Contagious ideas by PSST : spreading 2.0 social innovation. Edited by jérémy dumont, strategic planner in FRANCE

Enjoy all PARIS 2.0 on line. The next social media forum is coming soon....

http://www.psst-ressources.fr

With Referral Traffic, Social Media Sites Build Up Connections

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008832

 

Sites like Tumblr, Meebo and Pinterest not only refer traffic to Facebook and Twitter, but gain viewers in return

As second-tier social media sites become more popular with consumers, these sites are finding their place within the social media ecosystem, referring traffic to larger social networks, as well as seeing traffic arrive from Facebook and Twitter.

In November 2011, Compete analyzed referrals of US traffic to Facebook, and found that, in addition to retail sites bolstered by holiday traffic, Meebo and Pinterest were two social sites increasing in influence. Meebo’s US referral traffic to Facebook grew 314.48% in November 2011 compared to the previous month; Pinterest’s referrals rose 57.22%.

Pinterest is a social site to watch, as it is gaining users at a rapid rate. The top sites visited by US internet users after visiting Pinterest included several social networks: Facebook, 13.94% of the time; Blogspot, 8.74% of the time; Tumblr, 1.67% of the time; and Etsy, 1.57% of the time, according to Compete. As a visual-focused social network, it makes sense that Pinterest would refer traffic to other sites with photos and visuals, such as Tumblr and Etsy.

Additionally, larger social sites are referring traffic back to these second-tier sites. This demonstrates that consumers may be experimenting with these newer or second-tier social sites, but they also feel the need to share content from the larger networks and point it back to Pinterest or Tumblr. According to Compete, the share of Tumblr's traffic referred to the site from Twitter climbed 817.78% from October to November 2011. Similarly, the share of Meebo's traffic derived from Twitter climbed 262.05%, Pinterest’s increased 48.61% and Instagram's grew 40.80%.

While referral traffic isn’t a traditional measure of success for a website, looking at social networks in this way demonstrates the connectedness of the social media world. Marketers that want to test how their brand works with a second-tier social site like Pinterest or Meebo should work to connect their social media strategies and accounts to best take advantage of the increased interconnectedness in the social media ecosystem.

Corporate subscribers have access to all eMarketer analyst reports, articles, data and more. Join the over 750 companies already benefiting from eMarketer’s approach. Learn more.

Check out today’s other articles, “PepsiCo Trains to Tackle Digital Challenges” and “How Many Social Network Users in France Follow Brands?”

Does ‘Liking’ a Brand Drive User Loyalty? 59% of consumers have ‘liked’ a Facebook brand page in the past 6 months

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1008822&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&R=1008822

59% of consumers have ‘liked’ a Facebook brand page in the past 6 months

When it comes to Facebook “likes,” social network users are sending brand marketers mixed signals. An eVoc Insights study indicates 59% of Facebook users have “liked” a Facebook brand or company page in the past six months. Although this statistic may seem promising for brands, how “liking” a brand connects with consumer loyalty is still vague.

When surveyed by eVoc, 54% of users who “liked” a brand or company page on Facebook that sells a product or service said they were somewhat or much more likely to purchase from that brand. The study confirms that the most “liked” pages are for food brands, TV shows, music, movies and clothing.

Although the eVoc Insight statistic suggests more than half of consumers are agreeable toward purchasing from the brands on Facebook, consumer behavior suggests otherwise. According to a study from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, an Australia-based marketing think tank, just 1% of fans of the biggest brands on Facebook engage with the brands on the site. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute study looked at Facebook metrics for the top 200 brands, and through an examination of activities such as “likes,” comments, posts and shares, the research group found nothing substantial to link a brand’s Facebook presence with loyalty.

Limited consumer engagement with brands on Facebook suggests there may be a disconnect between the reasons why consumers actually “like” a brand and the reasons brands think consumers are “liking” their page. When the CMO Council asked Facebook users in Q4 2011 about their expectations after “liking” a brand on Facebook, the top expectation (67%) was to be “eligible for exclusive offers.”

However, when the CMO Council asked marketers what they thought it meant when a consumer “liked” their brand page, a quarter of marketer respondents answered, “because they are loyal customers.”

The link between “likes” and loyalty remains unclear. Although consumers respond favorably about their likelihood to purchase from a brand they follow on Facebook, that’s not overly evident on their Facebook timelines. Marketers should keep in mind that for consumers, Facebook remains primarily a place to interact with peers and share experiences. Although many consumers have opened up to brands that are present on Facebook, brand marketers should not expect loyalty each time a consumer clicks the “like” button.

Corporate subscribers have access to all eMarketer analyst reports, articles, data and more. Join the over 750 companies already benefiting from eMarketer’s approach. Learn more.

Check out today’s other articles, “Consumers Indicate Limits to Future of Ereader Market” and “UK Ecommerce to Defy Tough Economy in 2012.”

In order to differentiate many companies are moving beyond services into experiences. Thus Pizza Hut offers more than a meal; it will host your child's birthday party, complete with a candle lit cake and amusements.

http://www.managingchange.com/masscust/experien.htm

The Experience Economy is a new stage of economic offering. The agriculture based economy dealt mostly in raw materials: wheat to bake ones own bread, wool to knit the family garments. During the industrial revolution, millions of people moved from countryside to town, from field to factory floor. Free time was short and so not only did the factories produce steel and iron, engines and ships, they also produced tinned food and knitted clothes and the corner bakery produced the daily bread. The era of mass manufactured goods had arrived.

Further economic prosperity and increased automation has increased wages and decreased the hours worked. But rather than use the increased non working time to return to making our own bread and knitting our own clothes, we (in the advanced industrial economies) have chosen to spend our time purchasing services. Restaurants now cook and serve our meal and clear the dishes; personal shoppers advise on suitable fashion garments and then they spend time making the purchase.

This services stage has become so rooted and so prevalent that in many instances it is becoming commoditised in the same was that raw materials such as wheat and oil certainly have, and goods such as PCs and family cars almost have. Within financial services, cheque accounts, home and car insurances, and savings accounts are seen by most consumers to be identical services, with selection based solely on price or interest rates.

In order to differentiate many companies are moving beyond services into experiences. Thus Pizza Hut offers more than a meal; it will host your child's birthday party, complete with a candle lit cake and amusements. Walt Disney with their Disney Parks is the recognised expert in offering experiences. The workers are called actors, you the visitor are the guests and the theme park becomes the stage.

More than a Service

Pine and Gilmore believe that experiences are a distinct offering from services. Experiences must provide a memorable offering that will remain with one for a long time, but in order to achieve this, the consumer - sorry, the guest, must be drawn into the offering such that they feel a sensation. And to feel the sensation, the guest must actively participate. This requires highly skilled actors who can dynamically personalise each event according to the needs, the response and the behavioural traits of the guests.

Providing experiences requires a new supplier perspective. Suppliers of goods typically see themselves as manufacturers and service suppliers as providers. Those companies that wish to offer their customers an experience need to see themselves as stagers of events. Like any theatrical event, there needs to be a design activity for the sets and the props as well as dialogue scripting. However, these scripts are not like many call centre scripts that at often blindly followed in monotones. Your actors needs to dynamically select individual props and sentences in response to the statements, questions and body language of the guests. That is, it has to be a truely interactive experience to the point where the guest has as much or more influence on the actions as the actors. Where the experience is of a more sensitive or personal nature, then guests cannot be expected to open up and fully engage on their first encounter. It may require a number of encounters so that they reveal themselves over a duration. Like all relationships, trust and bonding needs to developed.

Beyond Entertainment

At first sight it appears that experiences have an affinity with the entertainment and leisure industries. Walt Disney's Theme Parks, a visit to a West End Theatre, an out-door adventure play ground, or a theme restaurant like Benihana. There is no doubt that the entertainment industry has acquired the skills and talents for engaging people, but now other industries have realised that many such facets can transform a vanilla "me too" service into a memorable event that the customer will want to repeat again and will want to recount to all their friends.

Sir Colin Marshall, former British Airways chairman, stated: "[What British Airways does] is to go beyond the function and compete on the basis of providing an experience." The aircraft and the flight is the stage, the setting, for a distinctive en route experience [1].

Andersen Consulting's Smart Store Europe in Windsor UK, transports senior executives into the year 2010. Here they can interact with advanced technology all within the setting of a home, a supermarket, a distribution centre, etc.. Andersen Consulting use film set designers to produce visually striking sets that embrace the executive and in some cases transport them into another world. Mr Kevin Duffill, Operations Director, told Managing Change that many executives came away shell-shocked with the experience. Smart Store is particularly aimed at the retail and financial services sectors.

Educational Discoveries and Professional Training International provide basic accounting courses for non financial managers that are based around lemonade stands using real lemons, balloons etc. [1]. Other companies do base their financial courses around games, the beer game and the automobile industry game are well know, but toy cardboard cutout props don't quite have the same excitement about them.

Staging events like these is expensive but in the experience economy more and more people will be willing to pay a premium to turn the mundane into a sensation.

The Four Realms of an Experience

Joseph Pine and James Gilmore have identified four types of experiences, with the riches being those offerings that combine all 4. When offering experiences it is possible that different customers will be looking for different experiences even when the base goods or service may be the same. Getting it wrong and offering the wrong experience is likely to be disastrous. Similarly the depth of required of experience will vary depending not just on the personal characteristics of the customer (guest) but also on the depth of the relationship and the place where it takes place.

Delivery

When designing and delivering experience you should aim to [1]:

• theme the experience
• harmonise impressions with positive cues
• eliminate negative cues
• mix in memorabilia
• engage all five senses

An Insurance Experience

Progressive Corp. makes settling a motor insurance claim an experience. Its claims adjusters arrive at the scene of the accident in vans fitted out with everything to help turn a crisis into soothing "drama". There is a place to calm down, refreshments on hand, and access to a mobile phone [2]. The claims adjuster will arrange for the vehicle to be towed away and repaired and provide for onward travel for the customer or over night hotel accommodation.

Beyond Experiences - Transformations

Experiences aren't the ultimate form of economic offering. Pine and Gilmore have identified a fifth stage: Transformations. Whilst experiences do provide sensations and a memorable event these do wear off with time. Transformations on the other hand make a permanent beneficial change to the customer. A sick person become well in body and mind, a dying company is turned-around, and a customer habitually spending beyond his or her means achieves financial viability and stability. Whilst experiences are memorable and are sustained for a time, transformations are inspirational and must be sustained through time [1].

 

B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore can be contacted at the address below [4].

Why not read a chapter from their book The Experience Economy.

External Resources

1. Pine II B J, Gilmore James H., Welcome to the Experience Economy in Harvard Business Review, July-August 1998
2. Pine II B J, Gilmore James H., How to Profit from Experience in The Wall Street Journal, 4 August 1997
3. Gilmore James H. and Pine II B J, Beyond Goods and Services in Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 25, No. 3, May-June1997
4. Strategic Horizons LLP (Joseph Pine II's and James H. Gilmore's company) is at PO Box 548, Aurora, OH 44202-0548, USA. Tel: +1 330-405-2886, Fax +1 330-963-4991, Email: pine&gilmore-at-StrategicHorizons.com.
5. Pine II, B J, & Gilmore, James H., 1999, The Experience Economy, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Mass.
   • Read a chapter from this book.
6. See the Links to External SIM Resources

Is anybody not hitting the 'like' button? Seemingly, everywhere you look on the internet you have the opportunity to say you like what you're seeing ...

Kevin Thompson -- Click on the photo - read Ipsos OTX MediaCT's archives.

 

By Kevin Thompson

Is anybody not hitting the 'like' button? Seemingly, everywhere you look on the internet you have the opportunity to say you like what you're seeing – even if what you're seeing is a ticket price way above face value for the Knicks (85 people) or that your best friend has just opened a can of beer (5 people).

It's easy to get carried away with the numbers. So easy, in fact, that we should indulge ourselves for a second: A recent study in the US and UK (by us, Ipsos OTX MediaCT) shows that two thirds of Facebook users had 'liked' something in the previous seven days. Not just one thing either – an average of five 'likes' a week.

Based on 151 million unique Facebook users (comScore data for USA, October 2010), that equates to 3 billion things being liked. Each month. And in the USA alone. That's a really big number, so you can see why you might think everyone is doing it, all the time.

But let's start over: On average, a Facebook user 'likes' five things a week.

Is that really a lot? What is a lot, when it comes to liking? Only five things a week make you happy enough to 'like' them? Perhaps this 'liking' isn't so ubiquitous after all. On this read, maybe there's actually quite a lot of discerning judgment going on. Perhaps we should look at what people are liking and why.

Status reports on beer consumption aside, around 1 in 4 have 'liked' content related to a TV show or movie in the past week. So realistically Facebook users are probably only 'liking' one or two TV shows or movies a week. It's not such a torrent of randomized 'liking' as it may seem at first glance. The people who 'like' your movie are potentially making it their 'movie of the week' – and telling their friends about it too.

Brands are lower down the list but, even so, more than 1 in 10 have 'liked' an ad in the last 7 days. The same number has 'liked' content (not ad-related) from a brand. Again, this may add up to several hundred million brand 'likes' a month but that isn't a huge amount per Facebook user (all 151m of them in the US).

Like many Facebook-related phenomenon, 'liking' is both really big and surprisingly small. En-mass the numbers look almost too big to contemplate and suggest a torrent of babble without much meaning. On the individual level however, the numbers are fairly small and suggest a more calculated set of judgments and recommendations on behalf of the Facebook user.

As a brand or content producer, understanding who is 'liking' your output helps you pinpoint your most important customers – the people who are selling your product on your behalf. 1 in 2 of these people 'like' something because, believe it or not, they really like that something and want their friends to like it too. Understanding the dynamics of 'liking' and focusing on those who tell you they 'like' what you are doing will become an increasingly important part of the marketing mix, particularly if the much vaunted explosion in 'social search' takes off any time soon.

Notes

The Ipsos OTX study was carried out online in the USA and UK in November 2010 using Ipsos's global online omnibus. In each country we spoke to a representative sample of 1000 adults aged 16-65 years. Full tabulated results available on request.

Kevin Thompson is SVP of Corporate Development for Ipsos OTX MediaCT in New York. A digital and social media expert, he has spoken at industry events such as MIPcom and the ARF and can be reached at kevin.thompson@ipsos.com.

Read all Kevin's MediaBizBloggers commentaries at Ipsos OTX MediaCT.

Plink is a credits-based loyalty program that rewards Facebook users for dining at chain restaurants with facebook credits

 

3rd February 2012 in Marketing & Advertising.

Facebook credits are a virtual currency that can be purchased with a credit or debit card to buy virtual goods in games and apps on the Facebook platform. However, never before have they been earned through purchasing goods offline. That is until Plink — a credits-based loyalty program that rewards Facebook users for dining at chain restaurants.

Launched last month, Plink was created to help restaurants and offline retailers reach and motive their customers online. To start using the program, consumers log in via their Facebook account, register the debit or credit they use when eating out and select the restaurants and shops they visit most. Plink then rewards diners with credits for each transaction made at one of those participating stores. Designed with ease of use in mind, no paper coupons or staff training are required. Credits can be used to buy music downloads, movies and TV episodes, as well as virtual goods in Facebook games. The program is free for consumers to join and Plink receive a payment from their partners — such as Quiznos, Taco Bell and Dunkin’ Donuts — each time a registered card is used in their restaurant or shop. Consumers can choose from more than 25,000 participating venues across the US.

The Plink platform taps into the potential of 800 million Facebook users, rewarding them for their offline purchases and motivating loyal behaviour. With 50 percent of purchases still made offline, inspiration here to improve your customer rewards scheme?

Website: www.plink.com
Contact: www.plink.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=main.contactUs

Spotted by: Raymond Neo

At MIPCube Content 360, digital creatives pitch new ideas in cross-media content and next-generation audience engagement through TV, Internet, social media and mobile applications, personalisation, viral content, social games and other digital apps...

MIPCube Content 360

 

• Important Documents

  

  • Terms and conditions
  • FAQ

  Key dates

  

  • 20 January 2012: Call for entries opening
  • 24 February 2012: Deadline for entries
  • 30-31 March 2012: Live pitching at MIPCube
  • 1 April 2012: Pitch at MIPTV for the winners

• Enter the MIPCube 2012 Content 360

  

  Videos That Create Global Buzz challenge

  The competition to find the best web-series, in partnership with MSN.
  3 finalists will be awarded €5,000 to create pilots to compete for the award.
  Read the brief
  Enter the competition

  

  New Transmedia Concepts

  The competition to find the best new transmedia fiction concepts
  Read the brief
  Enter the competition

• Your contact

  If you would like further information on Content 360, please contact: content360@reedmidem.com.

Now it's whether you engage your target audience that really matters ....What Next in Engagement ?

By Suzanne Bidlake,

Going direct to consumers was once considered the silver bullet in the pursuit of one-to-one relationships. Now it's whether you engage your target audience that really matters. The most highly personalised marketing effort is still a waste of money if it fails to engage, light a spark, provide a utility, trigger an emotion. You can read our experts' opinions in "What Next in Engagement", published October 15, hear what they had to say in films and essays below and also read the discussion that arose when we brought them together around the lunch table. Videos produced by Calvin Lau.

Around the table

Clockwise from top left

- Noelle McElhatton, editor (creative solutions), Campaign

- Devin Parmar, account manager, Campaign

- Amanda Arthur, data planning director, EHS 4D Discovery

- Hugh Burrows, planning director, Que Pasa Communications

- Mike Cullis, managing partner, Elvis

- Suzanne Bidlake, associate editor (reports), Campaign

- Claire Beale, editor, Campaign

- Rik Haslam, group creative architect, Rapp

 

- Jeremy Garner, creative director, Weapon7

- James Middlehurst, managing partner, MBA

- Stuart Derrick, journalist, Campaign

Not pictured: Ade Adefala, account manager, Campaign

 

Read the intro - Suzanne Bidlake, Campaign

How to Measure True Engagement - Ol Janus, EHS 4D Discovery

The Dawn of Engagenomics - Mike Cullis, Elvis

A New Vision - Prof. Derek Holder, IDM

We Want Action - Paul Munce, James Middlehurst, MBA

 

Content is King - Hugh Burrows, Que Pasa Communications

Get Real - Rik Haslam, RAPP

Beyond Distraction - Jeremy Garner, Mark Brown, Weapon7

 

Rules of Engagement - Roundtable discussion

By Stuart Derrick

Changes in the pace and place of consumer-brand interaction has forced direct marketers to rethink their offering

If there was one word that was banded about repeatedly at the latest Campaign roundtable, it was "outdated". The object of the description was the noble discipline of direct marketing, and the judgment was being delivered by direct agencies seeking to redefine their space in a rapidly changing world.

It is not that the idea of a direct approach is outmoded, participants said. Far from it. But rather that the pace and place of consumer-brand interactions is changing so quickly that the focus is now on consumer engagement. So, what did it mean for the positioning of direct marketing, the Campaign editor, Claire Beale, asked.

Rik Haslam, the group creative architect at Rapp, said the agency had not used the term direct marketing for 24 months in conversations with clients. It was an unlikely announcement coming from an agency that would once have been considered the epitome of DM. However, he added: "We get ourselves in a muddle with definitions, but it's meaningless to the consumer. All communication is meant to be engaging and consumers only engage in an interaction if it is worthwhile."

James Middlehurst, a managing partner at MBA, agreed that DM had old-fashioned connotations: "Maybe it could be rebranded as engagement or as brand action. We still pitch for traditional DM briefs, but we are getting them through inertia. Often, clients do not want DM anyway but want us to come back with a bigger solution."

Professor Derek Holder, the managing director of the Institute of Direct Marketing, who couldn't make the lunch, was surprisingly unconcerned about calls for a name change: "I've spent more than 20 years thinking of what else it could be called, but each of the alternatives become rapidly redundant. People know what direct marketing stands for."

What it means, however, has broadened so much that engagement better summed up what agencies and brands were trying to do, Mike Cullis, a managing partner at Elvis, said: "There are more channels to respond through. We have done experiential activity for Sailor Jerry at festivals and that is not traditional direct marketing, but it has enabled follow-up."

While the media context was changing, the fundamental challenge remained the same, Jeremy Garner, the creative director at Weapon7, argued: "How do you get people to spend time with your brand and sustain and build on their interest? That's engagement."

Whatever engagement means, there is no doubt that it has value, Cullis, referring to a report by the market researcher Hall & Partners, which claimed that two-thirds of a brand's profits came from engaged customers, said: "We have traditionally looked at lifetime value, but engagement goes much further if you can measure it."

Measurement was, of course, a key to successful relationship marketing, and was now an even greater part of a marketer's toolbox. "There is an ongoing data stream being thrown out these days. Even anonymous browser data ends up being attributed to an individual," Cullis said.

But if marketers are awash with data, distinct skills are still needed to dissect what it means, Amanda Arthur, the EHS 4D Discovery data planning director, said: "You have to be able to measure your data and relate it back to individual consumers. Brands might start with an engagement strategy and not think about measurement until the end."

A big question is whether direct marketing agencies can still lay claim to data as their domain. Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO recently picked up the Direct Agency of the Year award at Cannes. Is this an indication of the diminishing importance of sector specialisation in marketing?

Hugh Burrows, the planning director at the branded content agency Que Pasa Communications, said the lines are increasingly blurred: "I have no experience in direct marketing, but we capture data off the back of engagement. However, we would not respond to a traditional DM brief."

Middlehurst said that brands didn't want agencies getting bogged down in lifetime values and five-year ROIs. Rather, they wanted them to come up with creative solutions and then work out how they were going to measure them - perhaps for the first time.

"Briefs are traditional, but solutions are not," he said. "The emphasis is on us to go back to clients and say how we think a problem should be solved. It's no longer a linear process - it's a multi-channel world where a number of different actions are called for."

Each campaign now presents its own tracking challenge with unique KPIs and econometrics, Burrows said: "You end up with a complex, composite solution of website traffic, downloads, video streams and other stuff around virals and social media. We can weight things according to the channel importance, but it's an amalgam."

On some levels, this need for new thinking is leading to brands being less inclined to pigeonhole agencies' capabilities. "Global clients want a discipline-neutral solution from the off," Haslam said. "We will come across AMV, Razorfish, TMW and maybe even a small content agency in pitches. The client does not know who will deliver the best solution."

Such fluidity is also opening the door to new collaborations, Burrows said: "We have worked with Starcom Media recently on a brief that involved taking an established brand icon into the digital age. There is recognition of the need to go beyond two bursts of TV."

Roundtable participants felt that media companies were playing a greater role in shaping the engagement agenda. No longer the bulk buyers of old, they now have a compelling mix of discipline understanding and capability that gives them greater credibility as the curators of ideas that require the mixing of disparate talents.

Agencies were also changing their DNA to compete, Haslam said. He pointed to a race between above-the-line and traditional direct agencies to come up with the complete client package. Noticeably in the US, ad agencies are bulking up on digital and data competency, whereas direct and digital are trying to improve their creative offering. "Can ad agencies get data before we get creativity?" he asked. "We have been weak in this area. It's an enormous challenge for us to up our game."

For Burrows, it was important that agencies had a credible mix of talent in-house: "We have journalists to help with social media, video production specialists and mobile talent. If you are trying to use content as a starting point to engage, you need the tools."

The demands of campaigning in a digital age are producing strange bedfellows in agency teams, according to Garner: "The nature of the work is so diverse that you could mix a Wii designer, a PR person, a social network planner and an offline designer, and see what happens."

With so many talents and channels at their disposal, Beale wondered if DM creatives looked down slightly on briefs for the humble mailer. But Haslam said there was still pride in the craft aspect of DM: "It's tangible. Digital disappears into the ether. Traditional skills have not been left behind."

Meanwhile, the IDM, the repository of best practice in DM, doesn't want to be left behind either. "You need to have a lot of skillsets to be a marketer of the future," Holder said. "We take a broader view than we used to have and our courses are now catering for multichannel, onand offline marketing."

Holder's view is that the fundamental principles of direct marketing remain relevant despite the fact that the speed of interaction has increased massively. Indeed, digital media promises a level of personalisation way beyond changing a paragraph in a laser-printed letter, Haslam said: "If you were booking a hotel, there could be an RSS feed with the weather delivering added value." You could also serve up a list of gigs in the area based on the bands you know from social media that a person liked, he suggested.

The rise of social media is also shaping the way communications are handled, he said: "We used to deal with marketing departments, now it's the corporate communications department. It's great because they get quick approval and they trust you."

Garner said that there was a challenge with all of this potential to know when not to react and stand back: "You need to leave room for conversations to take their own path and you need the client's trust to do that." Cullis suggested that, in future, clients may want to own such conversations themselves, locking agencies out.

The problems of failing to engage effectively with consumers was seen earlier this year when Nestle stirred up a hornet's nest by responding aggressively to comments on its Kit Kat Facebook page. Haslam said the two-way nature of communications meant that brands had to live up to their values or face a viral backlash: "We can find ourselves telling clients: 'You can't say that as people won't believe you.' It's a hard conversation to have."

The growing importance of reputation management in the social space was leading both MBA and Que Pasa to explore building PR into their offering in some way.

The question of what engages was felt to be of increasing importance, because with so many channels, the claim on the call to action was hard to make.

With clients looking at payment by results, these discussions are vital. "There are so many ways to respond," Middlehurst said. "For our work for Everest, we did the econometrics to show that TV advertising was driving people to the website and Google. If we hadn't, it would have been wrongly attributed to pay-per-click."

Google is working with TV companies to discover the optimum time to upweight your PPC. This was the natural domain of direct marketers, Haslam argued.

People's changing media consumptions meant agencies were having to think more creatively, Cullis said. Virgin Media created its Sofa Stadium virtual stadium as a way of recognising that people watch TV using their laptops and of breaking into the primary relationship that fans have with Sky.

Burrows said that social TV would make engagement even more complex as it opened up to allow further interactive overlays.

Another challenge in engaging customers was the emergence of platforms such as iTunes and Facebook that held all the data on customers.

Cullis likened it to brands' situation in relation to Tesco Clubcard.

Rather than argue about whose data it was, Middlehurst said there were times when it might be wise for brands to hold back on demonstrating the amount they knew about customers as it made them nervous. The arrival of location technology such as Foursquare could lay brands open to further accusations of overstepping the mark. An upside to all these challenges is that engaged consumers are creating more loyal clients, he added: "Clients are buying richer agencies that can do more. It binds them to each other."

Data does encourage loyalty, Arthur said, although sometimes more through inertia than anything: "We have clients of more than 20 years.

Taking a database in-house has proved so disruptive that it hasn't happened. For some, we manage the database and the strategy and they can decouple the strategy if we don't deliver."

With the deluge of data, there was a real danger that brands could miss the point of it all, she added: "There is a difference between data and knowledge and it often doesn't get to that point."

As direct agencies have changed, so they have hit a purple patch in recruiting talent. With the rise of digital, ad agencies are no longer the first preference for new recruits. "Large agencies do not have enough respect for the diversity of talent," Haslam said. "We are more welcoming and embracing of digital and direct skills, and anybody under 30 is only interested in digital. At the moment, we are finding it easy to recruit exceptional talent. That would not have been the case four years ago."

For agencies looking for evidence that they were adapting to a new marketing paradigm, this is a cause for celebration in itself.

 

(From Campaign's "What Next in Engagement" supplement, October 2010)

This article was first published on campaignlive.co.uk