Marketing

Kony 2012, the campaign started by US-based NGO Invisible Children to stop Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, serves as a reminder that in the bright and shiny new social media world, we shouldn’t forget the basics.

Kony 2012. Depending on your point of view, anything from the most skillfully executed viral campaign in history, mobilising people across the planet to demand governments do something about the world’s most wanted man; to a dangerous example of modern-day internet-powered colonialism, perpetuating the helpless African myth to further self-serving ambitions and arrogantly disregarding the voice of the people supposedly being helped.

This has already been discussed very eloquently by people far more qualified than me to comment on the complexities and dynamics of the Kony 2012 campaign. Writing in the week after “Cover the Night” – the culmination of the campaign – it strikes me that there are a number of important lessons that marketers can learn from this online sensation. And, ironically, most of them are to do with not forgetting good marketing and communication practices, irrespective of the medium you are using.

1.       Audio-visual is the key to something going viral.

But, this applies primarily to developed markets with fast, affordable bandwidth. Ironically, only around 2 percent of Ugandans have internet access, so viewed the video en masse in makeshift cinemas, and certainly were unable to forward it.

2.       Viral doesn’t come from nowhere

There seems to be a perception that the holy grail of a campaign going viral springs from nowhere. In fact, as Kony 2012 demonstrates, an awful lot of planning, budget and an already mobilised community goes into creating an “overnight success”. Reports put the production budget for the first Kony 2012 video – at the time of writing seen almost 88.5 million times on YouTube alone – at $1 million. In addition, this video was seeded into a US-wide community of church and college-goers, who had been primed to be receptive to the message.

3.       Viral goes nowhere without real-life organisation

By all accounts the “Cover the Night” event, which was intended to make Kony famous by plastering posters of him all over major cities, was at best a damp squib according to most news reports. While personally I only saw a single Kony banner in Cape Town, the Mother City event was singled out by Invisible Children as a success – possibly thanks to 18-year-old Michel Comitis picking up the baton and running with it – at his own expense.

4.       Do your homework

As any events organiser can tell you – check out the date you have chosen for any potential conflicts. In Invisible Children’s case, “Cover the Night” fell on the anniversary of the Atiak massacre in northern Uganda by Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA); the anniversary of Hitler’s birthday; and the informal celebration of “Weed Day”. If this was intentional it was an insensitive, problematic and bizarre choice; if unintentional it was arrogant and sloppy.

5.       You only get 15 minutes of fame

Invisible Children’s idea was to make Joseph Kony famous. They probably meant infamous or notorious – but the differences between these are becoming increasingly blurred in today’s celebrity culture. Nonetheless, fame is a fickle mistress and quickly moves on to the big thing – the follow up Kony video has only received just under two million views on YouTube. In an unfortunate double whammy Jason Russell of Invisible Children, the director and “star” of Kony 2012, exacerbated the situation by becoming the next big thing with his peculiar and very public breakdown.

6.       If you start a conversation, you need to finish it

Even if it doesn’t go the way you planned. Invisible Children started off handling questions and critiques well, especially when it came to funding, with a dedicated web page and some slick infographics. Unfortunately however some of the feedback became ranty and emotional, which is neither helpful nor attractive.

7.       Be humble

From Russell single-handedly saving the world on behalf of his little boy, to Invisible Children’s lack of acknowledgement of other organisations’ efforts to stop Kony and improve the lives of those affected, to an arrogant assumption that a military solution was the only option – the Kony campaign displayed very little humility. Marketers can learn that humbleness at the outset can stand you in good stead when things start to wobble.

 

8.       Don’t only have one ace up your sleeve

So “Cover the Night” wasn’t the success it set out to be. However a campaign is seldom a slam-dunk affair and usually the whole is worth more than the sum of the parts. Unfortunately, apart from sketchy details about a pledge event at the United Nations in June and no details at all about something happening in November, there is not much left to hold people’s attentions.

9.       The internet is global

The general response to the Kony 2012 campaign in Uganda seems to be unease, offence and anger. While Invisible Children might have set out to create a campaign aimed at mobilising people in the developed world it was inevitably going to reach the people of Uganda – despite the limited access to the internet in the country. The arrogance of Invisible Children speaking on the behalf of Ugandans aside, several commentators have pointed out that Kony 2012 was perceived by the people it was supposed to help in the same way a campaign encouraging New Yorkers to wear t-shirts emblazoned with Osama bin Laden’s face would be.

This article was first published by African Business Review

 

The Super Bowl XLVI puts television advertising on the radar – is paying out $3.5 million for a 30 second spot really justified when digital marketing comes at a fraction of that cost?

There’s nothing like a Super Bowl to put television advertising firmly on the radar, as far afield as the southern tip of Africa, even if you’ve started consuming most of your media online. At $3.5 million for 30 seconds, and up to $4 million for the premium slots, brands must still be seeing value in this traditional marketing method.

But what does this mean for companies trying to work out whether to stick with the tried and tested traditional marketing methods vs. embracing the brave new world of digital media, in all its fresh-out-the-box shiny glory?

Let’s start at the beginning and take a look at the numbers, using South Africa and its 50 million-odd population as an example: TV penetration per household was sitting at around 72 percent in 2012 and currently Generations, the most popular TV show in the country, gets around 6 million viewers a week according to TAMS (television audience measurement survey) ratings. Radio is the giant, with 88.5 percent of South African adults listening to the radio per week, spending more than 3.5 hours listening per day, according to RAMS (radio audience measurement survey) stats. The largest South African radio station, Ukhozi, has in excess of 6.6 million listeners per week. Total circulation of the 836 members of the Audited Bureau of Circulation (ABC) in South Africa is a notch over 34.5 million readers – although these are unlikely to be unique.

Now let’s move into the digital camp and take a look at the reach here: according to the Digital Media and Marketing Association (DMMA) member sites saw 12.9 million unique browsers, accessing 424.4 million page views, but this comes from a base of around 6 million internet users. In addition, there were 1.5 million mobile unique browsers accessing 40.3 million mobile page views. Mobile penetration is famously sitting at more than 100 percent – although this doesn’t mean that every South African has a cell phone, with many people owning more than one SIM card. The country has 4.8 million registered Facebook users – just less than 10 percent of the total population and 91 percent of the total online population.

While these stats are in no way meant to be an apples-for-apples comparison, what do they show us? At the very simplest level, the Super Bowl advertisers are right – stick to traditional advertising channels to reach the largest audience.

But wait a minute. Why does Forrester predict that online ad spend will eclipse TV spend in the next four years? Closer to home, a DMMA report says that while advertisers currently allocate 10.7 percent of their current annual media budget to digital platforms, “this far higher than what [they had] assumed for years”.

It’s not so simple, is it?

Read the rest of my article on African Business Review

Since Groupon, the big daddy of daily deal sites, launched in 2008, group buying has been heralded as either a revolutionary new way for small businesses to gain exposure or as a sales and marketing disaster.

There is no doubt that small businesses around the world are very successfully using daily deal sites to market their offerings. However, there are enough horror stories out there – most notably the UK bakery that had to bake 102,000 cupcakes at a £12,500 ($20,000) loss after offering a Groupon deal – for businesses to tread carefully when figuring out whether this type of promotion is for them.

Daily deal sites negotiate huge discounts for consumers based on the principles of collective buying: deals are only activated when a minimum number of people agree to buy. In return for massively discounting their products and services, usually between 50-75 percent as well as giving the daily deal site a cut (around 50 percent of the price paid by the customer), businesses are marketed to the hundreds of thousands of local consumers who have opted in to receive the deals.

On the one hand, the concept is fairly risk-free: businesses only pay if the deal tips and they get business out of it. On the other, there have been a number of reports of businesses brought to their knees by overwhelming demand or thanks to making an irrecoverable loss on the deal.

In Africa, South Africa is probably the most developed daily deal market on the continent, although a number of sites have already closed down, including Naspers’ Dealify and Avusa’s Zappon. Groupon, currently boasting a market cap of $12 million, added South Africa to the list of the 46 countries it has expanded to at the end of 2011 when it bought local Twangoo in January 2011.

African Business Review got in touch with Daniel Guasco, Head of Groupon (www.groupon.co.za) in South Africa, to get his views on when it makes most sense for a business to use its services.

Read the rest of my article on African Business Review.

South Africa is well-known as a global leader in the mobile space — within our borders in any case – and we have been credited with a number of world-wide firsts including pre-paid mobile accounts, and SMS banking alerts. Indeed, some of our best-known, local-global success stories are mobile related — think Fundamo, MXit and Clickatell.

Unfortunately, I’d argue, we aren’t always the best at shouting our successes from the rooftops, and I am concerned that I am seeing the same thing happen in the mobile marketing space. By rights, we should be setting the standard for real results-orientated, broad-based mobile marketing campaigns. Let’s ignore, for the minute, the fact that headline writers all to often favour the sexy, yet very niche iPhone, over more bread ‘n butter stuff that is actually reaching a target audience in a highly effective way. I’m still not seeing awesome case studies coming from South African companies and agencies, with real results and ROI data attached to them.

I did a brief round up of how others in the industry would summarise the state of mobile marketing in South Africa today:

BulkSMS’s Pieter Streicher reminds us that permission-based marketing is here to stay, especially when it comes to mobile marketing:

By now, most companies should have woken up to the fact that if they want to stay in business for any length of time, permission-based marketing is the order of the day. In other words, get permission from customers and potential customers before marketing to them. What companies might not yet realise, is that SMS can be key to gaining this permission.

But, all too often the ball is dropped after the first engagement, making the customer database worthless. Once a company has started an SMS conversation with a customer – whether via an in-store promotion, on-package competition, TV ad or at an event – the engagement needs to be extended via a subscription to a VIP club, offer discounts and vouchers, provision of useful information or any number of other value-based offerings via a range of communication channels, including SMS.

An upbeat Mike Stopforth from Cerebra says:

It’s been an extremely exciting second-half of 2011 so far for mobile marketing. The sale of MXit to World of Avatar promises the continued growth and development of the mammoth instant messaging platform, while other homegrown applications like Motribe.com continue to achieve maturity and attract key clients and brands. The days of mobile marketing being limited to an SMS campaign and a mobisite are long gone, with agencies and clients alike looking to integrate mobile into marketing campaigns and online community management. In some cases we’re even seeing mobile lead marketing efforts. It’s an exciting time to be in mobile and I look forward to what 2012 will reveal!

Speaking of MXit, the mobile messaging company’s new owner and boss, Alan Knott-Craig feels we’re only at the beginning of what is to come:

Brands are only now awaking to the marketing opportunities presented by mobile phones…. Vodacom sends over 20 million Please Call Me’s every day. Each message ends with a short paid-for advert. They are sold out months in advance! At MXit we have over R1 billion of advertising inventory this year. Ten million people engage with MXit on a daily basis, spending an average of 45 hours a month on the platform. Show me another property like that and I’ll eat my hat.

Google’s head of mobile for SA, Brett St Clair pinpoints 2012 as the year of the smartphone in SA, as well as the opportunity that exists for shopping and mobile. He also points out that perhaps I haven’t been paying attention, with SA agencies winning international mobile marketing awards:

South Africa lead the way early in 2009 with Mobile Web Marketing, ranking in top 3 countries in the world for traffic volumes. Things have evolved and with around 6.7 million smartphones in the Market and this is on a rapid growth path as low cost Android handsets enter the market so we are seeing South Africa top the charts once again with mobile marketing audience engagement. This time consumers are engaging with search on mobile smartphones, using apps and HTML5.

Already 1 in 3 searches have a location element in them, consumers are using their phones as shopping companions on the go. 2012 will definitely be the year of the smartphone in South Africa, this will allow marketers to engage with audiences using rich media, contextually relevant targeting features and complete end to end tracking on phones. It is great to be working in one of the most innovating countries in the world when it comes to Mobile Marketing, last year South African marketing agencies won 3 out of the 5 international MMA Awards (Mobile Marketing Association), I am looking forward to this year’s event.

While all of these are great points, notice what’s missing from the industry at large? Real-life examples of effective campaigns, whether stand alone or as part of a multi-channel campaign, with actual results and outcomes. Instead, unfortunately, we are being fed and/or are resorting to case studies from abroad, typically more suited to a US or European, iPhone-wielding market.

First published on Vomo.

According to South Africa’s Digital Media and Marketing Association (DMMA), the top advertisers in South Africa have assigned 10.7 percent of its own current annual media budget to digital platforms. The DMMA says that although this is higher than expected, many marketers surveyed are still not spending any money on digital at all.

In addition, the perception is that traditional media is still king when it comes to attracting new customers, brand building and achieving reach, according to the DMMA study. However, social media was credited with increasing the longevity of customer relationships, as well as being cost effective, while online display advertising was considered to be easily measurable in terms of sales and return on investment (ROI).

Compare this to the US, where, according to an Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PriceWaterhouseCoopers report, online ad spend grew 23 percent from the first half of 2010 to the first half of 2011, and totalled $14.9 billion for the first six months of 2011.

African Business Review talks to leading online agencies across Africa to gauge the state of the nation when it comes to online advertising, and to find out what’s next for the online banner ad.

Read the rest of my article on African Business Review.

There is a distinctly upbeat air from two of South Africa’s best-known online retailers, Exclusives.co.za and Kalahari.com. Unsurprisingly, both have their sights set on the opportunities that mobile brings, but in the meantime are finding South Africans keen online shoppers.

Exclusives.co.za’s General Manager, Ben Williams, maintains it’s getting down to basics that is key to attracting and retaining online shoppers in South Africa. Success is down to “boring, basic stuff” he says.

Key to Williams’ strategy is “good marketing of good pricing”. Online prices must beat the prices in physical stores and then be communicated effectively. For instance, says Williams, although Exclusives.co.za is known to be good for books, he is working to build awareness of its pricing in other categories as well, such as e-books, music and games.

Secondly a commitment to delivery is vital, says Williams. And this is not delivery in the marketing weasel-word sense, this refers to the actual delivery of a physical item to a customer within the time promised. And once an expectation has been set, it can be a huge challenge to meet this: for instance a book might need to be delivered from the west coast of America, rather than the east, adding a week to the delivery time.

“Logistics are crucial,” says Williams. “Businesses that have watertight supply chains are winning.”

Finally, security is the third key factor in attracting and retaining online shoppers, says Williams. Here, as well as the usual digital trust certifications, such as Thawte, Exclusives.co.za benefits from the affiliation with a known and established offline store, Exclusive Books. “This provides an element of built-in trust,” says Williams.

Read the rest of my article on African Business Review

Just when you thought you had the interwebs sussed, Google+ comes along and rocks the boat.

Barely out of diapers, social networks Facebook and Twitter have changed the way we work and play. Companies don’t just have Facebook pages anymore; they have all-singing, all-dancing mini-sites, run competitions to drive “likes” and have creative teams dreaming up new ways of “engaging with the fans”. Twitter is no longer just for broadcasting what you had for lunch; promoted tweets are a regular occurrence in our Twitter streams, and celebrities can make a tidy profit by endorsing a brand of trainers in a tweet.

But if there is one thing you can be certain of in 2011, as ever, it’s that change is the order of the day. And Google’s launch of its social network-esque site, Google+, in June means that business owners and consumers alike need to work out what this means for them.

At time of writing, Google hasn’t launched the business-focused side of Google+ yet, bar a few early tests with companies such as Ford and has been actively booting off any businesses that try to sneak in via a personal profile. But, apparently based on feedback since the launch, the search giant has said it is bringing forward the launch date of its Google+ business services.

Read the rest of my article on African Business Review

In Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Doolittle books, the Pushmi-pullyu is a rare animal from Africa with two heads, half gazelle and half unicorn. When it tries to move, it gets pulled in two different directions.

It wouldn’t be surprising if many marketers feel like this at the moment, trying to navigate the rapidly changing digital marketing world, and getting the balance right between push and pull marketing.

Digital marketing is touted as the great conversation between a brand and its customers, but someone has to initiate the right conversations at the right time for your brand. Happy days indeed if your customers are spontaneously saying the right things about you, but many of the most successful viral campaigns need to be seeded.

Read the rest of my article on African Business Review

Update: So 48 hours later I still don’t have email. Thanks to a load of misleading and inaccurate information from Web Africa I decided to not pull my domain name from Web Africa and point it somewhere else yesterday or even this morning.

Apparently 2.000 domain names were affected.

I am still waiting for the CEO of Web Africa to return my call.  I hope he does and can explain this catalogue of disasters. (His PA did get back to me, but couldn’t really do anything to help at that stage). In any case I will very soon be an ex-customer of Web Africa, and move to an ISP where “service” actually means something.

Mistakes do happen. But I stand by my view that total transparency with both your staff and customers is the best policy.

Anyone who follows me on Twitter or Facebook today is probably sick to tears of me whinging about my lack of email and website thanks to a DNS foul-up at Web Africa, my ISP.

Now while I still am not 100% sure of what actually happened, these are my thoughts around the experience from a customer care point of view. This is something I am paying a lot of attention to at the moment, as I am about to launch a new venture that will both rely on and differentiate itself by extraordinary customer care.

1. Realise the magnitude of the problem – quickly. I first reported the problem at 5 pm on Wednesday. When I checked my email on Thursday morning and called the support centre to check in, I got the distinct impression that there were no alarm bells ringing at all at Web Africa yet.
2. Be grateful that your service is that important to your customers and treat them accordingly. The fact that I called in about my email and web site being down before 6 in the morning should have been a clue to the support person that I wasn’t just waiting for Facebook updates and cocktail party invitations. That I was relying on their service for business critical reasons, and that in fact my livelihood relies on my connectivity.
3. Share information. I get that sometimes this is difficult, especially when you are still establishing the extent of the problem. But explain what is going on, and why you can’t advise on whether this is a 30 minute problem or a 28 hour (at time of writing) problem. Don’t under estimate your customers and similarly don’t bamboozle them with jargon. A simple: “the computer that translates your URL into computer speak seems to have failed. We’re trying to find out if this is a slight spasm or a monumental cock-up. In the meantime, your options are X, Y or Z. Why not keep an eye on our site for updates.”
4. Empower your staff with information. The poor first line support guys are doing their best in the face of frustrated and angry customers. The least you can do is give them the information in point 3.
5. Make this information easily accessible elsewhere. And useful. And update it. When I eventually was told where the alerts are posted on the Web Africa site, they turned out to be the most unhelpful things in the world, without a date and time stamp, and weren’t updated regularly. How about using Twitter for this? Or another channel that your customer uses. Being able to get some information on a regular basis would have stopped me phoning the helpdesk on the hour, and then later on the half hour, further adding to everyone’s workload, frustration and expense.
6. When a more senior support person steps in to appease the irate customer, make sure they actually have something to say. Hats off to the person who did contact me when he said he would, but what a shame he actually told me less than the first line guys, couldn’t offer any other solutions, and really didn’t add that much to the party.
7. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. At least five times today I was told that my domain name was being fast-tracked for resolution. Awesome. Except I knew that everyone who was phoning in was being told the same thing. Let’s assume that was 100 people. So, I’m first in line, with 100 other people – not going to work. And you know what, it didn’t.
8. Compensation. I’m still trying to decide what the best thing is to do here. Today, I asked for some form of compensation, and I asked that someone contact me about this after the issue had been resolved. I am pleased that Web Africa is going to offer me compensation, but I am feeling a bit ungrateful at the moment because a) the issue is still not resolved and b) because it was offered to me in the middle of the whole fiasco, it feels more like a “let’s do something to shut this crazy woman up” rather that a “gosh we are really sorry for screwing up, please accept this token of our sincere apologies”. (BTW – embrace your crazy, enraged, het up customers. They care enough to contact you, rather than simply walking across the road to your competitor).
9. Apologise. And empower your first line people to apologise. I remember when I was at school and did a brief stint at a South Africa retailer for a holiday job, we were told, if anything happens to a customer you must never apologise. It’s admitting guilt and leaves the company open to litigation. (Clearly they were reading from a handbook someone had picked up in the USA!) Thank god that this is changing, and that many millennial companies are happy to put their hands up, say we screwed up, we’re sorry and we’re going to fix it in these ways. I do think many (most?) South African companies still need to learn this lesson.
10. Treat your support staff like princes and princesses. They are the face and voice of your company for your customers (those people who pay your wages, remember?) and are so often the worst paid, have the worst working conditions and are disempowered and poorly informed. I love the idea of every single person in a company, especially the CEO, doing regular stints at the helpdesk.

This is not intended to be a dig at Web Africa specifically. For a start I think it’s too easy to hammer companies nowadays using social media, and that often people don’t think before they post. As I mentioned, customer care is something I have been thinking about a lot recently, and today’s experience crystallised a few thoughts for me.

Having said that, Web Africa, I really, really, really would like to have me email back up right about now.

I’ve had the best day seeing the amazing response to the Breadline Africa celeb campaign which launched today and that I am helping promote.

So to say thanks to all the fabulous South Africa bloggers who have supported us with posts, Tweets and Facebook mentions, here is some link love from me.

2Oceansvibe

5FM

Afrigator – check out the awesome ad

A thousand guitars

Biz-community

Cleo

Cosmo Online

Globalpost (via SA Rocks)

iMod

Mother City Living

Muse Magazine

SA Rocks

The Digital Edge

You can enter the competition on the Breadline Africa site, or read the press release on the Twokats site.