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…)

Digital Media, whatever we think of it – it has begun to pervade everything… everywhere.

Politicians are using it, teachers, whole industries, the public, employers and… the crux of this little blog – employees. The fact that employees can reach millions of people who are connected to the internet through whatever platform in an instant and with no organisational control over content has, on occasion, created some PR faux pas for both brand and organisation. (Read more…)

Ok, here’s a stat for you to ponder – “25% of search results for the world’s Top 20 brands link to user generated content”. (Aaron, C., Edwards, E. and Lanier, X., 2009. Turning Blogs and User-Generated Content into Search Engine Results SES, pp.24-25)

Hmmm… so, if you were to search for Coca Cola or Disney or GE then approximately 25% of the results delivered by your Search Engine would be links to content generated by their customers. So, for organisations out there, you better hope they’re saying something nice!

User Generated Content (UGC) , as with a lot of terminology associated with Digital Marketing, has a numbers of different aliases. You may have come across Consumer Generated Media, eWOM, Earned Media or Participatory Media… essentially they all refer to the same thing – content on the internet produced by someone who is not affiliated with the organisation or brand itself.

OK, I’m not so naïve to think that organisations don’t try to produce digital content that looks like it has been written by an independent, objective consumer – consider how Dialaflight were ‘attacked’ by an alleged independent blogger last year or how Sony created a cringeworthy piece of UGC to influence those in the build up to the launch of their PSP. They’ve turned ‘blogging’ (Web Logging) into ‘flogging’ (Fake Web Logging).

Degree of Trust in Adverts April 2009

In April 2009 research by Nielsen demonstrated that after the traditional form of Word of Mouth (recommendations from people you know) the second most trusted form of ‘advertising’ was “Consumer Opinions Posted Online” with 70% of people indicated they had a degree of trust in this form of communication.

70% of people who access consumer opinions online trust them and 86% of online consumers use online reviews and UGC prior to making purchasing decisions (PR Newswire, Dec.9 2008. Kudxu.com Survey Reveals Online Reviews Significantly Impact Consumer Spending retrieved March 12 2009 from Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe Database).

So, all this means that consumers who shop online trust the content, feedback and reviews of strangers rather than the organisation and/or brand in question. As Google’s search algorithm, Caffeine, changes the way that web content is searched and delivered to consumers then more and more UGC will be found, read and used during the ‘Information Search’ and ‘Evaluation of Alternatives’ of consumer buyer behaviour.