Marketing - the going nowhere debate

JP Rangaswami is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and a Fellow of the British Computer Society. Originally an economist, then financial journalist and, after nearly a decade of working for an investment bank, his futurology skills have been recruited by BT.

He has a view about marketing .....'and when “socio-economic groupings” meant something, when “marketing” could predict your propensity to buy something based on all the boxes they put you into versus Long Tails that weave their equalising ways across class and gender and hirsuteness, or lack of'.

He notes that... "In the meantime, everyone else (bar the marketers) is into biometrics. And maybe that’s acceptable. Was a shibboleth an early form of biometric identification? Well, at least the shibboleth identified someone as a member of a group (or not, as the case may be). You see, one of the problems we face with modern definitions of privacy and confidentiality is deeply connected to this need for a protected need for individuality."

For PR, he has a thought content in which he says "Only the customer can make content king. We must all remember that."

We still argue that the PR industry has to provide content and excellent content at that. Is this still true. When 'we the media' is the new media, all our content is only as good as its acceptance by the commons in their niche and small communities.

For me, the key is the values of the commons. It is here where we can find allegiance, engagements and, for some, customers, vendors, partners and employees.

But don't go and seek the mass market defined by values. That is vanilla marketing. It lacks authenticity and the ingredient of community.

Because marketing is going no where and PR refuses to try to understand the nature of relationships, we now need a new supra profession that seek to weave its way among the relationship clouds (if you like the Myspaces, YouTubes, Blogger, Flickrs and Diggs of this world). These Relationship Cloud pilots have a better chance than those who still keep their feet firmly in concrete booted professions.

Ita a snap (URL Preview)

Snap Preview Anywhere form http://www.snap.com is becomming a great success story. They say that in just 8 weeks, over 45,000 sites worldwide have asked to be included on their sites. hey have generated over 120,000,000 previews.

There are lots of similar products out there but this one is really doing well and I like it and have installed it too. Hope you like it as well.

One of the advantages` for the PR practitioner is that this kind of added value/contnet can be used in releases sent to jounalists and others to show the depth of information available via embeded hyperlinks (because many journalists don't bother to click the links).

Consumers 'get it' - So PR has to as well

"Consumers get it; they understand technology and they are adopting it accordingly," analyst Sean Wargo told the Consumer Electronics Show last week.

More than $155bn (£80bn) in consumer technologies is expected to be sold in the US in the next 12 months.

"Driving the industry is the transition to the new breed, the next generation of technologies," Mr Wargo said.

The industry says consumers' love affair with gadgets will continue despite a US/global economic slowdown and a prediction that growth in the US market would halve in 2007 from last year's figures.

Is this true of the UK?

The evidence is that adoption in the UK is, if anything accelerating. The jump from consumer to corporate application is moving ahead too.

What this means is that ordinary people and corporations are using all manner of new web services, gadgets and widgets

It also means that communication practitioners now need at least a basic understanding of what is involved otherwise the population as a whole will accelerate out of the reach of the press relations oriented practitioner.

The £12 billion economy

Koopa is not the first to be top of the pops online. Its just that the rules for counting what's in and what's not have changed. In fact online markets have been encroaching on the high street fast and for a long time.

What is important is that the power of the online community is such that the dusty institutions like Entertainment Retailers' Association have had to acknowledge the reality of online interactions and sales.

I am still wincing over the UK retailers sluggish response to online markets in the last ten weeks of last year. Not being able to cope because of logistics problems is plain daft.

If one does a quick analysis of each of the sectors in the UK economy, it is possible to get an insight into how much is mediated by the Internet.

I have been doing just that

The current value of the Internet Mediated economy is now approaching £12 billion.

Or, to put it another way more than one £ in 10 of the UK economy is mediated by the Internet. Put another way, if the .net went down for a full year the UK economy would shrink 10% with a knock on effect on all other parts of the economy.

What this means for PR is this. If practitioners are not involved in this part of the economy, they are not part of a big slice of the action and because it is the fastest growing economic mediator (faster even than financial and construction put together - both of which are dependant on the Internet).

This is why the CIPR needs to be taking it much more seriously.

BL Ochman's 12 Marketing Tenets

As always bang on the money B L Ochman has a great view of modern marketing - or is it public relations.

Today, organisations have to be interested in the 'Relationship Cloud'.

Examples of Relationship Clouds could include YouTube and MySpace and we know how valuable they are by looking at the accounts of thier owners. But they are just two among many.

Ita a snap (URL Preview)

Snap Preview Anywhere form http://www.snap.com is becomming a great success story. They say that in just 8 weeks, over 45,000 sites worldwide have asked to be included on their sites. hey have generated over 120,000,000 previews.

There are lots of similar products out there but this one is really doing well.

One of the advantages` for the PR practitioner is that this kind of added value/contnet can be used in releases sent to jounalists and others to show the depth of information available via embeded hyperlinks (because many journalists don't bother to click the links).

CRM sux

We now see the Internet engaging people in evermore interactive ways. It is even closer to the ideas expressed in The Cluetrain Manifesto half a decade ago (Searls, D. and Weinberger, D. 2000. Markets Are Conversations. In C. Locke, R. Levine, D. Searls and D. Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto (pp. 73-112). Great Britain: Biddles Ltd. www.cluetrain.com).

In their study The End of Attraction: Why People Stop Visiting Company Online Communities. Tuula Mittilä1 and Maria Mäntymäki (http://www.ebrc.fi/kuvat/25-37_05.pdf) juxtapose the more normal customer relationship management with its online counterpart.

They offer evidence that relationship marketing with online communities differs in two ways from the traditional relationship marketing. Both the medium, i.e. an online community, and the relations vary from the traditional ones. Since online communities enable dialogue between the customer and the supplier as well as among customers the development of online communities has brought a new tool for implementing relationship marketing. Because of the development of the Internet ... interaction has enhanced dramatically. People with similar interests and lifestyles may interact around the clock and the globe. Word-of-mouth has a new scale while customers’ exchange views on goods, services and suppliers. As a consequence of that a customer's power grows as well.

Nosy retailers lost 16 million orders

Keep you nose out of my business and listen to what I want. So say the UK's online shoppers according to Webcredible.

Webcredible, asked Internet users what would be most likely to make them abandon an online purchase. Hidden charges topped the list of frustrations for 36% of respondents followed by having to register before buying a product, which polled 31% of the votes. Other annoyances were: not providing clear delivery details (13%); not offering telephone details (10%); and lengthy checkout processes (9%).

The person in charge of relationship management among retailers need to get gritty with the margin chasers, control freaks, and email address collectors (normally un-reconstructed marketing managers and brand managers).

If the PR manager is not being robust with the control freaks they should be fired. Now!

This year, their soppy attitude cost sales and they did not tell the board to get ready for the boom in online retail sales we all knew was going to boom.

Its simple barriers are breaking down. People are getting active in social media. They share their holiday snaps, videos and location details with millions and so are not going to be shy buying online. PR people should not tolerate ninny heads who want to create barriers because they were taught to collect 'customer information' and do something stupid like have a data base for 'customer relationship management', spam and scream marketing.

I blame the PR industry. It needs something stiff up its spine instead of pink fizzy down its throat.

The biggest cocktail party in the world

he IPA in a report in 2007 suggested that: "In the future agencies must recognize that traditional advertiser/agency/consumer relationships will be challenged with new models of engagement coming to the fore. As traditional advertising continues to decline, by 2016, the hypothesis is that media owners of all kinds, including online search, all networks, gaming environments and interactive digital TV, will be integrating brands directly into content and editorial." (Re-invention is key if agencies are to survive).

Huh! 2016 is too far away. Try the end of next year, or at latest 2009.

The idea that there are market segments and stakeholders as described by Porter and Friedman come up against a mum commenting on social and domestic life, friends and locality for a small family circle. Such a diary, fascinating to son and daughter who have left home, does not describe a demographic segment. Its influence is personal and of limited circulation. If written online in a blog it disappears among the millions of other blogs also written by individuals. But, because it is public and can be viewed by a billion people worldwide, its potential audience is huge. The writer is the nexus of a tiny community but only at a time and in a context chosen by the community. The casual inclusion of a brand in this conversational medium is incidental and yet powerful. One aspect of this power is that the comment can move from beyond the family circle to other friends through the same medium or others and spread viraly. Sometimes at speed and others in a more leisurely fashion. The power is in conscious inclusion in 'small talk' at the biggest cocktail party in the world. Sometime this will be in the 'bloggersphere' and at others in others social media as diverse as YouTube and email. As with such comments there are occasions, from time to time, when the conversational cacophony pauses and the single voice is lone and clear and its message taken up by others. Online, this can count in millions and in seconds.

What we see in these interactions is not a 'market segment' or a 'stakeholder group' we see people with an interest in the values expressed. This convergence of values brings people together in wider, often short lived, social groups, a will-o-the-whisp emergence of both values and relationships. For brand and traditional stakeholder managers, this is too ephemeral, too counter to their training, unmanageable and yet mysteriously familiar.

It is about relationships and is powerful. Where the role of public relations is to interact with latent, aware and active social groups, it can now find them online.

Business leaders underestimate the web

The IMRG figures for online sales in the run up to Christmas show that forecasts underestimated demand. Forecasts of £7.5 billion compared to the actual outcome of £7.66 billion and that is only part of the story. Sales were limited because online retailers could not deliver.

Last year online sales were £30.2 billion with an increase during 10 weeks to Christmas up 54% on 2005.

Well this is not much of a surprise to some of us. What is disturbing is that so many people are still in denial. Online PR is still a fringe activity. Online advertising is inyerface. Web sites are horrid and lack interactivity and response to the power of social media lacks imagination to a degree that makes users cringe and rage.

As an industry the PR business just has to get stuck in.

Poncing around in the hope it will all go away led from behind by the PR institutions is no way to run an economy, industry sector or business.

The response to the power of the Internet in the UK is akin to the response to the realities of manufacturing in the 1960's, R&D and education in the '70's, the global economy in the run up to the millennium and show lack of foresight and fuddy duddy thinking.

The lack of knowledge about online interactivity across UK management and the creative services is appalling.

There is a need for leadership.

Social Media sites are taking over

It is all very well to imagine that social media is significant.

My question is: Is Social Media attracting the interest of Internet users more than traditional serach engine and consumer web sites.

I needed empirical evidence that would prove the point.

One way of doing this is to compare like for like data of page views (see note below) between differnt types of web site.

I examined data over a three year period. In this time the number of Internet users increased and home broadband penetration increased from almost zero to nearly 60% of users. This should mean that there will be a general increase across the majority of web sites.

I took information about site traffic from Alexa and looked at page views of the top 30 Alexa ranked UK sites.

This would indicate both comparative interest in these sites as well as growth of interest among Internet users.

The results are are as follows:

Page views among the sites with top ten ranked pages:

Search engines

Retail Sites

Social Media Sites

Page views among the sites with 11-20 ranked pages:

(note: there were no search engines)

Retail Sites

Social Media Sites

Page views among the sites with 21-30 ranked pages:

(note: there were no search engines)

Retail Sites

Social Media Sites

This evidence would suggest it would be interesting to see what reach these sites enjoyed comparatively and there relative Alexa rank.

My conclusion from this is that:

Social media is among the top rank of web sites of interest to Internet Users.

Social media is making considerable inroads into the pages viewed by Internet users

Search engines are not increasing their traffic in relation to the increase of Internet users.

Retailers are, mostly loosing share of page views

Social media is enjoying an exponential increase of interest.

If someone, at this late stage is looking for a dissertation subject, this one would be stunning.

Alexa Page views measure the number of pages viewed by Alexa Toolbar users. Multiple page views of the same page made by the same user on the same day are counted only once. The page views per user numbers are the average numbers of unique pages viewed per user per day by the users visiting the site. The page view rank is a ranking of all sites based solely on the total number of page views (not page views per user). The three-month changes are determined by comparing a site's current page view numbers with those from three month ago.

Page views per million indicates what fraction of all the page views by toolbar users go to a particular site. For example, if yahoo.com has 70,000 page views per million, this means that 7% of all page views go to yahoo.com. If you summed the fractional page views over all sites, you would get 100% (this is not true of reach, since each user can of course visit more than one site).

Print and digital advertising converge

The Guardian group is merging its print and digital divisions for business operations. The Guardian Unlimited ad sales’ digital and print teams will be merged into one unit, GNM Commercial.

Many newspaper publishers are currently trying (Telegraph Media Group already does) to form cross-platform advertising teams, in order to slow the ad revenue migration to online ( Source: Brand Republic )

"There's no question that the internet represents an enormous challenge to our business models,” said Sly Bailey, Trinity Mirror chief executive.

Yet she also insisted that current problems are cyclical in nature

"We expect the cycle to move back into more positive territory. And we remain convinced that newspapers, as printed products, will remain a powerful medium for many years to come," she said.

She also commented that: "there's little doubt that some of the 'old media' companies will eventually be swept away" said Bailey (Source: Media Guardian).

Meantime, to stem the tide, the FT is going Mobile.

The FT Mobile News reader is free, and gives users access to news, comments and analysis, stock valuations and a 30-day search function.

Planning communication

Planning communication has taken on a new dimention in the last five years.

Developing a communication strategy even two years out means we need to consider a wide range of communications channels and they are changing very fast. For example, YouTube became a mainsteam channel in less than 15 months!

What chance do communications planners have with projects going out just a few years? What will be the important channels for the London Olympics will it be Myspace or YouTube or something else? In truth no one knows. Television may be marginalised by user bandwidth. Even search engines could be marginalised by syndication, social tagging or proprietary sematic web services. It is all guesswork.

Social media has now reach such a critical mass that it has to be part of communication planning for most organisations.

The core prediction of 'Communication - The next decade' published by the UK communications regulator Ofcom (http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/commsdecade/), is that the next generation of upgraded networks (the so-called NGNs) are likely to be based on the IP (Internet Protocol), leaving the historic differences between different network infrastructures far behind. We are already seeing this change in practice. It means that all media except print is competitive and on a level technical playing field. Daily UK domestic IP penetration will move up from 37% to saturation at 89%. Television as well as radio becomes technically indistingushable from the Internet. The commincations channels will have only two paradigms print and IP.

Broadband will not be up to 8meg as now but over 100 meg and the range of devices, especially mobile devices will allow the Internet to escape from the ubiquitous PC.

The timescale is very short. 100 meg broadband, now being rolled out after trials last year, will cover most UK homes served by cable in 2008, meantime of the 86% of the population who use mobile phones 22% already use IP mobile photomessaging and IP based mobile uptake is now showing signs of rapid accerloration.

As the twin cuves of newspaper circulation and online news page views passed each other in Europe last year communicators saw the maginalising of the only competitor to IP based communication. The decline in relevance for old media is now obvious but we know that online media is disruptive even more than its 17th century print counterpart.

Because of the extent and speed of adoption of Internet Procol devices and communications channels, how will professional communicators wrest the technology from geekdom and transpose it into mainstream education and practice.

How do we find new ways to manage communication. It will have to be an approach that factors-in the prospect of new, unknown and yet deeply influential channels for message interactions becomming hugely signifcant in months and will also have to face the prospect of cataclismic communication channel demise, a phenomenon we have not yet encountered except in the trial run, proof of concept demise of Fax.

Finally, what role is there for communications specialists in circumstances requiring integration of the desires and wishes of an online community empowered with huge capacity for distruption and capability to change how organisations are managed at both strategic and proceedural levels?

If you look at the economic contribution of the Internet in the UK, sector by sector, it ranges from a few percent to over 50% and my current guestimate is that Internet mediation contributes between £100 and 150 billion to the UK economy each year. By extrapolation that is something of the order of $4 trillion globally. This commercial power is bound to be a factor affecting communication management.

The Internet is ubiquitous as a means for communication of all kinds for over a third of the population now and this penetration will grow to 80% as broadcast progressively moves towards Internet Protocol based delivery.

Do we, or should we make time to monitor these shifts in communication technology and application. Most people involved in the communication business are busy dealing with the hear and now and are quite successful using traditional techniques anyway.

Before we start making predictions and second guessing the future channels, we will have to use the established management techniques developed for the management of change, the uncertain, crisis and emergencies.


I suppose we first have to deal in what we do know.

What we do know is that all the channels for communication that were available last year, ten years ago and 100 years ago are still there and many of them have high audience penetration as well.

We also know that some media will be much less significant than now. Can we write off fax or will we see it re-emerge in a new form? Among the junk mail, is a letter going to be significant? Will emails just go into the ether because of spam filters? What we know, is that we will have to continue to ask such questions.

What we also know is that there will be many more new channels to use in the next four years. We know that most will be digital?

We know that we don't know how the new channels will be delivered? Certainly some will be delivered by PC's and some will be delivered to browsers that won't have much by way of processing power but which ones? Some communication will use near field communication and so will video and podcasts morph becsue of these developments?

We can be certain that timescales will have changed. Already we have a doppler effect at play. Bloggers will be aware of thier own content comming back at them as news sometimes morphed, added to or truncated sometimes weeks or months later. The frequency and content of messages plus the time it takes for content to be news or part of the long tail will change message perceptions, reach and understanding. That is another thing that we know we have to watch.

Picture: Glooo

Online BOOMS!

In the ten weeks up to Christmas the forecasts for online retailing were wildly out. A twenty percent miss-match between forecast and actual is just awful. The Mad Hatter could do better.

Tesco.com broke all records with 1.3m shoppers buying food and presents on the site in the four weeks before Christmas - up 30% on 2005.

Wetherby-based ecommerce firm NetConstruct, working with Hemingway of Ripon, has provided internet sales sites for many High Street names including Argos, Harvey Nichols, John Lewis and BhS and according to Hemingway's managing director, Andrew Johnson, online sales show an above average increase of 56 per cent over the same period last year.

The number of parcels delivered is also thought to have increased to 200m from the 180m initially predicted.

Online sales over the Christmas trading period - the 10 weeks to December 24 - are expected to be up 50% to £7.5bn. James Roper, IMRG chief executive, who had projected sales of £7bn for the period, revised the figure upward. He said: "This has definitely been an online Christmas."

These numbers are telling us there are more people are spending more online. Twentyfive million people are shopping online in the UK. For those who have got a taste for it, online is now a real option and 80% of white goods are now sold online anyway.


And the influential and Internet savvy e-commerce said of the IMRG lift: Our gut reaction is that it could, if anything, be higher than that. This year was a real coming of age for internet shopping, and practically everybody I know bought some of their Christmas presents online.

I am with e-commerce and in two weeks we will know.

Now, is the PR industry ready to contribute? Are we working on Web 2.0 solutions. Well, it looks like its PR skills that are needed.

Risk management for PR and New Media

Public Relations is not publicity and is not propaganda and, to be effective it has to be planned.

Of course there are routines one can use in the development of PR planning and management but few of the standards include the need for risk analysis to be part of the process.

In social media, the need for proper risk analysis is greater than ever and it occurred to me that it would be fun share some thoughts on this with you.

Of course, first off you might like to see the lecture slides followed by a trial I am trying out.

The slide show below is not the full version but gets the point across.



Here is an experiment in providing a risk assessment matrix for new media. I have taken a standard template that has to be edited for the medium (e.g. Blogs, RSS, Games, Podcasts etc.) and for the organisation/campaign but it does give an idea as to how pretty standard risk management techniques can be applied to PR management.



Let me know what you think.

Jimmy offers wiki software and service

SMEs could stand to profit from a new service from Wikia, the for-profit offshoot of open-source encyclopaedia Wikipedia reports IT Wales.

Its founder, Jimmy Wales, is offering free tools including software, computing, storage and network access to businesses and communities who want to build interactive websites.

"We will be providing the computer hosting for free, and the publisher can keep the advertising revenue," Mr Wales told Reuters.

The offer aims to tempt special-interest groups hoping to set up sites as well as SMEs looking for the expertise and tools to expand their user base rapidly.

Nice offer. We have been using PB wwik for some time and its nice to know about different products and services out there.

Patent off to use wikis ?

The Gowers Review recommended that Wiki technology, as used in Wikipedia, could be used as part of the peer process to build a knowledge base of comments on the application's suitability. Previous inventions — prior art — are also taken into account, before the application is submitted to patent examiners. The use of a Wiki, which can be edited by multiple experts, allows links to prior art to be updated.

After being contacted by ZDNet UK on Wednesday, a spokeswoman for the patent office confirmed it was considering measures laid down in the review. She said that the Patent Office was "looking at an implementation plan" for Gowers' recommendations.

There would seem to be many ways wikis can be used. The PR implications for having knowledge building and consultation with peer review sounds a spiffing idea for new product and service introduction as well.

Wow! Gosh! Internet retailing is up

More than 180 million pounds was spent online last Monday, the traditional start of the festive shopping season. This is double the amount of ago year ago.

Predictions of 40% growth seem to have been gazumped. Perhaps the prediction that 25 million people are expected to spend £7bn through the internet - up from £5bn last year and representing £4m every hour, day and night, is too modest.

The driver for the UK where 85 percent of British shoppers preferred clicks to bricks is that they could avoid the "too stressful" high street.

But new research by KPMG and the SPSL Retail Think Tank (RTT) says the internet retailing market "is not as large as many commentators would have us believe" and that traditional high-street retailing still accounts for 2% of the sector's 2.5% growth.

So it may be that the Internet is taking share of sales and is depressing price. I can believe that.

I think that the Internet is taking a big bite out of high street sales perhaps as much as 12%.

What makes me think there is something going on over and above last year is that Woolworths new online offering is making them smile and reach is up for this bellwether UK retailer page views are up 50 since mid November. With two weeks to go M&S is no so dusty either. The high volume low price end of the market is doing very well and top end Debenhams is holding its own. The demographic seems to have changed and that will be a powerful influence.

The bottom line for PR is that online sales are growing and so the Internet is becomming ever more important to organisations and their internet PR activities.



Meantime, French cyber shopping traffic jumped 79 percent in the past week.

Grown-ups need not apply

Children are increasingly swapping music via mobile phones, often without realising they can be breaking the law.

A survey of almost 1,500 eight to 13-year-olds found almost a third shared music via their mobiles.

And if they didn't how would they know which CD's to buy?

Doubt if the music industry undersatnds this idea but they haven't got it yet at all.

TV is going to be fine, thank you. But it will look nothing like it does today and it will be open to all of us.

Steve Rubel has been pondering the fate of TV. I think he is right about some of it but has not factored in games and especially WII style interactive TV. To get some idea of how powerful games are in the market imagine selling 50,000 of any product in just one hour. WII did!

Interaction, especially physical interaction in a games style of Internet TV solution is well within his three year timescale.

Of course, he is speaking from an American not European perspective. Life is different on this side of the Atlantic.

Here we have the hotspots of the highest online retailing regions (not California, the UK), higher blog useage per head of population (not New York but Paris) and higest number of people with 100 meg broadband (Leicester - using cable).

In Europe, there are populations with very high uptake of broadband (2-8 meg) which is haveing a dramatic impact on Internet useage.

The PC has come out of the study/bedroom and into the living space in houses and that is where the real challenge lies.