Digital Minds Forum

Digital marketing is a massively important area.  All us enlightened modern marketers know that.

However, are many digital marketers wasting much of their time?   Are they building relationships with the wrong customers? Are the messages wrong for that digital audience?  Do the messages reinforce or counter the company’s competitiveness?

In essence, how much direction are digital marketers given by the company’s marketing strategy? Unfortunately, there is much evidence that strategy formulation is weak in many companies (see a book called ‘Marketing Plans, How to Prepare Them, How to Use Them’ by Professor Malcolm McDonald).  The consequence of this is that poor targets are often set for digital campaigns and the digital marketer becomes an obedient dog keenly jumping over a cliff to chase a worthless stick for their master. (Read more…)

The 4th Cambridge Digital Marketing Conference is happening on the 8th July. Looks like a very impressive day for a bargain £100 + vat. Really pleased to see it priced at something which self-pay students and freelance lecturers will be able to afford as well as those on a training budget.

The speakers include:

• Michael Nutley – editor-in-chief of New Media Age
• Mark Stuart – head of research at CIM and author of its recent Shape the Agenda report into the future of digital
• Dave Chaffey – beloved internet marketing guru of CIM/CAM students, author of emarketing books, websites and blogs

The Conference website itself is well worth a browse with audio of previous years’ talks as well as Powerpoints of some of the presentations.

I’ve got a bunch of my CAM and CIM students coming with me. Do spread the word.

Book online here.

Last week CIM published a new Shape The Agenda paper titled “What hasn’t happened yet. The shape of digital to come?”

I read it before a class I was teaching and, not having planned to, found myself referring to the paper frequently during my lecture. Realising therefore that there is plenty of  meaty info within its pages, I thought I would give you a whistle stop tour through some of the best bits.

Introducing the paper, Mark Stuart, head of research at The Chartered Institute of Marketing and author of the paper said;

“It’s a myth that people explore the world the internet has to offer – the reality is that most people stick to eight or nine websites that they regularly visit. This means that businesses need to inhabit the spaces their customers inhabit, in order to build the brand, create awareness and generate a relationship with the customer. There are some good examples in the paper including Waitrose successfully doing this, but American Apparel getting it wrong on Second Life.

The need to create a dialogue with customers is easy to say in theory; how do you do it in practice? Practising marketers need to live online the way their customers’ do; that’s the best way to create offerings that customers will like and respond to, versus being intrusive of personal spaces and becoming an unwanted third party. It means you find insights that lead to products and services. It also means you spot problems on the horizon and have the time to deal with them.”

I love the illustration that Mark uses in his Foreword. He cites Arthur C Clark writing in 1962 about 2010, where he states “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. How much of what we take as normal today would Clarke’s readers have viewed as magic? Devices (GPS) which tell us where we (and our friends – Google Latitude) are, messages received on the other side of the world milli-seconds after being written, monetary transactions through the atmosphere with no cash changing hands. (Read more…)