Being wrong is ok, failures and false starts are a precondition of success.
Some of the most successful people and companies I know are so, because they allow themselves to fail. Edison made over 200 light bulbs before he made the one that worked but he learned something from every mistake before reaching the end result.
It is the wrong turns in work and life that define us, risks are a measure of who you are. Those of us that take risks will end up leading more fruitful lives. Knowledge is built upon things that happen but if you stop taking risks and only keep the same knowledge it will quickly become unoriginal, and lets face it, who wants that label.
So, go on, get it wrong! It’s the right thing to do.
‘Fail. Fail again. Fail better.’ Samuel Beckett
I want the logo bigger and in the middle!
There’s too much white space, let’s fill it with pictures!
I want to add more information in!
Can we have some flashy, moving stuff?
Been here before? I have. It’s easy to get pent-up when you’re dealing with a client who either thinks they know what’s best or won’t budge on something you believe to be a risk to the project but, the key is to remain calm, objective.
Define the requirement, assess the associated risk and implications then recommend a strategy that ticks as many boxes as possible thus keeping the client happy and not putting the expertise of the project in jeopardy:
A colleague sent an interesting article around recently about ‘Funny and Frustrating client types’, it’s quite an interesting read (it’s here if you want to look at the full article).
It got me thinking about some of the clients I’ve worked with over the years and in every meeting it’s true, there’s always one. So I thought it only fair that I flick back through my notes and publish my own top ten ‘questions or comments’ that I’ve noted over the last few months… well, it would be rude not to:
1. So if digital radio catches on will the meaning of clockwise disappear? (this one actually got me thinking but I still think it’s a corker)
2. Google’s changed recently, it’s stopped giving me UK options as a separate! (turned out on looking at the results page he was in .co.uk)
3. We have a lot of USP’s that I think set us apart.
4. I love the idea of going online but it’s too expensive so we’re just going to do TV again.
5. The brief: I want to advertise like Apple. The budget: £8k. The response to the proposal: It’s too creative, can we tone it down please. aaaaargh! (thus proving the argument in the article above that this is a common aspiration for clients)
6. Our target market is everybody, obviously, everybody uses hairspray.
7. Don’t you guys just have a ‘create website’ button or something?
8. What’s that thing you do with Google, the secret word things? (That would be Pay Per Click Mr Client)
9. Anyone that surfs on the internet is just looking at porn so everyone that flicks to our website isn’t going to be concentrating.
10. I want to raise our brand profile but I don’t want to be on the internet because people will find out about us.
aah bless…
Whether it’s based entirely on a hard financial measure or softer metrics such as brand awareness or share of voice it’s key that you do have some measure in place to ascertain whether your marketing has been successful , or not.
You don’t necessarily have to go the hold hog and develop a complete ROI model, in some cases if this is the first time you’ve tried to allocate metrics against your activity that might prove a step too far ahead at the moment. However whether you’re looking to track an increase in traffic to your website , an increase in online sales or measure ‘buzz’ online, knowing how your activity performs is key to being able to accurately allocate future spend against media attribution.
An increasing trend with most of the companies I work with sees a larger split of marketing budgets moving towards online but that is not to say that traditional advertising has had its day and the whole future relies on the internet. This trend merely supports the consumer’s way of accessing and absorbing information in today’s world.
It’s true to say that it’s easier to track, optimise and report online activity but there are also accurate assumptions you can make between press circulations / reach and DM mail outs for example.
The bottom line is that reporting on effectiveness shouldn’t be an end consideration to your activity; it should be considered and planned in from the start. By identifying your key metrics for success at the beginning you can clearly and accurately report back on whether or not you deem your marketing activity successful or not.
So ask yourself, what are you trying to achieve and what in your eyes would you deem to be a success? What do you want the results to be?
That’s your starting point, remember it’s an ongoing process and by measuring the effectiveness of your marketing you can continue to optimise your spend. What is right now may not be right 12, or even 6 months down the line.
Can I PLS get a translation – I need a crash course in text slang, I’m feeling a bit left behind and I can’t be the only one.
Is this the way the future is headed now, the fact that we’re all connected in real-time and can share views and information within seconds isn’t enough, we have to supplement a perfectly good language for text slang and acronyms which take me hours to decipher – honestly we could have done with today’s teens when we were trying to talk in code during the war.
It’s 2EZ when there’s 2MI swinging round and 4COL where do U start? Forget LOL I’ll be LBAY or maybe FOTFLOL, I mean whatever LIC. Everything just gets LIT and MEGO when NE1 sends me a MSG I don’t get, it’s like totally OMH and makes me wanna SMEO, I guess it’s just NFM.
If this makes as much sense to you as it does to me, take my advice and JGI.
With browser support constantly growing there’s been a lot of talk around how to make the web a more user-friendly place to live and work.
Cloudkick have developed an interesting tool for the IT guru’s working at the heart of the technical platforms that keep a multitude of web applications up and running for us all.
They’ve launched Cloudkick Viz; a simple tool that makes it simpler and easier to manage server infrastructure.
Now for the techy bit: Cloudkick Viz turns your browser into an interactive Network Operations Centre (NOC) which automatically pulls in the data from the servers you’ve connected to Cloudkick. Built with HTML5, canvas (an element of HTML5 that allows dynamic rendering of shapes and images), and JavaScript this is the first cloud monitoring system in the world that runs in real-time in tune with your servers.
To make it even easier to use it’s all displayed in a nice 3D graph that rotates around a central axis: check out the live demo here
The ongoing 3D debate is growing as more ways of enjoying it come to the market, and just as we’re getting our heads around the viewing side of it, ways of recording it are going main-stream.
The latest development is 3D recording on your phone! ‘What?’ I hear you say, it’s true, already the first to launch a 3D TV Sharp have jumped even further ahead of everyone else and are planning to launch the world’s first 3D camera module for mobiles and hand-held cameras by the end of 2010.
The camera shoots 3D footage at 720p resolution (it handles both stills and video), we’ve yet to see what level of production quality we can expect but demo versions are set to hit us by the summer so watch this space.
Sharp is also in charge of developing the 3D screens for the upcoming Nintendo 3DS and plans to produce a whole range of 3D devices before the end of the year.
When I first started my foray into the online world over 10 years ago, when I first started designing websites 7 years ago, even when I switched to the dark side and started to manage accounts 5 years ago I was fully prepared to battle proudly against all the negativity that surrounded online marketing. If I had £1 for every time I heard someone utter the words ‘It’ll never catch on’, I’d have set up my own business and called it ‘I told you it would’, 3 years ago.
Honestly though, I was amazed when a client (a new one just to clarify) uttered those words just the other day, I really thought that even the most remote Neanderthals had realised that ‘t’interweb’ is here to stay. It would appear not however, so here’s some statistics for you, hot off the press from the latest Econsultancy Internet Statistics Compendium:
I think that proves my point.
And if you are reading this and you’re still a sceptic, can I politely point out that you’re online at the moment…
<rant over>
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