“Si and Gareth have completely redesigned the Outdoor Guernsey website with a great understanding of my personal and business needs. Their care and attention to detail is hugely impressive and their customer service is awesome. The CMS was designed around my needs and to all my requests and preferences but the guys still make sure that efficiency, usability and effectiveness are paramount and I now accept their advice (almost) without question. Complementary skills, great value and personability round off a superb package. We are now working on an exciting social networking package for my business, with the most important thing for me the ‘WE’.” – Ant Ford Parker, Outdoor Guernsey.

We are really excited to be promoting such a well regarded local business. Outdoor Guernsey have a great reputation locally and are awesome to work with, we want to help complement their marketing campaign with a social media strategy that will allow them to solidify their market position, while pushing themselves into new markets. The soon to be released Outdoor Guernsey blog will act as a central hub of the campaign, providing Outdoor Guernsey with an infrastructure that allows them to push new content to social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter with relative ease, while ensuring this benefit is felt by the website itself.

A Google Analytics package has been put in place to allow Purple Coffee and Outdoor Guernsey to monitor the effectiveness of the social media campaign and provide a measurement of return on investment. Information is key to making informed marketing decisions; using Google Analytics really provides Guernsey businesses with a way to accurately build a picture of their client’s movements to, within and from their website. Purple Coffee continue to work closely with Ant Ford Parker to ensure that the social media marketing campaign evolves smoothly and that Ant builds the skills necessary to confidently manage his Facebook pages and blog.

“I think the whole social media explosion of the last few years is extremely important to us in a number of ways. Getting information out (marketing) and receiving feedback has always been a difficult or expensive task, but necessary for a business to grow and evolve. With social networking we can to interact like never before with our customers and reach potential customers through our interactions. It enables our business ethics, direction or beliefs (branding) to become more noticeable as we interact with complementary businesses or organisations. It has enabled us to solve specific problems, such as sharing photos of customers on activities. Previously a lot of time was spent emailing clients with the files. Now we simply share on Facebook or Flickr.

Building relationships with customers and the business community has now become something you can manage from your laptop, information sharing and feedback receiving is much easier and more visible, this also means that giving quality service and maintaining a high standard is extremely important, as word soon gets around.  EBay was successful because the feedback system allowed users to be confident that they could trust the seller, the same applies in the social media network.

For Outdoor Guernsey it has been important to develop and learn about this new way of marketing in partnership with a team that not only has high technical skills, but a deep understanding of how social interaction works and its relevance to our business. It is important for us to be continually involved in social interaction so we can innovate and evolve. Purple Coffee has delivered on all counts and the promise is for more innovation and change in the future.” – Ant Ford Parker, Outdoor Guernsey.

Purple Coffee and Outdoor Guernsey have also worked with Kate Heywood from thebestofguernsey. The Best of Guernsey promote both Outdoor Guernsey and Purple Coffee through their website made up entirely of local Guernsey businesses which have been recommended by local people and have great reputations on the island. Kate really understands the value of online marketing and through The Best of Guernsey has established a variety of marketing tools to promote the member businesses including testimonials, member offers, e-newsletters, blogging, social media promotion and more recently the introduction of a very innovative product to raise brand awareness – viral gaming. Kate provides both Purple Coffee and Outdoor Guernsey with fantastic marketing support to further complement and enhance their marketing strategies.

The use of social media platforms such as Facebook provides a central way to not only advertise to, but interact with new audiences. It is this interaction that is of real value. Outdoor Guernsey are able to transparently offer their services to their audience in an interactive setting that allows their audience to provide Ant with the information he needs to refine his services into exactly what his customers want.

To find out more about Purple Coffees social media marketing services why not check out our services page or give us a shout!

Existing concepts; Star Trek-nology

Science fiction has long been the testing ground of technological concepts; it provides an area for society to express its wants, perceived needs and consider the new possibilities of technology in general. It is no surprise then to find many examples of technology in the science fiction setting that strike an uncanny resemblance to the technologies we use today. The following quote demonstrates the link between the iconic Star Trek series and that of Apple’s gradual evolution of touch screen devices.

“Not long after their debut in TNG, PADDs became a real-life technology with the introduction of the Apple Newton; Palm Pilots being a similar device common in the world of the present. Recently, devices with touch-sensitive displays and user input systems which reconfigure themselves depending on the task at hand, such as the iPod Touch, iPhone, and most recently, the iPad have been developed which bear an even stronger resemblance to PADDs and the LCARS system.” - (Memory Alpha, 2010)

Apple are often extremely intuitive in the marketing of their products, well they didn’t miss the trick with the iPad either. The iPad advertising campaign featured many examples of the iPad displaying Star Trek related imagery and content, couple this together with the striking resemblance in name and visual form and one can confidently assume there is a little more than co-incidence involved.

The name “iPad” itself evokes the PADD (Personal Access Display Device) which is the term used for the gadget that was first introduced in the original series in 1966 and was coined in 1987 on Star Trek: The Next Generation, the show’s first TV revival…At the end of the day, and even after all of Apple’s hard work, we have Gene Roddenberry and his visionary designers from Star Trek to thank for the inspiration for this technological marvel — the PADD. - (ZDNet, 2010)

The series of adverts (2006-2009) were also famed for their visual consistency and presentation; they were shot on a white background and featured the same two men, John Hodgman as “PC” and Justin Long as “Mac”. This visual consistency allowed people not only to quickly recognise the adverts and relate to their associated connotations, but allowed the audience to build a rapport with, or warm to the characters over time. The series of adverts were so successful that AdWeek named the series “campaign of the decade” in its best of the 2000s roundup. Here’s what they had to say;

“Apple always diverged from the “speeds and feeds” ads associated with the computer category, but the brand really defined itself with the 2006 launch of TBWA\Media Arts Lab’s “Get a Mac” campaign. That series of 60-plus ads brought some humanity into the equation by turning the machines into live-action cartoons. In so doing, the comic spots offer transparent understanding of the aspirations of its audience and how people identify—and connect emotionally—with technology. The genius is in the casting. The Mac guy, Justin Long, is a younger version of Steve Jobs who is casual and comfortable in his skin. PC, personified by John Hodgman, as a rounder, paler Bill Gates, is a well-meaning geek with all kinds of operating problems. For Apple, the campaign managed the neat trick of making the brand look laid back and cool while it mercilessly skewered its rival.” – (Best of the 2000’s, 2010)

The viral nature of the adverts and their positioning within new media channels such as YouTube, also meant that they spread rapidly and meant by the time the competition could respond, the damage had been done. While the adverts themselves were undoubtedly very intuitive and creative, they also further served to reinforce a wider audience perception of Apple as market leaders and innovators.

“In the past few years, clever commercials have become content in and of themselves, thanks in no small part to the rise of YouTube and embeddable multimedia.” – (Mashable, 2010)

In summary the “Get a Mac” campaign, of which the adverts were a central component, were a typically intuitive marketing move by Apple, since the centrality of their brand and their somewhat “closed” product range allows them to carefully consider, orchestrate and present their brand values to their potential audience with precision. The adverts depict “PC” as being the competition, existing within a comparable closed infrastructure, when in fact a “PC” is nothing more than a combination of various differing components, both hardware and software, sourced from an often innumerable set of suppliers; the most notable of which include Microsoft that Apple’s advertising often seeks to belittle. This move by Apple left “PC”, as the audience now thought of it, in a very exposed position. The lack of centrality associated with the production of personal computers and associated software, left companies likes Microsoft with the need to either establish an equivalent corporate infrastructure, or to take the lead and defend both themselves and the newly Apple constructed notion of “PC” that would be difficult to reverse.

While Apple has achieved considerable success, they have never really succeeded in conquering a majority market. They have captured and retained a small market that is in part preserved by a closed universe of compatibility and above all by the user friendly presentation of technical devices; permitting the technically illiterate to enjoy the prestige and convenience of being in the “fore front of technology.” This of course may be a conscious decision based on the premise that positioned as perceived market leader, Apple have less competition than exists in the “PC” market.

Content is King

Communicating with audiences is one thing, but without strong content to support business message, products or services, communication could not only be ineffective but ultimately damaging to business reputation and market credibility. Before considering the distribution of content it should be carefully vetted and optimised. Take blogging as an example, optimisation of copywriting in the form of keyword inclusion can increase the visibility of products and services to consumers. To this avail creating content for the web is an art in itself and a constant search engine optimisation (SEO) battle. As well as the obvious SEO advantages of well written content, also consider what it exemplifies to audiences. Content for contents sake is never a good thing, it will bore and frustrate your audience and in the long run compromise business image. Content should provide a clear message about a product or service, or perhaps be used to lay the foundations for interaction between audiences.

Content Distribution

So the content is ready to go! Now you need to deliver it to your audience. The list of social networking platforms for web based content distribution is endless. So how can businesses deduce which social platforms are most valuable to them? Considering the product or service to be communicated is the first step; next is to consider which platforms your consumers currently occupy, or are most likely to make use of if they don’t currently. Incentivising the use of such platforms can be a good way to encourage audiences to make use of platforms such as Facebook if they don’t currently. If users are given little reason to populate such social networks, they are unlikely to use them if they don’t currently. However, as the use of social information systems becomes increasingly common place, it is likely that audiences may already reside on such systems, Facebook and Twitter’s increasing user numbers are supportive in this context. The challenge then for business is learning how to tap into these existing user bases. Content distribution can be very time consuming to businesses if they plan to target numerous social platforms, maximising the ease of which distribution takes place is thus key to online marketing success. Thankfully the use of API’s on popular social platforms is enhancing the interoperability of such systems. Automation of content distribution is now very realisable. If the automation of distribution is to be utilised however, content quality becomes even more consequential and so too does the need to clearly map and identify where content is coming from and where it is going to. While the viral nature of social media can be effective in easing distribution workload for businesses, this scenario can create new problems; tracking where your information ends up and maintaining full control over information becomes increasingly difficult. Businesses must be aware of the threats this poses to their long lasting corporate image. Content is very difficult to erase online and is inherently mutable. In short, what businesses put out, may not be what comes back in.

Audience Interaction

Marketing principles have always evolved around communicating clear messages to audiences; social media adds something to this scenario by allowing audiences to communicate their message back to businesses and brands. Grasping the value of interaction is essential; while audiences have always been able to communicate back to businesses in a traditional sense; social media makes interaction far more accessible to audiences. So why should businesses communicate with their audiences? There are numerous reasons why, some more obvious than others. Social consumer relations management (CRM) can provide businesses with an approachable appearance. This not only encourages interaction, which can be monitored, but also engenders trust and confidence in brands. Social networking platforms also facilitate voyeuristic behaviour, allowing businesses to sit back and monitor the conversations about their products or services. This “listening” can also reveal gaps in the market and often drives further product innovation. Take Google as an example; Google often release close to finished products, but continue to pay close attention to users wants and needs before implementing further changes.

Analytics and Return on Investment (ROI)

So good content is in place, a cohesive distributions network has laid the framework for contextualised conversation with audiences, so what next? Conversations are great, but in a physical marketing context, it can be very difficult to have more than one conversation at any one time. Social media facilitates numerous conversations and forms of interaction across multiple networks, while casting aside the restrictions of space and time. This is great I hear you say! However it can be very easy to lose yourself in all that noise. For business’s to further quantify the value of their interaction, they need data to facilitate further analysis of their marketing tactics, thus benefiting from this additional knowledge. Market knowledge allows businesses to make informed decisions about what to talk about next and where to talk about it. Marketing has always relied on tactical content placement, but with online media analysing the success of content placement becomes far more precise.

Good Content + Distribution Networks + Audience Interaction + Analysis = Success?

So do any of you out there have any experience here? Have such principles been a great success or a complete failure for your business? Or do you find yourself somewhere in between? What tools did you use? Which Networks did you target? What problems did you have? We’d love to hear you experiences whether you’re a Guernsey business or from further afield. So please comment.