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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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A bit about the campaign:

This year, in conjunction with media partners SAfm, City Press, GreaterGood SA and MXit, as well as  Anything Goes Video Production and Flat Stanley (who have given The Foschini Group CSI full rights to use their track ‘Song for the Broken Hearted’), the concept is to support 16 charities for 16 days  charities who all support victims of abuse.

Sixteen short listed non-profit organisations that meet the required CSI criteria each receive a R20,000.00 donation towards their work from TFG CSI.

The rationale behind this interactive campaign is that there are a large number of NPOs that are not widely recognised or acknowledged for their support of victims of abuse. By assisting them in increasing their exposure to the public, the campaign aims to build their profiles and to kick start support by providing the donation.

Click on the badge to the left to find out more. Well done to everyone involved with this incredibly worthy initiative.

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Some great examples of viral marketing include Google, which had almost no marketing budget initially and relied on its users to spread the word. Twitter is another example, and shows how word of mouth support can take a product from the early adopter phase and into the mainstream (even Oprah tweets nowadays!)

You also get examples where the marketing campaign itself (as opposed to the actual product or service) becomes viral, either on purpose such as Nando’s adverts, or accidently, such as Ogilvy’s History Channel ads.

This is a marketer’s holy grail, as the customers do their work for them, and also give the marketing message added credibility. Think about it, do you trust a smirking salesman more than your next-door neighbour or colleague who has no financial interest in telling you about the product or service?

Viral marketing is really just a form of word of mouth endorsement – which is as old as when the first hunter-gatherer told his buddy that the antelope hang out on the other side of the hill and he better head that way if he wants to eat today.

However, thanks to the Internet and specifically the rise of social media and platforms such as YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and so on, word of mouth had just been given super powers, and viral campaigns have the ability to spread to millions of people around the world. Likewise, when things go wrong, they will go spectacularly and publicly wrong.

In my opinion some of the best viral campaigns happen spontaneously, thanks to a combination of humour, timeliness, ease of passing on and intrinsic value. Seeding, or deliberately setting up, a viral campaign needs to be handled carefully by marketers, and usually involves “infecting” super nodes of opinion and influence in the hope that the message spreads.

Essential reading: Seth Godin’s blog

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Look at popular blogs where people are interacting, commenting and conversing with each other. You’ll see many traditional publications now allow for comments at the bottom of articles, taking the letter to the editor concept to a whole new level. News is often breaking on social media platforms first, and then followed up with more details and analysis from “traditional” media.

Related concepts: Web 2.0

What this means for marketers:
Communication is no longer one-way, from company to consumer. Consumers are having their own conversations about your brands, without your involvement. Companies need to change their approach and start conversing, rather than telling. This also has an impact on media relations, with traditional media looking to redefine themselves in this new media landscape.

This is the first in a series of posts that I have planned. The idea came about when I was sitting at a conference in Cape Town in May 2009 and overheard someone whisper to their colleague: “What’s viral marketing mean?” This reminded me that things are moving so fast at the moment that it can sometimes be difficult for marketers to keep up, and to know what is important and what can be disregarded. It also reminded me to get out of my echo chamber, and share some of the knowledge that I am been fortunate enough to pick up along the way.

Drop me a line with any requests and I’ll do my best to provide a user-friendly explanation.

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