a slightly discounted price. (A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow.) This is made possible by analytics driven decision making.
16 Apr 09 Affiliate Marketing is Your Online Sales Force
Pay for performance marketing makes perfect sense anytime. If a salesperson performs well, they should get paid for their efforts. Your affiliate marketing channel should be treated no differently to another salesperson. If your team of affiliate websites perform better than your human salesforce, then replace them! You don’t need them to maintain customer relationships, that’s what customer services is for! It’s a recession after all.
Tags: ecommerce
