Daan’s blog about social media, online marketing and whatever else comes to mind

Apparently it’s already 4 years ago since Citroen started their Transformer campaign for the C4.

It’s taken a while, but they’ve finally been challenged. The Chevrolet Aveo has stepped up to the plate and made sure Citroen got F’d in the A.

Could this spark another one of these bitch fights amongst car manufacturers? I bloody well hope so, that was hilarious!

Hat tip: My excellent co blogger over at Viralblog, Paul Veenendaal.

I apologise if that title comes across as a bit of a stretch and give you no idea of what this post will be about. Then again, people like surprises - I know I do! (only good ones, though!).

Right, so what the hell has Barbara Streisand got to do with Louis Vuitton? Is she a big fan of their cute, little hand bags? Possibly, but that’s not what this post is about.

It’s about the Streisand effect and how Louis Vuitton fell victim to it. Or more accurately, how they turned them into a victim of this pretty new phenomenon.

I’ll try and explain the Streisand effect first. It’s when a brand or person decides to make a mountain out of a molehill, really. It’s an attempt at concealing or censuring something which is usually rather insignificant, but becomes a big deal because they try and hide it. That’s my version, but for clarity’s sake I’ll include the Wiki version below:

The Streisand effect is a phenomenon on the Internet where an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information backfires, causing the information to be widely publicized. Examples are attempts to censor a photograph, a file, or even a whole website, especially by means of cease-and-desist letters.

The reason why it’s called the Streisand effect is because Barbara Streisand was a bit miffed after finding out someone took a picture of her beach house and put it on the internet. After a C&D letter the opposite of her intentions happened as the photo went viral on the internet, which prompted pretty much the entire world and their dogs to see it.

So, Louis Vuitton then. Nadia Plesner, an artist who created the image below as a anti genocide protest got sued by them for ‘brand jacking’

She refused to take the photo down because, and I quote:

"Thank You for Your letter of 13.02.2008.
However, I must inform You, that the bag in my drawing is
inspired by - and refers to - designers bags in general –
not a Louis Vuitton bag.

If you take a closer look, you will also notice, that the
pattern in my drawing is not the pattern which is used in
the design of a Loius Vuitton bag.

The name Louis Vuitton is in no way mentioned or referred
to, neither in my drawing, nor in the campaign as such.
Sometimes recognizable objects are needed to express deeper
meanings, and in their new form they become more than the
objects themselves – they become art.

You will find a similar case, where the Polish artist
Zbigniew Libera was inspired by Lego sets for another art
piece.

I therefore stand by my freedom of expression - artistic
and/or otherwise - and will continue my Simple Living
campaign in order to raise money for the victims of Darfur."

So they basically got their asses kicked by someone who stood by what she created and what she believed in.

I have no legal background, but without going into the legalities of this case I think it’s fair to say Louis Vuitton could have dealt with this a little better!

It’s easy to critisise, so I’ll tell you what I’d have done too.

They really had three options:

• - Take the legal route, as they’ve done - wrong choice in my opinion
• - They could have ignored the issue
• - They could have joined forces.

I’m kinda stuck between 2 and 3. But I don’t like the army and the word ‘forces’ reminds me of it, so I’ll opt for door number 2, please.

Take the legal route

The legal route only served to further increase the attention a relatively small campaign got. A campaign which was not focused against , nor included it the brand directly. There was a cultural reference, but with the campaign it was aiding I doubt too many people would have made a link between Darfur genocide and Louis Vuitton.

Ignore the issue

As stated above, the links to the brand were tentative and the issue at stake was not the brand, but something completely different. The brand was not used directly, nor was it attacked. Knowing the possible implications of the Streisand effect a ‘letting sleeping dogs lie’ strategy would probably been have a wiser choice. This would have been my strategy.

Joined forces

They could have commended her effort and offered to lend their support. This would have generated plenty of goodwill and could have given the brand a great boost. There is a branding issue here though. Do you, as a luxury brand, want to be associated with a politically engaged campaign? Does supporting this campaign fit with your brand identity and would it have generated results or even attention among the target audience of the company? Maybe a horrible way to look at an issue which involved a campaign against genocide, but that’s just the way it is.

Conclusion? Don’t just look at the law books. Consider the implications for your brand, think of alternate strategies. Is it really that big of a deal and is it worth to pursue, knowing full well the whole thing could blow up in your face? It probably isn’t.

About bloody time too! I know, I know it’s been waaaaay too long and I planned on writing a lot more about it.

It might be a good idea by starting off to say we’ve put our campaign live. About two weeks ago!

Working with a tiny budget has been quite a challenge. At work (I work at online marketing agency Onetomarket) I work with clients who have budgets a lot bigger and also help monitor campaigs with substantially higher budgets.

So the perspective on this campaign was totally different. One big issue is the fact that changes we were going to make were going to have to be educated guesses, rather than calculated ones. With a very low number of clicks and impressions it’s hard to draw any conclusions, also because we didn’t have access to any analytics data.

We decided to pause/delete all keywords with more than 100 impressions and less then 1% CTR (click through rate, for the non geeks). This resulted in a 33% increase a few days ago and the CTR has been rising ever since.

The first week we let the campaign pretty much untouched to get a better idea of what was working and what wasn’t.

This gave us two surprises. Firstly, we didn’t do very well on our ‘Branding’ campaign. With Bournemouth being a town name, it was never really a branding campaign anyway, but we pretty much sucked there. A very low CTR, but it did generate the most clicks in the first week. And because the other campaigns were a bit slow to get going we let it run until we saw we would be able to spend enough (and more rewardingly) with our other campaigns.

The second thing which surprised us was the fact our ‘accomodation’ campaign did so well. We decided to keep our max CPC at $0.20, and with some very competitive terms we weren’t expecting to see a great return. However, it’s doing very well and it’s the campaign which is doing wonders for our CTR.

Besides dumping the less performing keywords we’ve also decided to use daytime targeting on all of our campaigns. Our stats indicated we were receiving a lot of impressions, but no clicks during certain hours of the day - so we stopped showing ads at those times.

I keep mentioning CTR, but as we don’t have any analytics software and no way to measure conversions this is our most important metric.

And with just 5 more days to go (which is when both the campaign and the competition ends) we’ve already passed our target of 750 clicks.

Unfortunately we didn’t get to try all things we wanted due to various reasons, but overall I am really pleased with our results so far. I’m sure there will be plenty of teams out there who will have a higher CTR than us, but I doubt many of them have been able to tweak their campaigns and get an increase as big as ours has been (just checked again and it’s over 50%!!).

At the end of the day I feel that’s more important. The CTR at the beginning of the campaign is influenced by a lot of external factors, however the CTR you finish with will have a lot more to do with the optimisation of the teams.

So overall I’m really satisfied with the experience and our results so far. It will be interesting to find out how we’ve fared against the opposition - but even if we don’t win anything, it’s been a useful learning experience for all of us.

An interesting discussion about the effects of blogging on political campaigns on the Daily Show with John Stewart and ‘Blog Wars’ writer David Perlmutter.

It being on a comedy focussed news show makes it a little less high brow and probably more accessible to people unfamiliar with the territory.

Recently Apple abused its automatic update system for iTunes in a very ‘Microsoft-like’ (Ballmer would argue that’s the Microsoft of old) move.

What should be a routine operation turned into a rather sneaky attempt by Apple to increase the uptake of their Safari browser by PC users. This sparked a lot of debate online. Statistics wise it seemed like a good move, according to Fortune “During the month that it lasted, the percentage of Safari for Windows users among Net Applications’ clients, which had never climbed above .07%, grew three-fold, to .21%.”

Some argued it is detrimental to the internet as a whole and that it “undermines the trust relationship great companies have with their customers.

The statistics, at face value, seem impressive. However, how many of the people tricked into installing Safari will actually start using it? Are they even aware a new browser was installed? Will they be happy to find out they have been tricked into installing something they didn’t ask for?

I thought the industry was slowly moving away from opt out to opt in, so its sad to see a company such as Apple abusing their privileges. I have no problem with them using their Software Updates to inform users of new Apple products which might interest them, but ticking the box for them is out of order and an out of date marketing technique. Firefox has shown its perfectly capable of promoting (or rather, getting promoted!) their browser without having a platform of their own. Maybe Apple should give them a call to get some tips on spreading a non Microsoft browser on a Windows PC.

Another point which I haven’t seen mentioned yet is what this will do to the Apple brand? OK, so they may have ‘won’ some new Safari users. They’ve also angered a lot of people, plenty of Apple enthusiast amongst them. They may not have been affected personally, but chances are they don’t approve of shady tactics at show here.

Is it worth risking your relationship and good standing with your evangelists for some ordinary market share gain? Whether or not it increased Apple’s bottom line and whether or not this will have a losting affect we will have to wait and see, but as far as I’m concerned Apple have made a massive mistake in abusing the trust of their users.

This is a quote in my latest blog post “Thank you Zappos - a Great Company“. As I am a marketeer it may sound strange coming from my mouth, so I felt I needed to clarify my use of that quote and where I stand on the issue.

First off all, I want attribute the person I stole the quote from: Robert Stephens, founder of the Geek Squad. He recently gave an excellent presentation about how he built the corporate culture at the Geek Squad:

And one his key points is that it’s all about customer service, in fact his presentation is titled “Customer service, the new Marketing”.And I agree. As I’ve said before, marketing is not the cherry on top. It’s a process that should start at the ideation stage. Don’t think of a product, create/build it and than think ‘hmmm, how can I sell this’. From the beginning you need to think about how you will make your product stand out.

With the amount of choice consumers have these days whatever you decide to sell is probably already out there. So you need to think of ways to be remarkable, turn your product into a purple cow - as Seth Godin calls it.

Television ads are extremely expensive and less effective by the day. Word of mouth is free. Especially for companies with small budget the choice seems obvious, yet is often overlooked.

Excellent customer service is the single, most powerful to to generate word of mouth. And same goes for poor customer service. Be brilliant and people will spread the word for you.

Customer service, more often than not, is seen as an expense rather than an opportunity. Cutbacks are talk of the town, not investment. Yet, this is probably one of the most, if not the most important areas of a company which can provide a competitive advantage.

I’ve been playing with this thought in my head for a while and was looking for a way to turn it into a blog post. Funnily enough, Matt Dickman of Techno//Marketer recently wrote a post conveying similar thoughts.

More and more marketing is shifting from helping to sell products and services to creating an experience. Products are bought less and less for their utility, but because of the way they make the buyer feel.

“Marketing is a tax you pay for being unremarkable”

This brings me to Zappos, a online shoe and accessories retailer from the United States. Founded in 1999 and currently grossing almost $600m a year. How did they get this big? Not through marketing, or at least not through the old school of marketing. Excellent customer service as their unique selling point pushed the company to their current heights. You can order shoes and shipping is free. Don’t like the shoes? You just send them back and guess what, they’ll pay for that as well!

I came across the company online several times already. Not through looking for a new pair of shoes, but because other people were talking about them. And not just talking, they were singing their praises - every single one of them. And seeing as I’m a big believer of the importance of great customer service I started dinging for more information and found a presentation created by company owner Tony Hsieh. At the end of the presentation they offer to send anyone a copy of their culture book. Already being impressed with the rave reviews and the manner they have joined the conversation with their customers, I decided to email and ask for a copy.

They responded only a few hours later asking for my contact details! Even when I informed them of the fact I am based in Holland they persisted and promised me a copy. Two days later, yes just TWO!! days later the book was on my doormat. In all honestly I wouldn’t have blamed them if they told me they couldn’t send me a copy. But they didn’t only go out of their way making sure I got a copy, but they also send it off immediately making sure I would get it as soon as possible.

I’ve got feet like Donald Duck so I’ll never buy shoes online, but I’ll make sure I recommend Zappos to anyone who will !

It may not sell any shoes for them, but it does generate publicity. And more importantly, I’ll happily recommend them to any of my friends and that is something far more valuable than any marketing campaign can buy you!

Seeing as I live in the only town in Holland with trolley busses and I travel to work by bus, I get to see quite a few of them. Usually the advertising whacked onto these buses is just boring, unimaginative and crap. Never before had I seen any creative use of the obstacles that were being used. Until now, have a look at these two.

This one speaks for itself, I would have thought!

This one is a little bit trickier. This is actually the back of the bus, which gives you the impression the bus is driving backwards. The company who created it is an insurance company!

Source: Frank-ly

Recently I came across a new form of guerrilla marketing. It’s sort of like graffiti, but instead of ‘dirtying’ things, it’s done by cleaning them! Very clever, indeed! Below are some examples

Has anybody else seen any other examples?

Sources (All Dutch):

Molblog

Molblog II

Nu.nl

A great way to distinguish yourself from the competition is through customer service. Great customer service can save you a lot of money as it has the potential to generate plenty of free publicity and word of mouth. And the beauty of word of mouth is that it’s far more powerful and effective than any other form of advertising. It’ll increase the likelihood of a return visit/purchase. And most companies see it as a burden on which money can be saved, rather than an opportunity to save money.

Recently the website I help to run, Talklfc, had to switch to another host, Dreamhost. A friend recommended them (Word of Mouth!) as a cheap and reliable host. However, just as we signed up with them one of their servers - the one we were hosted on - was experiencing problems which caused some downtime. We’d kinda gotten used to it, which is why we switched in the first place, so we were quite happy to wait for them to sort it out.

Which they did. But they also offered us one month of free hosting as a way to apologise and thank us for our patience. And we received this email yesterday:

Hello,

This is just a note to let you know we’ve finished processing your
request for an account credit due to the Blingy problems.

Because things were so bad, we’ve actually decided to go ahead and
give you a three (3) month credit instead of just one.. you should
see now at https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=billing.invoice that
there is an account credit of $29.85 . This credit will
automatically go towards any future charges you incur from
DreamHost on this account.

Again, we’re terribly, terribly sorry about all the performance issues
of the last several weeks. We’ve now automtically closed out your open
ticket about “Blingy Account Credit”, however if you still have any
problems related to this or anything else at all, please reply to this
message and let us know right away.

Thank you very much for hanging in there with us, and we promise to do
our best to make things work better all around from here on out.

Sincerely,
The UnHappy DreamHost Bad-Blingy Team

What I like about this note is that it was written by a human. Not a standard message of something clearly not bothered about the whole situation, but a message from someone who is genuinely sorry for the inconvenience.

And that’s the point. People like to talk about people, not robots or automated messages.

For some more great examples of WOM marketing and insight, have a look at Andy Sernovitz’s blog.