Enpiem Internet Marketing Blog

April fools from Enpiem Internet Marketing!

Whether you are a client, requiring Internet marketing services to be carried, out or a provider looking to offer Internet marketing services to clients, there are a number of legal documents that are worth obtaining to protect your brand, project and business. Entering into a business relationship with an offline supplier, you would sign NDA’s and contracts – online relationships should be no different.

Companies, especially small businesses are often daunted by the complexity of online contracts and the clauses, caveats and safeguards that need to be in place to protect both parties. Whilst the ideal solution is to hire the services of a law firm that specialise in online legal documentation, there are a number of cost-effective solutions that small businesses can explore for ready-made documents written by lawyers and available for use ‘off-the-shelf’. These documents include:

• > Affiliate contracts
• > Affiliate terms & conditions
• > Link or content provision agreements
• > Non-disclosure agreements
• > Consultancy agreements
• > Website hosting, support and maintenance agreements

Simply Docs provides over 1,250 documents and updates covering a wide range of uses from trading to employment and health & safety issues. Access is via an annual subscription offering unlimited access and download of your chosen category. The website records the documents you’ve downloaded in your account login area and highlights any updates to your documents by email along with lists of new documents added to the site. The documents are provided in Word format with clear personalisation fields for you to tailor the document to your specific business, the supplier you are proposing to work with and the dates/value of the work to be carried out.

Another site offering similar resources is Compact Law who offer download of a complete set of documents and also offer an additional service that includes legal support (answering questions relating to the documents, their use etc.). The documents are drafted by fully qualified and highly experienced solicitors and barristers. The Compact Law documents cover a wide range of Internet business related activities for sites selling products fulfilled offline or delivered electronically online as well as marketing and site/campaign development documents.

Enpiem Internet Marketing do not provide legal advice and this blog entry should not be construed as legal advice. Enpiem Internet Marketing provide strategic and tactical consultancy for online channel marketing for your business. Contact us to see how we can help promote your business online.

One of the most popular requests to the Internet marketer is for a ‘viral’ marketing campaign, a campaign that spreads like wildfire throughout the Internet gaining massive momentum and a vast upturn in traffic or sales without the associated acquisition cost. In addition to their request popularity, they are probably the most misunderstood activity and probably the hardest to develop successfully. There are many excellent campaign examples and we’ll look at a few, but these have been well planned, well resourced (funded) and well executed and crafted to a product that lends itself to this type of activity.

So how do you plan a viral marketing campaign? There are a number of factors to take into consideration. Providing something for nothing is a great place to start, this was how Hotmail became so popular, it was a free resource that recruited additional users through in-email promotion, free software or tools are also popular. Playing on user behaviours is another great factor to consider. For example, many successful virals have made the transmitting individual of the viral tool appear ‘cool’ and ‘benevolent’ be this through pass on a special offer, a free resource or something personalised and funny. People like to be popular so play to these desires with your viral campaign. Borrowing from medical terminology, a virus only spreads when it is easy to transmit to others. The same is true of digital viral campaigns, email is an obvious and free way that the message can be passed on – so keep the transmission process fluid and easy to replicate.

Another important factor in planning your campaign is to remember not to get destroyed by your own success! Again, taking a medical analogy, if your virus consumes the host then it will cause the host to die, if the viral campaign requires users to visit your website to do something and traffic exceeds your bandwidth allowance then the site will go offline and your virus will die – ensure your campaign either has scalability built in or doesn’t rely on limited resources to provide it. With an email based viral campaign you are encouraging your recipients to use their own email accounts and addresses to spread the word, rather than paying for these emails to go through your network using your bandwidth. With video viral campaigns Youtube is an excellent way of tapping into others infrastructure for streaming content without the need for the users bandwidth or the need for attachments.

Famous Examples

Viral marketing campaigns come in a wide variety of delivery formats. Some are interactive and others are just images or videos to watch. Here are a number of very popular viral campaigns that we have been the recipient of over the past few years, many are still available online:

1. Do the test - a clever video viral for Transport for London that gets across the message about how easily it is to miss something (in the case of this campaign’s message cyclists) whilst using a humorous method of explaining a very serious point.
2. Quicksilver – Dynamite surfing – a supposed hit-and-run viral video where a surfer paddles out into a river whilst somebody throws dynamite into the river and the surfer rides the wave generated by the underwater explosion. This was completely staged but went massively viral, supposedly attracting over 10 million page views in the first few months
3. Threshers 40% Off Voucher – made popular when it was publicised that this was an accidental publication of an offer supposed to be for a limited number of people but thanks to email, social networks and blogs it was passed widely around and attracted a massive up-turn in sales
4. Subservient Chicken (Burger King) – a campaign that started in 2004 and is still available online at www. subservientchicken.com. It is supposed to have generated over 46-million page views during the first few weeks alone. This campaign is interactive and involved the user.
5. M&M Candy Lab - some time ago we reviewed the Cadbury’s M&M brand viral marketing campaign and it still ranks amongst our list of favourites. Sadly it isn’t available any longer, but you can read our blog entry about the mechanism used

Whilst these examples embody the best practice of viral marketing campaigns and the excellent execution of the concept, it is easy for a campaign to either fail to become ’viral’ or worse…backfire on the brand. Sony ran a campaign that used false blogs and supposed user-feedback to promote their PSP product, but this backfired when it was found to be a staged campaign, you can read the article on the Guardian newspaper’s website - here

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide strategic Internet marketing consultancy for b2b and b2c organisations and tailored marketing solutions, including viral marketing project management. Contact us to see how we can help your business succeed online.

The key to your success is planning. All effective campaigns start with a well thought out plan, as this picture we found shows…

It is unclear as to which formal planning methodology Godzilla used. Enpiem Internet marketing on the other hand use the SOSTAC framework to create bespoke campaigns for our clients. SOSTAC is an acronym for the component elements of the framework - Situation Analysis, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Actions and Control.

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide strategic Internet marketing campaign planning and campaign management. Contact us to find out how we can help you get the most of your website and business online.

We saw this on the Viralbank website – an HTML tattoo!

Have a very Happy Christmas and a peaceful new year from Enpiem Internet Marketing.

Its now been 8 weeks since Google announced the beta launch of their browser ‘Chrome’ and we thought it was time to see how this new kid on the block was squaring up to its peers and what the fuss was all about.

The good news from a marketer’s perspective is that Chrome seems to cope with flash and interactive rich media display content, so there doesn’t seem to be any compatibility issues to worry about with your creative portfolios. If your site and adverts display in Firefox, then presentation in Chrome seems to be very similar. Chrome presents a clear layout and design, maximising the visible page with no additional tools provided as default (other than the ‘omnibar’ which doubles as both an address bar and search box at the top of the browser).

We were interested to find out what the practical advantages were to marketers as well as prospective customers. With a minimalist layout would that mean more organic and PPC results displayed above the fold (i.e. before vertical scrolling was necessary) than IE? We searched on google.co.uk for ‘home insurance’ using both Chrome and IE 7 to see if this was the case. IE 7 showed three landscape format Adwords results then four organic results above-the-fold. Chrome showed the same three landscape Adwords results then five organic results above-the-fold. For PPC results both showed six adverts on the right side of the page, although with IE the sixth was only the title line but Chrome showed both description lines and the URL as well. On Yahoo we found similar results, IE displayed three organic results and Chrome displayed four. For PPC ads, Chrome displayed six on the right side but IE only displayed five.

Another good point for marketers is the default homepage (and ‘new tab’ page default) shows the previous nine websites visited as well as a search feature allowing users to search their history (providing more chances for users to find your site again). However, this is a double-edge sword because multi-site display also showcases your sites design on same page as your competitors. If the user is looking to make a decision about which site to go back to based on aesthetic presentation then layout, branding and USP prominence will all be decisive factors.

Are there any minus points? We couldn’t find an RSS reader built-in and JavaScript code used to add sites to the favourites list in IE didn’t work (similar to Firefox). Is the sparse layout a negative point? Not really because this is simply a starting point and familiar buttons such as ‘home’ and ‘bookmarks’ can easily be added by the user. However this would reduce the visible page and that fifth organic result. On the whole, Chrome performed very well and we were impressed with what is after all a beta release.

We also liked how you could enter calculation queries directly into the omnibar and receive immediate results. We asked ‘5 miles in kilometers’ as a search query and the first result on the SERP was the calculation result ‘5 miles = 8.04672 kilometers’. The same search on the IE 7 address bar returned a page of calculator sites requiring further clicks to achieve the result.

So is Chrome set to challenge Firefox and IE? Watch this space has to be the answer to that. One of our retail clients is seeing Chrome accounting for 4% traffic after just 8-weeks, so its certainly one to keep an eye on.

Yesterday we received an email from a friend telling us they had sent us a ‘candy lab creation’ with a short personal message and a ‘click here to view’ link. Clicking on the link brought up a scientist’s lab with two M&M characters standing each side of a giant M&M. One character told his colleague to ‘play the message’ where upon a photo of Nick’s face appeared on the giant M&M and proceeded to lip-sync to the song ‘I want candy’ (a track originally recorded in 1965 by the ‘Strangeloves’). The eyes of the photograph blinked and moved and the mouth opened and sang in what was a hilarious couple of minutes of embarrassment for Nick!

This turns out to be an excellent viral online marketing campaign from M&Ms to support their microsite http://www.mymms.com/ a site for consumers to personalise M&M sweets with names, messages and photographs. The viral campaign is a clever way informing consumers of their new production capability to print faces on the surface of an M&M. We were hooked and had to send out a couple to friends of ours and hence passed on the viral infection – the hallmark of a good viral marketing campaign. The process of uploading a photo is well organised with clear non-technical instructions. You can crop and zoom the photo to best capture the face and that’s all there is to it. In addition to a choice of two song clips you can also create custom messages that are spoken by the photo character.

From there it’s a simple matter of completing the details of you name and email and the recipients name and email with an optional personal message and that’s it. You can also copy HTML code and embed your singing face on a web page.

The viral was developed for M&Ms by the agency IMC2 interactive using Oddcast’s PhotoFace technology and is a great example of doing a viral right. Highly interactive and personal (like the Mini Cooper ‘ave a word’ campaign) that puts across a product offering in a highly entertaining way that leaves you reaching for your digital photo album and email address book. Well done M&Ms!

To get your friends, family and colleagues singing along – visit http://www.thecandylab.com/

Google is ten year’s old today. Happy birthday Google! Learn about the development of Google and a whole range of facts and figures by visiting: http://www.google.co.uk/tenthbirthday/

Yesterday I ran the Windsor Half Marathon and my legs are still deciding if they forgive me! Having returned from races in the past and checked the popular ‘Runners World’ online forum, I was always amazed at the speed at which participants had voiced their praise and annoyance at various issues from course layouts, toilet facilities to attitudes of race officials and the provision of refreshments. By the time I’d arrived home there was always a growing list of comments already posted.

As I paced the closing miles of Sunday’s race, I thought I’d use today’s blog entry to look at how forums can both help and hinder a business/brand, and should therefore be approached with some degree of caution if you intend to use them as a marketing tool on your website. Remember…you might not always like what you read!

Forums are often on the ‘shopping list’ we see at site planning meetings with prospective clients, keen to offer their visitors a feedback channel as afforded to them by the implementation of a forum. And its an obvious choice, given the credibility we as marketers put on client testimonials. Why not encourage your customers to tell the world about how you’ve solved their problems, provided great customer service or exceeded their expectations. This ‘genuine’ feedback often carries a lot of weight with prospective customers.

I don’t think I’ve booked a holiday in the past few years without first trawling the online forums for feedback on the tour operators, the hotels and the excursion companies prior to booking. I’ve avoided making some costly mistakes as a result of heeding the advice of fellow travellers, all thanks to the existence of forums. When you do things right, the forum is a glowing testimonial to your achievements, with far stronger credibility than the marketing copy you spend days crafting for your website. But when things go wrong – they can be a fast-track to bad publicity!

By Sunday evening there were already over 50 comments on the Runners World forum for the Windsor Half Marathon (view it here) about the race we’d completed earlier in the day. Initial comments were predominantly about the traffic congestion around Windsor Great Park and hopefully this is something the organisers can review for next year. Certainly good advice for those deliberating taking part in 2009 if only just to add on time to get to the start!

So I’d say by all means consider implementing a forum on your website, but do so in the knowledge that you might not like everything that is said about your business, products and services on it. Also – do please share your experiences both good and bad in forums – many fellow customers rely on forums as part of their decision making process. From entering a race to choosing a holiday, the forum is a powerful tool.

To discuss your company’s forum requirements, drop us a line using our contact us form and we’d be happy to advise you on the best approach or help you implement the right forum architecture for your business needs.

Nick.

We’ve updated our glossary of Internet marketing terms and acronyms today to now over 100 new media terms explained. Some of the new terms include: ad network, CGI-BIN, CPS, FMCG, KPI and LTV. We’ll be adding more over the coming weeks. Check out the Internet marketing glossary.

We also loved today’s Google Doodle of the Cern LHC.