For consumer brands this is an easy fit. Consumers are now accustomed to proactively seeking out what they need via online channels, rather than being ‘sold to’. The trick is to provide the destinations and content for them to find. And engage with.

B2B businesses too can utilise the social space with business relevant information which can have the added benefit of improved customer knowledge and therefore improved service delivery.

As an integrated agency we don’t believe in ‘bolt-on’ social media, and definitely not as the only channel. By beginning with the audience in mind we can build the right programme with the most effective message and media selection.

Now all the kerfuffle has died down, social media marketing is simply another (new, great, exciting yes) route to customers and potential customers. In the same way as all channels, it needs a strategy, planning, creativity and intelligence to use it most effectively.

And persistence. Once you push the button you need to sustain the conversation by refreshing the content regularly and ‘rewarding’ engagement.

After all, just as you wouldn’t ignore a customer’s phone call, so you shouldn’t ignore their social media interaction with you.

Click here to read our beginner’s guide to social media.

Then

Once there were spoken stories. Then there were books and magazines. 
Then recordings and radio. Then cinema and TV.

Now there’s all of the above plus the internet. But in communication terms the internet is the biggest thing that’s ever happened. Ever, ever, ever. Ever.

Now

With the explosion of online media and accessibility your website needs to be optimised to work for the new world of proactive customers. It needs to be so much more than just an online presence:  it needs to perform as an inbound lead generation tool.

First it needs to be found. Once found it needs to interest and engage. Lastly it needs to help convert interest into a sale.

To get to this point, there are several key issues that you need to consider.

Click here to read and download our InTouch Why?guide, make your web 
work.

Surely as a BBC pundit this is verging on the Jonathon Ross, Ron Atkinson debacles? When will high profile figures learn how important communication is?

We say to our clients all the time that the key to effective communication is to understand that the message sent is not as important as the message received. We ensure we ask: what do the audience want to hear, what have they heard, and is it having the effect we need it to?

So let’s just think for a minute about message sent and message received. My son likes to call me baldy. I have no issue with that, in fact, I quite like being greeted when I get home with ‘OK baldy?’ I find it endearing. However, if a total stranger, who was bald, came to the house and my son answered the door ‘Hello baldy, what can I do for you?’ I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they were offended.

How, therefore, can the defence be: I used a word which at home is not an insult? I would argue that when a player says to an opponent ‘good pass’, they mean it ironically and in an offensive way to try and put them off.

How then does this terribly fragile defence stand up? In any communication, if the recipient’s interpretation is that it was an insult then it was. The person sending the message needs to understand this and modify their communication.

If we want to stamp out racism or any ‘ism’ then we need to be consistent and set the right example. Mr Lawrenson, you were being a Liverpool player this morning and getting drawn into the field of play. You really should know better and the BBC needs to educate its pundits more effectively to stamp this kind of misguided input out.

At InTouch marketing we talk about ‘audience, message, media’, and lastly ‘measure’. Most businesses follow the route down the first three avenues but for some reason never make it back home via the ‘measure’ road.

Hopefully the creative was good and the message clear but this does not always guarantee instant success.

Closing this loop is important. It gives valuable insight into how successful a campaign was but also provides other extremely helpful pointers for honing and improving your communication.

Measuring and analysing results helps to answer some key questions such as:

What were response rates?

Was the message sent the one received?

How good was the data?

Did the response mechanism work as well as expected?

And crucially, what changes can be made to improve the communication?

Of course experience helps to preempt the pitfalls to good communication. Audience, message, media act as filters to ensure that the ingredients which go into the communication cake are correct to begin with. But of course modern communication is confusingly multi channeled and multi layered. And audiences more savvy. Gone are the days of light the blue touch paper then sit back and wait. If they ever existed. Audiences need courting. Confidence needs building. Dialogue needs to be nurtured.

Big brands can operate simultaneously across global channels to diverse audiences. Smaller brands don’t have the same opportunities to blitz the Market. Budgets have to stretch further so measurement is even more important to improve the efficiency of the communication and reduce waste.

So unless you have a bloomin’ big rocket one communication will not suffice. Measuring, honing and repeating the message is vital to get the most bangs from your marketing fireworks.

We have developed a programme which helps businesses to develop more successful campaigns. We call it Active Customer Development and it is designed to optimise sales and marketing knowledge about audiences to build targeted communications that find and help retain customers.

Google + has added some impressive new features such as video hangouts which allow up to ten people to chat via Android smartphone and for users to share the content of their computer screens with whoever they are talking to. It has also added ‘social search’ which allows members to find results from socially shared information, in addition to the wider web. This will be of great interest to businesses in terms of search engine optimisation, as a recommendation (+1) or comment from a user’s friend could push a business higher in the search results.

Facebook has responded to Google’s challenge by introducing a number of new features, including a new friend system which makes it easier to add people to categories, similar to Google Circles. Facebook also announced that it’s working on a feature which will help users link their profile directly to their Twitter account.

When Google’s senior vice president, Vic Gundotra, was asked what he thought people would move away from Facebook or use Google+ in addition, he said: “We suspect people use many different tools to share.”

Has Google done enough to turn people off Facebook or is it in danger of overwhelming us?

Before the advent of the computer ideas were sketched out with paper and pen, visuals skilfully hand rendered and coloured in with markers, and copy marked up with detailed instructions and sent out for typesetting which would sometimes take days to return. It was very labour intensive.

The bad old days? Not when it comes to imagery, no. Back then, image was king. At one time we had a constant flow of photographers and agents through our offices, presenting beautiful original work to get our creative brains fuelled with all the fantastic possibilities. How better to differentiate a brand than a wonderfully conceived original image to go with a face melting headline?

When I worked on the Guinness annual report in the 90s the photography budget alone was circa £100K. We designed sumptuous sets, hired fabulous models, seduced the top photographers to champion the products. The results were nothing short of art. Commercial art. 

Today, the budgets for imagery are non-existent. After all, images are free aren’t they?

Nowadays, it seems, the image is an afterthought. The proliferation of ‘free’ royalty free libraries and the abundance of cheap imagery has driven down the desire for high standards in imagery, and devalued the term photographer. In the past, photo libraries were the absolute last resort. A poor compromise. Today they are seemingly the first, and often, the only choice.

The good ones do hold a range of fantastic images, but at a price often too high for a client’s budget. Creatives are sent back to the cheaper libraries to hunt down a ‘similar image’ at a fraction of the cost. This can take hours and hours, time which is often not accounted for, so the cost of finding an alternative image is absorbed by the agency.

A huge bear pit to this approach is exclusivity. How do you know your chosen royalty free image of a pretty girl used to promote chocolate isn’t being used by someone else to raise awareness of chlamydia?

There is another problem: the digital camera, or worse, the camera phone. Everyone has one, no one can use it. But because it’s free, image quality isn’t important. All of a sudden, it’s ok to present yourself in fuzzy, overexposed, flash burnt, harsh-shadowed, red-eyed glory! Or, a favourite of some, in a dinner suit.

It seems that only the top brands with the biggest budgets are still investing in creating unique high quality imagery to sell their products. It is a real pity that the art of originality seems to be a dying one. After all, a picture is worth…

In January, Facebook saw its first drop in UK users since July 2006, as numbers fell 5% from 8.9 million in December to 8.5 million. Now, new data indicates a second slump, leading some to suggest that finally people are ‘tiring of the ubiquitous social media site’.

Shockingly, Facebook says Brits and North Americans are their main worry as figures show that over 100,000 British users left the social networking site during May. Commentators think this is because Britons – and six million in America, who also closed their accounts in May- are suffering from ‘Facebook fatigue’. Not only has Facebook seen a slump in users in the UK and US, there has also been a drop of about 1.5 million in Canada, and numbers also decreased in Russia and Norway.

Nic Howell, deputy editor of industry magazine New Media Age, said the site was no longer as popular as it once was with their main audience of young people.

“Social networking is as much about who isn’t on the site as who is – when Tory MPs and major corporations start profiles on Facebook, its brand is devalued, driving its core user base into the arms of newer and more credible alternatives,” he said.

Nielsen Online’s figures showed that there are 712% more Facebook users than there was a year ago. Alex Burmaster, European internet analyst at Nielsen Online, said that it was inevitable that the site’s early growth rates could not be sustained and user numbers were likely to plateau.

“Just as one swallow doesn’t make a summer, so one month of falling audiences doesn’t spell the decline of Facebook or social networking. However, real growth potential lies in the niche networks – those based on a particular lifestyle or interest, such as travel, music, wealth or business,” he said.

It was also shown that less popular social networking sites such as Windows Live Space, BBC Communities and Friends Reunited saw a rise in users in January 2011, whereas numbers of MySpace users had fallen by 5% and Bebo, 2%.

 In its defence, Facebook made a statement to VentureBeat: “From time to time, we see stories about Facebook losing users in some regions.  Some of these reports use data extracted from our advertising tool, which provides broad estimates on the reach of Facebook ads and isn’t designed to be a source for tracking the overall growth of Facebook.”

What do you think the future holds for Facebook?

The results showed a shift towards electronic media such as email, social media and web. It also indicated that most other channels were being utilised at about the same level or even slightly more.

Although not surprised about the increase in use of electronic channels, the continued use of other channels at the same level does beg the question, just where is all the budget coming from?

If the answers are reliable then budgets must have been increased to pay for the additional activity, in social media for example, unless businesses are trying to keep costs down by generating activity in house, of course.

It would be interesting to know. Setting up a Twitter or Facebook page is relatively easy, but understanding how to use it to generate sales leads and eventually money paying customers isn’t always so obvious.

Similarly, sending emails from company computers is one way to get messages out there. But not so easy to monitor open rates, track responses or follow up leads when your system isn’t built to do this. Not to mention creativity.

On the other hand, if the results aren’t entirely accurate, but the trend towards greater use of electronic media is true, then is it at the sacrifice of more traditional channels?

Being media neutral, our position has always been to try and select the channels that best reach a client’s target audience, so we have no prejudice in terms of channel preference. Honest.

So, clients, customers, suppliers, friends, Romans, countrymen. Fess up. What’s going on out there? Is this the dawn of the do it yourself marketing comms era? Or can we still help?

Click here to view the results of our survey.

But the benefits of running a good scheme can reach far beyond the cost, and it can become a vital communication tool to help raise awareness of your business’s goals.

People create the profit for any business (not just the sales force, of course). However the barriers to continual improvement and people reaching their full potential are many and varied: apathy, cynicism, lack of targeting, lack of communication and not feeling appreciated are all top of the list.

So, the answer is that an incentive scheme helps to break down the barriers to real communication within an organisation and changes behaviours to get teams thinking about continual improvement.

The key benefits are twofold: financial improvement of the business and boosting team morale.

An effective scheme could help:

• Boost productivity
• Create better teams
• Improve retention of existing personnel
• Persuade new recruits to join
• Build your brand internally
• Teams feel more valued
• Reinforce valuable training
• Extend product knowledge

Encouraging freedom to think and act proactively will ultimately bring financial rewards to your business, and incentivising behaviour is a currency which people appreciate and understand.

Here are some things to think about when creating your next email campaign.

Target. As with all marketing, targeting your audience is key. Most recipients are only going to opt in to email if it is relevant to them at that moment, especially in a B2B environment. So ensure that you have a clear understanding of your audience’s appetite for the information you are feeding them.

Test. Testing different reactions to the same email, including different subject lines, will help you decide what designs and messages work best. You can also test time of day and day of the week. The more testing, the more scientific you can be in your approach.

Measure. By tracing and measuring response to your emails you can build a picture of what is most effective, learn who has opened it, when, and even if they passed it on to a colleague or friend.

Flexibility. Try and mix up the messages in your communication. The flexible nature of email marketing means that you can quickly build different templates to add variety to the designs to keep them looking fresh. Don’t just think newsletter.

Link heaven. With the boom in social media marketing and the rise of interactive websites, email is a powerful way to seduce your audience into your brand’s world.

Response. The most effective marketing involves building a dialogue with the audience, not a monolague. Encourage response and participation through questionnaires, competitions, registration forms and links to blogs, even forward to a friend.

Legal and sensible. Don’t forget that there are many rules regarding the legality of marketing through emails. It is important that you take heed if there as they are there to protect genuine email marketeers and also protect your brand from copy cat style attacks. It is also sensible to create a plain text version as well.

Entertain! We live in a world of consumer and marketing savvy people. We are surrounded by advertising noise and inundated with images and offers. Getting the creative right is the same challenge as in all forms of marketing. You only have seconds to make an impression, so make it simple, engaging and entertaining. Use of video or animation is a compelling way to engage with your audience and keep them coming back for more.