Corporate Eye

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Lucy Nixon

Lucy Nixon

On Being Chatted Up by Social Brands

I have a secret life.

Or not so secret, actually, but not obviously connected to this one.

I am the editor here at Corporate Eye, but I also have a personal blog about living gluten free, and raising a coeliac child. In that role, I am occasionally courted by big name brands.

influencer-social-web

These brands want me to think well of them, and – more importantly from their point of view – write positive posts about them and their products. They want me to be on their side, an advocate, using my small influence to support them, because we have a shared audience.

I’m not naive. I know what is going on here, and despite that I have to tell you that it works, at least partly (independent bloggers have their own personal brands to maintain, after all, and don’t want to sell out).

Everyone likes to be validated, and it is undeniably flattering to be invited to cook in Sainsbury’s kitchens, or to dine with them, or to have afternoon tea at Claridge’s with Genius. Not just flattering, but if they’ve got the approach right, highly enjoyable and engaging.

New US rules say, quite rightly, that this kind of interaction, or receiving of goodies, should be declared. There is the beginnings of a code of conduct for bloggers – though whether there is one for the array of covert marketers is quite another question – and this should help both sides in being transparent and open about the relationship.

How is this relevant to you?

If you haven’t identified influencers in your market, start now. Your competitors are probably talking to your shared influencers already; relationships – even alliances – are being forged. There are companies eager to help you find them and/or to talk to them, and to help you spread the word. The influencers will almost certainly be interested to hear from you, if you are indeed relevant to them – after all you do need to be an enthusiast to maintain a blog on a particular topic, because it is hard work.

And if the influencers are just not that into you: don’t you need to know that too, and why?

Try to genuinely engage with them as individuals, setting up a real two-way relationship. There is value to you in what the influencers have to say about you and your products, and they will probably have insights that haven’t occurred to you. Yes, as a blogger, the gifts and events are nice, but it is even better to feel heard, and to believe that your opinion matters. Keep it small-scale, and have a real conversation.

If a crisis hits your company (when it does?) it will be good to know where the influential people talking to your market are likely to sit on the issues involved. Will they support you? Can you provide them with your side of the story?

Pop-up influence, or spot the influencer

Not only have I talked about Sainsbury’s and Genius on my gluten free blog, I am talking about them here, helping to bring their marketing messages to a different group (to some of whom it will be personally relevant, as 1 in 100 of you are coeliac, after all). Do they know that? They won’t be expecting it, because to them I am Lucy at Free From, but if they’re using monitoring tools properly, they will pick it up.

Unless you look, you won’t know who the people talking about you are talking to, where they are talking, or what they are saying. And it won’t always be what you expect, or where.

Note: this was Coeliac Awareness week here in the UK. Coeliac disease is an autoimmune condition in which eating gluten (found in wheat, barley and rye) damages the lining of the small intestine, and is managed by a gluten free diet. It is estimated that 1 in 100 people have coeliac disease, not all of whom are diagnosed.

Adobe and Apple Battle over Flash in Ad Format

Adobe-Apple_Flash_adComparative advertising has been making a comeback in recent years with the Progresso vs. Campbell’s soup comparative ad campaign bringing back memories of the Coke vs. Pepsi challenge from decades earlier.  This week, Adobe and Apple have jumped on the comparative advertising bandwagon but with a catch.  Instead of trying to differentiate two brands or products, Adobe’s “We Love Apple” ad, which is part of its “Freedom of Choice” campaign, attacks a business decision made by Apple which Steve Jobs communicated quite clearly recently — Apple’s mobile devices, including the iPad and iPhone, do not and will never support Flash.

The Adobe ad making the rounds across the social Web this week is pictured above and includes copy that says Adobe loves creativity and flash, but, “What we don’t love is anybody taking away your freedom to choose what you create, how you create it, and what you experience on the Web.”

According to Adobe, the campaign is intended to defend consumers’ freedom of choice claiming that big companies with deep pockets shouldn’t be able to dictate the content people can view online, and since 75% of online video content still uses Flash, that’s exactly what Apple is doing by refusing to support Flash on its mobile devices.

Of course, tech-enthusiasts argue that Flash is “old school” and it’s only a matter of time until it’s completely replaced with better technology.  However, Adobe has a point.  The change from Flash hasn’t happened yet, and it’s unlikely to happen overnight.  Regardless of whether or not the technology is appropriate for mobile devices, people will still want to use it until it’s completely replaced across the Web.  Considering that the vast majority of online video is viewed on YouTube, and YouTube still relies on Flash, Apple is denying access to a big chunk of online content that iPad and iPhone customers would probably like to view.

What do you think?  Which side of the debate do you stand on?  Should Apple support Flash on its mobile devices or should consumers understand that Flash technology needs to be replaced on mobile devices, so they’ll need to live without access to Flash content until the shift to that new technology is made across the Web?  In the meantime, which brand looks better or worse in this feud?  Is Apple a bully or is Adobe a sore loser?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Mobile Ads Drive High Response Rates and Brand Boosts

The US mobile advertising market is expected to reach $593 billion this year according to eMarketer, and that growth is attributed to research which demonstrates high response rates and positive branding from mobile ads.  In fact, research from InsightExpress reports that mobile ads are “significantly more effective than online ads across several branding metrics … exposure to mobile ads provided two and a half times the lift of online ads for ad awareness and six times the lift in purchase intent.”  Now, those are statistics that are hard to ignore.

Take a look at the chart from eMarketer below which shows specifically how mobile vs. online advertising affected respondents’ impression of brands.

emarketer_mobile_ads_brand_lift

In terms of click-through rates, the most avid mobile device users (typically smartphone owners) were most likely to click on mobile banner ads but found full-page ads intrusive and clicked on them far less often.  Also interesting was the finding that claimed less avid mobile users noticed sponsored apps more often and clicked on them more often than avid mobile users.

As I wrote about last month, Fortune 500 corporate executives are less enthusiastic about mobile advertising, but it would appear based on these statistics that they might want to re-evaluate.  Clearly, mobile ads are getting noticed and having a positive effect, not to mention getting the click-throughs that executives value so highly.

The trick now is figuring out which types of mobile advertising generate the most positive responses from specific target audiences.  The InsightExpress research found a variance between how different ads perform, from mobile video ads to mobile Internet ads and more, in terms of purchase intent, awareness, and brand favorability.  For example, mobile Internet ads saw the biggest increase in ad awareness and purchase intent but mobile video ads saw the biggest increase in brand favorability.

Mobile advertising is still in its infancy and no path for success has been defined yet.  We’re still very much in the experimentation and learning phase, but if your brand isn’t there experimenting and learning, you’re missing out on a big opportunity that your competitor just might cash in on before you can get budget approval.  In other words, the time to add a mobile component to your marketing plan is now.

Your thoughts?

Goldman Sachs–Here We Go Again?

The announcement came during stock market trading hours–GOLDMAN SACHS SUED BY SEC.

Some complained that the SEC should have waited until the markets closed. But the damage to Goldman Sachs shareowners and the markets was already done.

A week later more news came out on the weekend–

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Emails at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. released by a Senate subcommittee show just how much financial reform is needed, two leading senators said on Sunday.

The emails, released Saturday, show executives and other employees at Goldman Sachs knew that the firm was making money on the collapse of the housing market, largely by betting on the failure of mortgage securitizations and derivatives like the ones it bundled and sold to investors, whose failure led to the financial crisis.

“There is something terribly wrong about a country like ours where you make billions of dollars by making nothing and producing nothing but taking advantage of an economic situation, Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., said Sunday on Meet the Press.

What makes this emerging story even more interesting is that Goldman Sachs appeared on Barron’s February 15th cover story on The World’s Most Respected Companies; it was rated 30 out of 100 companies. Barron’s noted —

Barron's Most Respected

I am not faulting Barron’s (this is a good publication and I am a subscriber). Rather, this highlights the continuing problem we have with Corporate Ethics.

This story has another interesting and promising aspect: when considering a similar deal, Bear Stearns turned it down because of its Ethics conflict. As reported in the Guardian—

Bear Stearns, the Wall Street bank now part of JP Morgan Chase, turned down a similarly structured deal to the one under scrutiny between Paulson & Co and Goldman Sachs because it “didn’t pass the ethics standards”.

The bank, which collapsed during the credit crisis, “smelled trouble” when John Paulson, the hedge fund’s founder, approached it with the idea of creating an investment that the fund could bet against, according to author Gregory Zuckerman in his book on Paulson, The Greatest Trade Ever.

As noted in the MarketWatch item above, the Goldman Sachs incident is once again motivating a hair trigger demand for more regulation. When will there be a realization that you cannot regulate ethics?

This is not an academic or esoteric issue. When people are no longer restrained by objective notions of right and wrong, nothing is safe—not your investments, not your house, not your neighborhood, not you! What we’re talking about, ultimately, is the moral consensus upon which the rule of law rests—that’s the very foundation block of Western governments and societies.

When ethics fail in the commercial markets, more and more stringent regulations are certain to follow. It’s the only way to assure the integrity of financial and commercial transactions. But we lose freedom in the process.

The problem is that regulation, however well intended, can’t solve the ethical problem. The best regulation can do is to define what people can get away with by drawing a line they can’t cross. It does not answer the question, “What is the honest way to do business?” Crosswalk.com Commentary

In one of my recent posts, I mentioned that Ethics, to be effective, must be well integrated within the organization’s Culture; so much so that it guides daily decisions of all employees-

Perhaps the key reason is that most companies don’t realize that ethics must start with “the tone at the top”. Board and C-Suite members must be visible in promoting ethical behavior and putting in place an ethics program that promotes an ethics culture. This takes considerable effort and time since it must be embedded in the existing corporate culture.

Bravo to Bear Stearns for showing that Corporate Ethics can work, sometimes.

Google Invites Investors Home

google-earnings-release-on-ir-website-page-1

When Google speaks, people listen. Whether it is the enormous market capitalization, the global reach of the company’s well-known brand, or simply the expectation that the company will continue to be a worldwide innovator, when Google does something new, it matters to more than just Internet searchers.

Recently, Google released its first-quarter earnings in a manner that broke the traditional mold for releasing financial information. Instead of posting the actual press release and financial numbers via one of the financial newswires, Google released only a short statement saying that its earnings statement had been posted on the company’s investor relations website. A link to the IR website at was provided. However, no actual numbers or commentary was included in either the release text or its headline.

The full text of the statement released on Marketwire was just 50 words.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA–(Marketwire – April 15, 2010) –   Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) has released its first quarter 2010 financial results. Please visit Google’s investor relations website at http://investor.google.com to view the earnings release. Google intends to make future announcements regarding its financial performance exclusively through its investor relations website.

Releasing Financial Information on Company Website

This is not the first time Google has published its earning press release and materials on its investor relations website. In fact, Google and most other corporations routinely post such information on the IR websites in order to make it easily accessible to investors and potential investors. It also reduces the workload of the IR Department by freeing them up from responding to routine investor requests for publicly available information.

However, until this quarter, Google had always followed the time honored tradition of releasing earnings information via financial newswire. Like most other corporations, Google orchestrated a carefully timed dance in which a press release with the earnings data was submitted to one of the financial newswires. Then, they waited for the release and its contents to begin showing up in additional news streams to verify that the release had been done correctly. Only then, did the company release the earnings data online, thereby ensuring that the information had been publicly released in an unquestionable manner first.

With its first-quarter earnings, Google took a different track by simply releasing a notification that the information had already been released (or likely simultaneously released) on the company’s own website.

Google is not the first publicly traded company to release its earnings information on its corporate website, however, it is the first worldwide household name to do so. Ironically, the updated guidance giving companies like Google the green light to do just that came almost a year and a half ago. So, why did it take so long for companies to start using their websites to release financial information, and will other companies follow in Google’s footsteps.

Slow Moving Regulation Meets Internet Speed

In 2008, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission updated its Internet guidance for publicly traded companies using websites and electronic media for the first time since 2000. The update brought the agency’s Internet guidance up from archaic to merely out of date. However, in doing so, it opened the door for exactly the sort of thing that Google did with its first-quarter earnings for 2010.

The SEC Interpretive Release addressed several issues, and just as tellingly, specifically did not address even more issues. However, the interpretation did bring acceptance to the concept that a publicly traded corporation’s website could be used in certain circumstances to release information and communicate with stockholders. As long as the company’s website was a “recognized channel” for distributing information, then publishing material on that website would count as publicly releasing the information.

The criteria for considering a company website to be a recognized channel included that investors know the website’s location and that the information be easy to find. Most importantly, the guidance required that the company inform investors that it publishes important information on the website and that it plans to do so in the future. Google has already been stating in its financial filings that it has a website, where it is, and that it does publish financial information there.

Despite this go ahead from the SEC, the vast majority of companies continued to operate under the old financial news release first, website second model. The question was whether companies were just that slow moving, or whether there was some fear about changing a paradigm that was already working.

Penguins must leave the safety of the ice in order to find food in the oceans. However, there is no way of knowing whether a killer whale or other predator is lurking in the waters below. The only way to find out is to jump in and see what happens. Of course, no one wants to be the first on into the water, so the penguins inch closer and closer to the edge until finally, one of them drops into the water below. If nothing happens, then the rest of the penguins jump quickly into the waters to feed. If, on the other hand, a predator appears, the penguins move back to try again another time.

In the case of corporate financial earnings, many companies figured why take the chance of angering shareholders or provoking the wrath of regulators. At issue were both the inertia of a long-used methodology, as well as the pesky problem of letting investors know exactly when and where financial information would be released in the sometimes unreliable world of the Internet.

Google’s press release, it seems was designed to take care of that last problem. The company did not abandon the press release altogether, it just changed what it said. Moving forward, the company has indicated that it will continue to release financials on its own IR website. The interesting piece of the puzzle is whether or not it will issue another mini-press release telling everyone that the data is ready, or if it will skip that step altogether and rely exclusively on its own company website.

April Wrap-up


Spring Blossom

The customary updates, previews, and quick-takes!

More about . . .

Facebook: Big doin’s this month at the world’s second-most-visited website.  Now nearing 400 million users, Facebook announced it will go for even more dominance by introducing a further array of “ways to connect.”  We’ll check into the details next month—but meanwhile, those involved with social media should not ignore this development.

CERN/LHC: What’s been happening at the world’s biggest science experiment?  Quite a bit, apparently, though none of it easy to understand.  Get an inkling by reading about the first (ever!) “reconstruction of a Beauty particle” on April 21, 2010.  The CERN search for a Recruitment Specialist is now closed, though.

The Return of the Road Show?

In my little world, a key indicator of economic health is the number of road shows I’m invited to.  In the boom days, I could have had breakfast and/or lunch courtesy of some vendor(s) at least once a week, just for listening to panel discussions and watching slideshows.  And probably gotten a tee shirt in the bargain.  (Or a squeezy ball or a festive badge lanyard, or even a logo’d padfolio!)

No more.  Of course I’m not active in the event-rich IT world now, but I’m still on a lot of “lists,” so it stands to reason that I would get fewer invitations, but not necessarily zero.  Yet zero has been the exact number for the last couple of years.  Imagine my surprise, then, when I got several very nice opportunities all of a sudden.  A couple are in the careers/recruiting/HR arena, and I’ll report on those next month.

Meantime, I’m just wondering if the increase in events reflects/predicts improving economic conditions?

Update from the Undercover Employee

Yes, I’m still undercover—though only part-time now.  That gives me an opportunity to continue observing the culture at Company Big without using up too much bandwidth.  And the insight for this month is:  Keep emails short, or at least give them onscreen readability.  There have been dramatic developments at Company Big this month, and the well-meaning execs (those coming and those going) have sent out l-o-n-g messages explaining why, saying good-bye, saying hello, etc.  They may think lengthy blocks of text look more sincere than short paragraphs and bulleted lists, but no matter what the subject, an extended message really benefits from some amount of visual organization.  For a refresher on effective email, revisit a classic post from 43 Folders!


(This month’s “beautiful image” courtesy of Noel Zia Lee.)