How People Really Use Mobile (& Mistakes Marketers Make)

I recently came across this fantastic article from the Harvard Business Review website, titled "How People Really Use Their Mobile". The link to the full preview article can be found here. 

For me, it's always been a challenge understanding how consumers really use their mobile device (whether it be a smartphone or tablet). This article gives great new insight into this - there are really seven key motivations for using a mobile device. More importantly, there's a clear contrast between how people are using their mobile device and the disconnect between what marketers are doing (in mobile advertising, in-apps brand engagement and mobile marketing).

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To marketers, the prospect of reaching shoppers through their smartphones is tantalizing. But mobile doesn't always mean on the go. New data show that 68% of consumers' smartphone use happens at home. And users' most common activity is not shopping or socializing but engaging in what researchers at BBDO and AOL call "me time."

Seven primary motivations for people using their mobile device. 
The reasons consumers use smartphones can be broken down into the goals listed below, along with the average monthly minutes and percentage of interactions devoted to each.

Where Marketers Go Wrong.

Marketers often get it wrong when looking to either place ads in front of potential customers, or in understanding true user behavior.

Lesson number 1 for marketers - Making Bad Assumptions About App Use.
Apps can have more than one purpose. Facebook, for instance, can be used for socializing, self-expression, or discovery. And if you're using a shopping app to dream about what kind of couch or pizza you might order tomorrow, you're in "me time."

Lesson number 2 for marketers - Failing to Connect with Users During "Me Time".

Mobile ads that consumers see during "me time" generally do poorly on effectiveness (as measured by the percentage of viewers who click on the ad, search for the product, recall the product, or make a purchase). That's because the majority of messages aren't relevant to the context, are easy to ignore, or get in the way.

You can find out more about this impressive research from the Harvard Business Review website here. 

Why I love Samsung and why Apple has lost its cool

Firstly, there are a few things I need to get out of the way. I work for Samsung. I joined in 2012 and I’m the Regional Marketing Director, looking after digital marketing and go-to-market initiatives in Asia (I wrote about my awesome new job at Samsung here). This is my personal perspective as a marketing leader working inside Samsung and paying particular attention to some of Samsung’s key competitors – including players like Apple, HTC, Nokia, and RIM/Blackberry. It’s in no way an official company statement, just my personal opinion.

So with that said, I’m immensely proud to work at Samsung. The company has become the number 1 brand in Asia, and according to Interbrand’s global survey Samsung has rocketed to number 9 position. Samsung make amazing products that I use every day (my 55” SMART TV; my Galaxy SIII, etc.) and has revolutionary products on the horizon, such as the Ultra Definition TV and the Youm flexible displays that were showcased at CES 2013. The reason I love the brand is related to why I no longer like Apple. Sure, Apple still produce fantastic products. I’ve owned a Macbook Air, iPhone and iPad – as well as the ill-conceived Apple TV. Most of their products are great – so why is Apple losing its cool (as suggested by WSJ’s article: “Has Apple lost its cool to Samsung?”) and what’s changed with Samsung?

I see it as three things:

1.   Attitude – Apple simply aren’t listening and don’t seem to care. Samsung do.

Apple think they know what you want, even when they’re wrong. As Forbes identified in their article “Five Dangerous Lessons To Learn From Steve Jobs” - Throughout his career, Steve Jobs famously eschewed market research and relied on his intuition. In a 1985 interview with Playboy, he said: “We built [the Mac] for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research.” Twelve years later, he told Business Week: “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

The problem with this approach is that you’re right – until you’re wrong. We’re now seeing that with iPhone 5. It was a disappointment.  Not because it wasn’t a good phone, but because our needs have moved on. People are demanding larger screens, new features and open access to new Apps and their own data/App ecosystem. We no longer live in a world where are needs are dictated to us. With the rise of social media and the obliteration of barriers between consumers and brands, this type of attitude is not acceptable.

2.   Apple are anti-social and shun media (traditional, PR and social media). This is an area Samsung have embraced with success.

From a marketing standpoint, it’s even more pronounced. For many years Apple have simply refused to engage with the media and to engage customers. Apple are one of the few major corporates that are completely anti-social. They have no Facebook presence, do not engage via Twitter or LinkedIn and certainly have not opened communication via Weibo or other social networks in China or in regional communities in other markets across the world. 

Samsung on the other hand have invested heavily into engaging with customers via social media. Using both in-house people and our agency partners Leo Burnett, Cheil Worldwide and Starcom, Samsung have put in place Community Management and social customer engagement in 47 countries. 

It also helps that social networks, such as Facebook, are now generating some serious ROI for Samsung (in this case, for the launch of the Galaxy SIII).

3.   Winning hearts and minds through marketing – Samsung are now simply better marketers than others in the consumer electronics category.

As identified in the Wall Street Journal article “Has Apple Lost It’s Cool To Samsung?”  Samsung’s “The Next Big Thing” campaign has struck a chord with consumers.

The campaign swayed consumers including Will Hernandez, an Apple iPhone owner who bought a Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone about three months ago after seeing Samsung's ads."If you see this stuff on TV enough, it gets you thinking," said Mr. Hernandez, a 34-year-old resident of Somerville, Mass., who adds that he likes how his Galaxy has a larger screen than the iPhone. "Now, when someone gives me an iPhone to look at a picture, it looks so tiny."  The marketing onslaught is helping Samsung widen the gap as the market leader. Samsung is estimated to have held 28% of the global smartphone market last year, up from 20% a year earlier, according to IHS iSuppli. Apple's share, meanwhile, isn't rising as quickly, moving to 20.5% in 2012 from 19% a year earlier.

There’s some great brand building, emotionally engaging stories that Samsung are creating. LeBron James’ day with Samsung Note II was a viral video sensation, with over 40 million views to-date. In Malaysia, Samsung have been working with local music artist Yuna, a collaboration that lead to "Sparkle Project": http://video.sparkleproject.my/ 

This helped Samsung lead as one of the top 10 viral video brands in 2012 (even ahead of the great work Old Spice are doing). 

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I realise that technology, particularly with brands like Samsung and Apple, is a passion of many people. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the three points above so please add your comments below.

2012 Marketing Year in Review

As 2012 is fast drawing to a close, it’s time to reflect on the big changes this year has brought us. For a more comprehensive and professional review of the year you can check out the very entertaining YouTube Rewind 2012, Google Zeitgeist 2012 (top searches) or Facebook year in review. If you’d like to do your own personal Facebook review, you can add it to your timeline here. https://www.facebook.com/yearinreview

In terms of milestones, it was a year of Olympics, PSY’s Gangnam Style, Samsung Galaxy S3 and The Avengers making the leap from Marvel’s comic books to the blockbuster movie screen. For me personally, I had the huge milestones of getting married to the love of my life Rachel, and starting an awesome new job at Samsung.

From a marketing perspective, I felt there were some amazing highlights that are worth revisiting:

• Top viral videos, including KONY, Dumb Ways To Die and Bodyform’s social media comeback.
• Samsung taking the global mobile leadership position, and taking it to Apple (with a sense of humour).
• Samsung becomes the number 1 brand in Asia.
• Red Bull and Felix Baumgartner’s groundbreaking Stratos space supersonic freefall: http://www.redbullstratos.com
• Coca-Cola spreading some happiness. 
• Instagram giving entrepreneurs a billion dollars worth of hope.
• Facebook generating some serious ROI (for Samsung Galaxy S3). 
• There were also some fantastic campaigns like:
• Yuna's "Sparkle Project" in Malaysia: http://video.sparkleproject.my/ 
• 7/11's BYO Cup Day for Slurpee in Australia.
• Campaign Asia’s Agency Of The Year winners: Leo Burnett in Australia took our top Creative Agency, Visual Jazz Isobar as top Digital Agency http://www.aoyawards.com/anz/winners; DDB as Creative Agency, Isobar as Digital Agency of the year in Southeast Asia: http://www.aoyawards.com/sea/winners; BBDO/Proximity as Creative Agency, Trio Digital Integrated as Digital Agency in China: http://www.aoyawards.com/china/winners; and Cheil Worldwide taking top honours in Korea: http://www.aoyawards.com/japankorea/winners   
• Marketing Magazine’s Agency Of The Year winners: Possible Worldwide in Singapore, Leo Burnett/Arc in Malaysia and Ogilvy & Mather in Hong Kong: http://www.aotyawards.com

And of course, a few big fails too. Nokia faking product features, Belvedere Vodka seemingly promoting sexual assault and a few other dumb zingers. You can see more #fails here and here. 
 

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

7 steps to build a social media-enabled employee brand ambassador program

Note: This blog post first appeared on, and is currently available at Firebrand Talent's marketing blog.

Have you ever had a customer track you down via Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter to resolve a problem for them? What about a friend asking you for advice about a product that’s made by the brand you work for? If that’s happened to you, like it or not that makes you a brand ambassador.

 

Social media has rewritten the rules for engaging with customers. No longer can you be a faceless organisation that only relies on a small PR team to “spin”news, a marketing team to craft promotional messages, a customer service hotline to answer customer complaints or the field sales force to deal with everything else. Almost all of your employees can be tracked down and identified either via LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and Forums. So what does this mean for your customer engagement plans? There are two options:

•  Hope customers won’t ask questions via Facebook or Twitter, and that your current customer service/marketing/PR/sales force will cope with the diverse demands placed on them. Clearly, this isn’t realist or smart.
• Embrace social media, train up all employees and build a strong network of brand ambassadors.

So what’s a “brand ambassador”? A brand ambassador is a passionate advocate of your products and company. They are someone, in any part of the organisation (from frontline staff to the CEO) who is proud to work there and to recommend your products to customers. There’s one other requirement that’s important: they must not be afraid of using social media to engage customers.

Here’s the 7 step guide on how you build a robust social media-enabled brand ambassador program:

1. It all starts with a social media customer engagement policy. Here’s are 3 great examples from Intel, Coca-Cola and Dell.
2. Define who you want to approach as the first generation of brand ambassadors. Is it the marketing team? Customer service team? Sales force? Or perhaps employees from any part of the organisation that are social media savvy? Ask for volunteers first, and then draft the right people as needed.
3. Add customer/social engagement KPIs into each brand ambassador’s performance plan. Importantly, make sure this is also a KPI of the executive team. If the CEO has these KPIs in his/her plan, then it will be clear organisational priority.
4. Training. This is so important. The training program should cover the basics like media training (how to respond to external enquiries, what to say, what not to say, etc.), your company’s code of conduct, your policy on confidentiality and sharing information as well as understanding social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogs, Forums, etc.). More advanced modules should focus on tone of voice, how to correctly identify yourself as a company employee, the blurred line between personal and professional social media, and so on.
5. Provide tiers of engagement. Not all brand ambassadors are equal. Consider providing more intense training for employees that are already customer-facing, or who have high profile roles (the CEO, Marketing Director, Sales Director, head of product design, etc.).
6. Ensure you have strong links back to the rest of the organisation, such as HR (for job enquiries), Customer Care (for customer service issues) or Sales. For example, studies have shown that 47% of people want customer service through social media, so it’s important your brand ambassadors know how to respond to service-related issues.
7. Once you’ve got it right with the brand ambassadors, consider rolling it out for all employees. Dell is doing it and already has over 10,000 employees trained. Not only does this reduce the risk of things going wrong with employees using social media, it’s also 10,000 brand ambassadors who are actively engaging customers!

Finally, get help. This isn’t easy otherwise all companies would be doing it. There are specialists who understand this space and who you can outsource this to, such as Obviam (http://www.obviam.co) and Third Space (http://www.thirdspace.asia).

Another Social Media #Fail: Why Every Company Needs Social Media Training

Another day, another social media #fail.

This time it was in Singapore and the furore was ignited by a (now former) employee of NTUC, Singapore's largest member-based organised, Amy Cheong. She posted racial remarks on her personal Facebook page that managed to offend almost everyone. There's a screenshot of the comments below. Here are a couple of great links to Phatfreemiguel's Blog and Marketing Magazine for more background info.

  
One of the problems (outside of the offensive remarks) was that it was on her personal Facebook page. So does this mean that it's ok to vent, swear and make offensive comments on your own private Facebook or other social media page? The answer is no. There is no such thing as privacy in social media, and the idea that the page or platform is private is a lie.

Everything you do on social media is public, even if on a supposedly private page. 

Comments can be copied, pasted and spread easily over the Internet. And the worst thing for someone when it goes wrong is that it never, ever goes away. It will be there forever, easily searchable on Google or Bing.
Today every employee is using social media, whether it be Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin or posting comments to forums and blogs. The real problem is that few organizations have yet caught up with use of social media, whether employees are using it in the workplace or not. The fact is that it doesn't matter whether bad social media behavior is on personal or company time, there's an expectation of a minimum standard of professional behavior in a public forum. Every organization must have a social media policy, in the same way they have a use of IT equipment policy, an ethics policy or a code of conduct. It's absolutely essential. Even more importantly, after an organization implements a policy they have a responsibility to train all employees in what's expected of them, their rights and their responsibilities both at work and in personal time. Social media is here to stay. Ignoring it is not an option. 

The best thing any organization can do is quickly get up-to-speed on this, otherwise issues like the Amy Cheong incident in Singapore could happen to one of your employees or to your brand. The consequences of getting it wrong can be damaging and long lasting if you get it wrong.

Business development #fail on Twitter: How NOT to pitch to me.

I believe passionately in the power of professional networking. Specifically, reaching out either in-person (usually at networking events or professional seminars) or via wonderful tools like email, LinkedIn or Twitter to cement a solid business relationship. Almost every day I receive an approach from an advertising/marketing agency, media owner, technology provider (particularly around mobile apps right now) or people looking to work for or with me (job opportunities).

I can’t speak for every brand/client-side marketer but I assume that I’m not alone or particularly unique in receiving these requests. I strongly suspect that marketers’ at most big brands are facing the same issue. Why wouldn’t you want to approach a Marketing Director, Digital leader or key decision-maker at a great brand like adidas, Chanel, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Nestlé or (in my case) Samsung?

When done right it opens you, and the company you work for, to wonderful opportunities, better media and marketing and of course, great new partners. The problem is that very often, it is done so poorly or with such little consideration it often comes across as rude or ignorant. That’s why your calls or emails are not returned.

I recently wrote a guest blog post for Firebrand Talent, which goes into detail on how best to approach client-side marketers like me. I've written a commonsense set of 6 guidelines that I hope more people will take to heart. If followed, you're guaranteed to improve your sales success and build better relationships. The article, titled Agencies, media & digital companies: Your sales pitch sucks can be found here: http://blog.firebrandtalent.com/2012/08/agencies-media-digital-companies-your-sales-pitch-sucks/

So with this in mind, I recently had a very strange encounter on Twitter that's left be frustrated and bewildered. I was asked by a supposed expert in social media and digital reputation management in the Philippines Tony Ahn if he could pitch for Samsung work, and get an introduction to the local marketing team. I say supposed, because the Twitter exchange ended in him insulting me personally - isn't that something a digital reputation expert hoping to win new business should try to avoid?

Here's what happened: 

If you are not familiar with the terms MAYABANG or YABANG, they roughly translate into arrogant or conceited in English.

Now sure, I might have come across as harsh but I hope the criticism would have been taken in the spirit of improving the communication or finding common ground. After all, my time is limited and I could simply ignore the conversation right? That may be a fair call. But to then take it to a personal level and get to insults, well that's not cool at all. What I find so bewildering about this exchange is how this is coming from an expert in digital reputation management and social media, who is clearly interested in winning new business.

So what do you think? Was I too harsh and deserve the insult? Or is this a case of a senior PR/social media person forgetting where they are (Twitter) and not practicing what they preach? Please let me know in the comments section below.

Update 1: There's a little more fuel that's been thrown onto the fire. This really doesn't seem like the best way to manage a relationship online...

Social data helps CMOs drive key decisions: New research & infographic from Bazaarvoice.

New research from Bazaarvoice & The CMO club: Today's top brands put consumers at the center of the business. 

CMOs can lead the consumer-focused revolution by harnessing first-person data created by online consumer conversations. But smart CMOs don't keep this data to themselves. They elevate to Chief Consumer Advocate when they share these insights across the entire organization.

In "Chief customer advocate: How social data elevates CMOs" top CMOs share: 

- Social data impacts decisions for nearly all CMOs
- CMOs use data to drive smarter decisions beyond marketing 

- CMOs believe social reveals consumer sentiment and improves brand awareness

The full research report is available here on the Bazaarvoice website.