Digital marketing: Little and often

A hypocrite speaks

This afternoon I had the pleasure of chairing a seminar hosted by the Media Trust all about how small charities can take advantage of using the web in general and video in particular to further their communication.

There were some fascinating examples from both Greenpeace UK and Macmillan Cancer Support.

We discussed:

• Video’s ability to explain complex ideas and express emotive messages
• The underlying importance of social networks, particularly finding enthusiastic supporters who can at as ambassadors and help a charity develop
• Using existing tools, going where the audience already is and not re-inventing the wheel
• Not spreading your efforts too thinly
• Supporting material for the main message – video has more impact if it doesn’t stand alone

What is clear in modern marketing is that big campaigns still have some use, if you can afford them, but they suffer from a long preparation,  followed by a large but short-term impact.

However, you can get a very worthwhile result from regularly putting small and simple messages out there. You’re playing the long game.

My top tip is actually very simple:

Keep a weblog. Add info it regularly. (Sharp eyed readers will notice that I don’t actually manage to do this myself. Oops!)

Link to pictures, video, other writers who resonate with your cause. Use other tools like Twitter and Facebook to send people back to your blog.

Quite apart from the conversation you can now start to have with your supporters, a weblog is a great way to prove your diligence in your chosen field. It’s also a great way of reminding yourself what you’ve been doing for the past few months.

In short, it’s a planning tool as well as being a your archive of actions. Need to get that Annual Report out in half the time? Keep a weblog and you’re doing the work throughout the year rather than in one exhausting block.

HuffPost tests headline efficacy

The one above probably won’t win any awards

Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab is pointing out a very clever strategy the Huffington Post has used to discover which headlines get the best clicks.

It’s been A/B testing in realtime. Half the users see one headline, half see a different one. After a certain amount of time, the headline which has got the most clicks so far becomes the one that everyone else sees.

That’s smart.

Why would I want to be friends with a corporation?

Sentry Parental Controls has just asked to be my Facebook friend. And this irritates me.

I don’t add people I haven’t actually met, and I don’t know Sentry from the Horseguards, so the answer’s a big fat finger on the ‘ignore’ button. But I’m annoyed that they would just send a friend request, to me in my personal space, without so much as an additional message explaining anything about them or why they might be relevant to me.

Sentry are friend-spammers.

I’ve no problem with marketing, but they’ve got completely the wrong strategy here. I haven’t heard of them before, but my first contact with them has been negative, so it’s likely that my first contact will be my last.

Why would I want to be friends with a corporation? Can’t think of many reasons, although Macfans will be able to tell you, but I bet an iPod lover’s relationship with Apple started small and personal and on the buyers terms and subsequently grew into something more meaningful. Like real friendships in fact.

Or is this the way digital relationships happen now? I hope not.