AIMIA Connect 2009 Recap-Part 3

This is the 3rd and final part of the AIMIA 2009 Connect Workshop

Managing Your Online Presence and Online Opportunity Conversion

Peter Crowe, CEO

Corvus Consulting

Steve Beger Photography (Beger.com Productions) in Homage to Nikola Tesla

The question Peter asks to start off his presentation is how to leverage the consumer uptake in location-based services?
Why would you bother with this?
• Customers are buying local
• Customers are supporting local
• Customers are engaging with local media
• Local customers deliver higher profits
Local search is growing, this is because more people are searching for local listings in contrast to broad, generic searches. The search engines are trying to leverage that fact, evidence of this is the ’10 pack that Google offers’, that even appears for some searches that don’t contain any local information. The 10 pack occupies key real estate and search engines are increasingly aware of your location.
Three main players in the local landscape, namely: Yellow Pages, Google and True Local. In order to get listed correctly several things need to be done:
• Make sure all your locations are listed with the Yellow Pages / Google / True Local
• Identify and update any relevant vertical directories
• Create a content page for every branch location on your website
• Develop an inbound link strategy around the content page / location
• Don’t forget regions. E.g. ‘Inner West’, ‘North Shore’
• Standardise your location data
The Power of Ratings & Reviews
• 84 percent of Americans say online customer evaluations have an influence on their decision to purchase a product or service
• 66 percent of respondents checked some type of online review forum when looking to purchase a particular brand of product or service.
• 50 percent relied on online reviews in the first stage of their buying cycle.
• Ask your known happy customers for feedback and give incentives
The important lesson I took away from this presentation was the vital importance of local search and how it impacts on both the quality and amount of visitors you get to your site. You need to dedicate resources in order to make sure your local listings are accurate and appear in the Google 10 box for the search phrases you are targeting.

Cracking the Quantum Code

Tim Cheng, Digital Creative Director

Euro RSCG Australia

Euro RSCG needed to create a promotional tie-in with the 007 movie, Quantum of Solace, generate deep engagement with the Sony Australia brand and to position Sony as a market leader in the consumer electronics category. The challenge was to recreate a ‘best ever’ promotion by driving double-digit incremental volume. The target market was:
• Active technophiles
• Early adopters of new technology and influence the opinions of their less tech-savvy friends
• The target market also enjoys high-involvement entertainment experiences
• James Bond fans
The strategy was to recruit thousands of ordinary people as “spies” and to use Sony products in order to save MI6 agent, Constance Newlove, crack a mysterious code, save the world and win untold riches and SONY/007 prizes in doing so. To live the intriguing double life of a secret service agent, players scanned QR codes to receive video mission briefings on their mobile phones.
Their missions took place on mobile, online, and in the real world. Players collaborated (and competed) using social networking platforms including blogs, forums and Facebook. The final mission was a live event at Sony’s flagship store in Sydney.
The campaign was a massive success has achieved the following milestones:
• Over 8,000 unique mobile players
• Over 23,500 mobile views from 35 countries
• Over 10,000 You Tube views
• Generated total sales valued at 33% over target
• Engaged individual customer registrations measured at 42% over target
Learning’s included; the intelligence of communities far exceeds that of one person, updates need to be made in real time to keep the game organic and fluid, create multiple entry points, players are part of the game and finally everyone wants to be Bond . A very well presented module supported by a great video supporting the case study, thoroughly enjoyable.

Like your high school librarian

Julian Cole, Digital Strategist

The Population

Why use case studies to convince people to use social media:
• Case studies build confidence
• Australian case studies build even more confidence
• They also help stimulate new ideas
FMCG Case study
• Listerine-Listerine earlier in the year had an academic report linking the product to cancer, Listerine wanted to find out the real impact of the report.
• KFC-they set up a Facebook page for their Australian audience, they amassed over 20,000 fans in 1 week from a Cayan burger promotion. Use a promotional kick-start to get this rolling.
Fashion Case Study
• For the release of the new Dosh wallets range, they targeted a number of influential blogs, they managed to get presence on many style blogs and they achieved this by getting straight to the point with publishers.
• Billabong Lil Weeds-aligned with stab magazine to create a talent scout community, much better results than MySpace.
Television Case Study
• Needed to get people interested and engaged in the second season of Football Superstars, so they created a Facebook fan page with 3000+ fans, in summary, reality TV is perfect for social media.
• Last Ride-director set up a blog talking about the production of the movie, this gave an insight into creating a film, this worked as the blog targeted passionate people.
The importance of case studies was the main take away from Julian’s presentation. If a case study is researched thoroughly and well written it can prove to be a valuable marketing tool in the arsenal of any company. The information Julian shared from the case studies was very fascinating and showed how social media can work across a wide variety of industries.
I thoroughly enjoyed this workshop, it had a little bit of everything, the vast majority of the presentations were well thought out and delivered with much enthusiasm and gusto. Kudos must also go to AIMIA for hosting an event that ran like clockwork and from what I can tell was very well received. This was a digital conference and being in the search industry I would have liked to have seen some more emphasis on search engine optimisation, let’s hope next year SEO gets its own dedicated session
Have a good weekend everyone

See Bruce's author page for links to connect on social media.