Thoughts about the future of advertising on social networks: How can it be integrated successfully and unintrusively?

I have always liked to view my facebook profile in spatial terms. Sort of like a living room cause that’s the one room in ones’ house where his guests spend most of their time. Ok so  it’s sort of like your living room with a door that is open to the street. That door is either half open for by passers that want to take a peek or fully open for your acquaintances. Now advertisers want to enter this space and hang next to the personal photos you have up your wall, a painting you love or the video you want your friends to see a big-ass advertising banner.

Now let’s think under what circumstances people my actually want to have this done to their living room. First of all, I personally don’t want any big-ass advertising banner in my living room because I can’t think of a single brand, person or message that has such that much significance in my life. Plus my girlfriend would kill me if I had something up the wall that dwarfed that photo of us in a trip to Venice, a photo that I didn’t want taken anyway. Some people however do feel this way about some things be it Obama prior to election, Madonna, a photo of their car or whatever other marketed item they feel plays such a big role in their life.

There should be some sort of boxed space on the screen that allows the profile owner to personally choose what sort of advertising they want on their main profile page. For example I like Madonna, give me a selection of 100 cool images of her and let me choose which one I want to be displayed in my profile (plz allow me to download and keep some afterwards). Now give me the option to display underneath that picture a personal message e.g. ‘Theo+Madonna=L.F.E’, and also the option to display when her next concert near my country of residence will be, and whether I will be attending or not. Similar thing with my new Ford Kuga. A picture of myself with the car that is hyperlinked to my album of pictures/ videos I have shot with my car. Etc. For the aforementioned reason it would also be important to let the user choose how big they want this thing to be.

I imagine that this might also be possible in terms of branded tagging by the user him\herself. For example I put up a picture of me holding my baby, I could tag the clothes it is wearing with the brand ‘e.g. Diesel kids’ which in turn could be hyperlinked to the page of the Diesel online catalogue where that product might be found or I could also state its price, comments about what I think about it, where I bought it from and why someone should visit that particular store. If I am out taking a stroll with it in a pram I could tag the pram.  Of course tagging is work and work might require payment. It is a big question how much such work should be paid but one thing is certain, that it must be paid according to how influential that person is. For example a highschool’s gang of cool kids is very influential as they act as role models for a lot of their schoolmates. The cool gang always has the coolest accessory, device, clothes first. Indeed they also make it the coolest.

It doesn’t always need to be paid however. I might love the brand, its products or parallel causes they try to advance (e.g. environmentalism) so much that I might actually want to show my sympathy by promoting them myself (and in turn helping the environment). How it is possible to love a marketed thing so much is another story however.

Perhaps it would also be possible to expand the information about oneself in Facebook with questions such as: who is your dentist, what car do you drive, favourite brand of clothes, favourite restaurant etc

This article is a response to the questioned posed by Lisa Duddington in the cScape customer engagement forum. View the discussion here.

So what do you think? Do practices such as the above stand a chance? Do you think the individual that is the profile owner must actually want the advertising to be placed in his profile in order for it to be truly unobstrusive and successful?

Encouraging customer engagement or preventing customer disengagement?

Most accounts of engagement suggest ways of encouraging or promoting a customer’s engagement with the brand/website. In a handful of cases however (e.g. Jim Novo and Erwin Ephron) one reads about preventing and reversing customer disengagement instead.

But is there a meaningful and valuable distinction between the two? Are the marketing techniques used to encourage our customers’ engagement with the brand/website different to those that are required in order to reverse their disengagement? Have most accounts of customer engagement overemphasized the former in the detriment of the later?

Is there a distinction?

It seems to me that the techniques involved in preventing disengagement must be different from those of encouraging engagement since the attitudes and behaviour of a customer that is disengaging are entirely different from those of someone who is already engaged. Disengagement, as Jim Novo warns, however is often masked by new customer acquisition.

Defining the disengaged

In order to be able to prevent disengagement it is necessary to be able to identify a customer who is disengaging from the brand/website.

We can identify a customer’s disengagement, when we witness a shift in his or her degree of engagement on the following scale:

Given that the process of disengagement can begin no matter what a customer’s degree of engagement, it is important to look at both:

1. Where a customer is in the Engagement lifecycle
2. What the pattern of a customer’s movement along the continuum of Engagement is. Were they less engaged in the past couple of months?

Preventing disengagement therefore refers to the process of identifying a customer’s disengagement with the brand and attempting to reverse it.

Before we look at the types of disengaged customers it is important to distinguish them from former customers (i.e. non-customers). To do this one needs to define defection, and not count dead customers as ‘retained, but disengaged customers’. As Jim suggests although there is no reason you can’t use “24 month active” or “36 month active” or “5 year active”, it is imperative to define what retention is for your particular business and stick with it.

There are two kinds of disengaged customers.

1. Customers whose engagement is above average but on a downward (right-ward) spiral. What Jim Novo refers to as High current value, Low potential value customers.
2. Customers whose engagement has fallen below average and is now either stable or continues to decrease. (Jim’s low current – low potential value customers)

Both of these customers, that is, irrespective of their current value, are apathetic towards the brand. They continue to provide their custom due to lack of competitors, convenience of location, low prices but are nevertheless ready to defect.

The value of paying attention to disengagement

The customer insights that are gained by means of identifying disengagement can be used in the following ways:

• Segmenting marketing communications. Although two customers may have the same degree of engagement, their degree of engagement may be growing or decreasing. Your communications should therefore not be identical to both.

• Improving customer retention. By means of tracking the disengagement process and preventing or reversing it.

• Marketing budget allocation. Should you spend money at the 2^nd kind of disengaged customers? At what point should you stop? Read further on how the concept of disengagement can help in evaluating…

• campaigns
• search phrase
• changes in your website

Digital customer engagement in a troubled economy

The threat of economic instability and even recession, the like of which has not been experienced for many years, poses some very serious questions. Do we carry on as before with unchanged business practices? Do we tighten our belts? Do we try to reach out to new markets and customers, recognising that the best form of defence is attack? The reality of course is that we are likely to want to do a bit of each-indeed, in many cases, we will have to. But how do we decide which, when and how?

It is our contention that by embracing customer engagement and adopting the use of digital media as the spine of your customer interactions, no matter what market you are in, you stand a far better chance of not just emerging from a downturn unscathed, but of emerging as a winner.

If you are interested in this topic take a look at a report (can you call it a report if its 90 pages long?) we have published which you can download for free (can you call it free if registration is needed?) here.

Take a look at a taster:

To find out more about the report click here

To find out more about the authors

Richard Sedley

Martyn Perks

Useful resources on customer engagement

I’ve aggregated what I think are the most valuable links\resources on Customer Engagement, and categorised them as follows:

Definitions of customer engagement

An overview of the various definitions of customer engagement segmented by type of author:

• Companies
  Critical commentary on these definitions is provided wherever possible
  • Gallup
  • Forrester
  • WebTrends
  • Future Now
  • Comscore
  • Nielsen \\ NetRatings
  • Compete
• Individuals – leading thinkers
  • Jim Novo
  • Eric Peterson
  • Ron Shevlin
  • Steve Jackson
  • Jeremiah Owyang

Research on customer engagement

Quantitative research on customer engagement – focus on what their respondents have to say about their experiences of the benefits CE offers, the barriers to implementation, the behavioural characteristics of engaged customers and the techniques they use to engage their target customers and to measure their engagement.

• cScape
• Economist Intelligence Unit

Scepticism about customer engagement

An overview of debates on the value, limits and possible pitfalls of customer engagement segmented by argument:

• On the value of customer engagement
• On customer engagement as a metric

Measuring Online Engagement: What Role Does Web Analytics Play?

If you have the time take a look at a post I ve written on measuring customer engagement, published in Avinash Kaushik’s ‘Occam’s Razor’ blog:

 http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2008/01/measuring-online-engagement-what-role-does-web-analytics-play.html