Corporate Eye

...compare, compete, excel

Archives for 2009

Using social media to promote your conference

You may remember that I posted a while back about the Ethical Corporation’s Corporate Governance conference, which is next week (16-17 June, in London – if you haven’t booked your tickets, it’s not too late…)

Apart from encouraging you to go, because I do think that this will be an interesting and very timely conference, I thought I’d point out how they’re using social media to promote the conference.

Ethical Corporation have set up a LinkedIn group where people can raise topics they want to discuss, and get to know each other a little before the conference begins. This has been up for a while now, so there’s been plenty of time to get involved. And – obviously a best practice here – the group is linked to from the main Ethical Corporation site, which both authenticates and promotes the group.

ethical-corp-tweetEthical Corporation have a well established Twitter account, with Nick Johnson (head of conferences) tweeting. The account is independent of this conference, so Nick already has a following of over 1000 people (including me) to communicate with.

One of the many things he’s using this account for is to advertise the conference, and to offer a discount to those people following him on Twitter. This is a great concept, though not unique to @ethical_corp, as it targets exactly those people likely to be interested in attending the conference – his followers. @communicatemag used Twitter last week to promote their conference by retweeting to win tickets, and since theirs was a social media conference, this was an ideal mechanism for promotion.

Based on observing Nick’s tweets, he’ll be setting up a hashtag (#) for the Corporate Governance summit, as he did for the Responsible Business Summit (#rbs09) – this means that all the tweets about the Corporate Governance summit can be collated and followed by Twitter users. This way interested people can find out what people make of the conference – the backchannel – whether they are attending or not. And @ethical_corp live-tweeted the last conference themselves, so I’m sure they’ll be doing that too. Again, there’s a link to the Twitter account from the main site and back again – authenticating the Twitter account.

Ethical Corporation also have a Facebook page, which they’ve used in the past to promote their conferences.

Clearly they will have used offline promotion techniques too, but these seem like good ways of finding those of us who are online and interested in corporate governance. This blog post, too, is discussing their conference … it all helps.

Anything else? What other social media techniques have you seen companies use to promote their events?

Microsoft Redemption Comes in the Form of New Bing Ads

Lately, I’ve been writing about Microsoft’s lack of creative branding here on Corporate Eye, but today, I can actually say that I saw some marketing come from Microsoft that didn’t put me to sleep.  Have you seen any of the new Bing commercials on television?  If not, you can watch the one I saw last night which appears below or check out the Bing channel on YouTube where you can find a bunch of Bing commercials.

I think the concept is strong — most of us who use a search engine and get lost in the myriad of unrelated and useless results can empathize with the people in the Bing ad above.  I also like the idea of branding the time-wasting and annoying experience of picking through search results to find something that’s actually useful as  “search overload syndrome”.   However, I don’t think people are overloaded with ‘searches’.  They’re overloaded with meaningless results, particularly spam results.  I think search overload syndrome (which I’m sure will get the SOS acronym) could have been better.

The complete campaign, dubbed the Bing ad “manifesto” was created by JWT and cost Microsoft a mere $100 million.  It appears to be working so far.  As I mentioned in my post earlier this week, Microsoft Bing has bypassed Yahoo! as the second most used search engine behind Google.  What remains to be seen is whether or not the Bing product will live up to the hype.  We’ll have to wait and see if Bing is still in second place in 6 months or a year from now.

Now, back to the commercial in the video above (and the others from this campaign).  I think the only real problem I have with it is the rebranding of Bing as a “discovery engine” rather than a search engine.  That term doesn’t work for me for two reasons:

  1. I don’t want to “discover” anything when I’m conducting a keyword search.  Ultimately, I want the perfect result to be delivered to me, so there is no discovery required on my part.  That word connotes more work for me — like an explorer or archaeologist spending years trying to find a hidden treasure or lost artifact.
  2. Microsoft isn’t fooling anyone.  If it looks like a search engine, acts like a search engine, and works like a search engine — it’s a search engine.  I know they’re trying to differentiate Bing from Google, but I’m not buying the “discovery engine” line.

There is quite a debate going on at the Bing YouTube channel about these commercials with strong arguments from both sides.  Regardless of whether or not a person likes these ads, you have to agree that they’re better than most of Microsoft’s previous marketing efforts.  What do you think? 

CSR Website Benchmarking Results Announced

There’s one thing, and one thing only, which many business leaders may wish they had in these troubled times.  No not bottomless pockets, or even a customer-hypnotising website.

It’s the portable memory eraser from the Men In Black films.

Think about having the ability to instantly erase the memories of both creditors and consumers … huge savings could be made across all corporate finance and marketing activities!

What’s more you get to wear shades every time you use it … brilliant!

However this flight of fantasy is unlikely to become reality anytime soon, so what else can companies do to communicate their sustainability to a wider audience?

One answer is to be part of a CSR website benchmarking scheme, which is exactly happened to the companies in the Standard & Poor’s / Milano Italia Borsa index. [Read more…] about CSR Website Benchmarking Results Announced

Looking at Company IR Home Pages

I’ve been away from this blog for awhile, completing the busy part of my academic year, seeing one child graduate from college, another one finish high school and get ready for college (no relief from tuition bills yet) and generally keeping busy.  That doesn’t mean however, that I haven’t been casting a critical eye over IR web sites.  Lately I’ve been poking around the investor relations home pages for FTSE 100 companies to get a feel for what the IR home page says about the company’s point of view.

My first stop was a visit to Marks & Spencer.  I spent many years in retailing, so I thought I would start with something that seemed familiar. M&S, like many retailers, makes you hunt to find the investor relations page.  They reserve the main Marks & Spencer website for retail shoppers, forcing you to find a link to the corporate web page way, way down in the corner of the retail page.  Click on the link for The Company and you go to the corporate page and a further link takes you to the IR home page.  A hunt, plus two clicks: it’s not perfect, but not too bad.  

Once you do get to the IR home page, it’s actually quite well laid out.  A list of subjects on the left hand side makes it easy to navigate to the section you’re looking for, while the page itself contains many of the most sought after pieces of information such as a link to the latest Annual Report and a stock price quote with a mini stock price chart.  The one suggestion I would have to make the main page better is to have the list of links present the reader with a pop up list of subheadings when the mouse is scrolled over the subject.  This would enable the reader to quickly see if the information was in the section without the time and effort of navigating to the section in question and back.

Impression of the company gleaned from the main IR page:  The customer, not the investor, comes first, which is not unusual in a retailer. Still, I didn’t like the hunt factor.  Next, the company understands design.  The IR home page is well laid out and the design is crisp and appealing without excessive clutter.  In fact, I would go so far to say that the design is better than most of the M&S stores I’ve been in.  Finally, we’re treated to two pictures of the Chairman on our way to the IR home page (and I noticed at least two others while I did a quick circuit of the site) which gives a pretty good indication that a.) the chairman has a big ego and likes publicity, b.) probably has a hand in almost every corporate decision being made. (Note:  a subsequent visit to the site as I was editing this piece revealed far fewer pictures of the chairman, so I might be a bit harsh here.)

I will freely admit these are snap judgements, but considering the average time a person spends on a web page, those are the operative types of judgements when looking at web offerings these days.

New Marketing vs. Old Marketing: Using the Same Message


There’s nothing wrong with using the same marketing techniques over and over; especially if they’re getting results. And results are just what the Mars company seem to be getting. First introduced to American GI’s in World War II, their M&M chocolate candies have been a delicious and fun to watch marketing plan from the very beginning.

Here is an older video commercial of one of the M&M debuts from 1960. Does anyone remember this one?



They’re marketing has always been a hit because their product is so much fun and it’s fun to eat! But what I see from them is consistency across the line, no matter when the time of their commercial was. During a period where social media and new media are pretty hot, companies like Mars are staying consistent and productive with their same message. Take a look at this one from the 90s:

Marketing techniques are only as effective, as they are effective. If they are working for your company, is it really necessary to change them? Does it really make a significant difference if the marketing message looks different to your consumers, or are they more concerned with the product behind the message? What do you think?

I think the Mars company hit the marketing nail on the head with their consistency in their marketing message. This proves that it really doesn’t take a whole lot of new marketing ideas or twists to convey their message. Mars has proven that with theirs.


Best Corporate Career Site? Another Look at Award-winning Yahoo


yahoo-careers

Back in April, when Yahoo was named the Best Corporate Careers Website in the ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards, I was on the trail of another story and merely swooped by the site for a look.  Nothing fabulous or fascinating jumped out, so I didn’t go back for an in-depth examination.  Until now.

ERE subsequently published more detail about why Yahoo won, complimenting the widespread use of technology, prominent display of awards, product integration, and a combined marketing approach designed to drive traffic to the career site.  All of which turns out to be true–and so well done that the result is not flashy, just very satisfying.  So I enjoyed taking a more leisurely tour of the site.

In fact, I had an excellent adventure, thanks to a front-page link called “Play in the Sandbox.”  Click on it, and transport into the magic realm of Yahoo! Research, where your inner geek is bound to find some fun.  For example:  access to a huge list of technical articles, including one I couldn’t resist downloading:  On trusting your socks to find each other addresses “design issues that may arise as a result of the deployment of networks of devices that will constitute the ‘Internet of Things’.”  (I’ll let you know how it turns out.)

yahoo-research

The sandbox feature is certain to have appeal for some of the very people Yahoo! most wants to find and hire.  So my takeaway impression is that the company has analyzed the interests of their target audiences and has come up with creative ways to engage them.  Which may be the most important step in creating a successful career site.

Full disclosure . . .  I’m a diehard Yahoo! fan.  I find their search engine superior to Google’s and I love the personalization capabilities that let me create an attractive and really useful online information center.  So I’ll highlight this comment from ERE:

As we all know, Yahoo has been undergoing turmoil in recent years, so it’s particularly amazing that despite the turmoil, coupled with the economic downturn, its HR team put together an amazing Web 2.0 rebuilding effort.  The result of this transformation?  A career site that went from being ranked as one of the worst sites (on the prestigious CareerXroads ranking) to one of the best sites, all in a short period. The redesign tripled the amount of content consumed by its visitors, which led to increased conversion rates.

Take an extra look at that last sentence.  I couldn’t find confirmation or more detail–but assuming that ERE has the facts, Yahoo got a great return on its redesign investment.