Sometimes living in Switzerland can be a little puzzling for foreigners like me. Familiar things are done just that little bit differently. This example gave me a real surprise, for example - Migros, Switzerland's biggest supermarket and retail chain and one of its biggest companies, decided to use Web 2.0 tools to involve the public in redefining its product range, as reported by Barnaby Skinner for the country's Sonntagszeitung newspaper. Fine, so far, but in order to keep any new ideas to itself, the company decided to restrict the blog's four sections - "wellness", cosmetics, household products and Migros employees - to a community of 50 users each (calling the policy "first at the pool"). Very productive bloggers will get SFr. 100 each.

So what is strange about this? Well, it's basically another customer focus group but with a different vehicle. Using a closed version of Web 2.0 in a social network for this seems a bit, well, pointless really. Comments from Jorg Dietz of Nielsen Netratings to that effect made me smile:

Allerdings befürchtet er, dass in einer Community von bezahlten Bloggern ein verzerrtes Marktbild entstehe. Ein richtiges Anreizsystem sei ausschlaggebend für gute Inhalte, ansonsten würden Vielschreiber nur ihr Sackgeld aufbessern wollen.

Das grösste Problem ist jedoch die Abgeschlossenheit. Web-2.0-Gemeinschaften wie Wikipedia oder Myspace leben vom freien Informationsaustausch und -zugang... Er vergleicht diese Marktforschungsmethode mit jemandem, der gewaschen werden will, ohne dabei nass zu werden.

To paraphrase, Dietz thinks Migros hasn't quite got it, and that paying people regardless of content encourages them to write anything for a bit more pocket money. Dietz also says that a closed community undermines the whole ethos of Web 2.0 networks that live and die by information exchange. He likens the venture to trying to wash yourself without getting wet. It's not a highly original saying (in German), but one I'm fond of. I couldn't agree more.

What do the blogosphere, Wikipedia, and Apache have in common? Basically, huge influence, a great deal of collaboration, and dependence on free work supplied by amateurs. In Apache's case this has created a huge degree of reliability, and in Wikipedia the more science-based topics are usually very authoritative, too. Even in the blog vs traditional media debate it's now widely recognized that the comment and response system and immunity to commercial pressures compensate for a relative lack of infrastructure. The news world has in fact reached a point of interdependency.

Now, a lot of the more authoritative blogs are done on a professional basis, but the ecosystem in which they operate is one in which amateur or semi-professional bloggers predominate. This "mixed economy" model is also the basis of the profit in the Open Source movement -- companies can use Open Source profitably by using part Open Source, part proprietary software.

So how does this mixed professional and amateur, commercial and free environment affect the way you conduct online PR and marketing?

1. It's important not to make too big a distinction between amateurs and professionals. Professional is not better, commercial is not more reliable, so hierarchical thinking of this kind can be counter-productive. Mutual respect is the watchword.

2. It's not all about money. The fact there is so much good discussion in blogs, that Wikipedia is now so reliable, and that the open source movement has produced so much reliable software proves that a lot can be done without money. But it can't be done without trustworthiness and reliable information. Web presence comes with being a provider of information - not a tit-for-tat process of buying favours but one of becoming a participator. The investment is time and energy.

So perhaps the model companies should use for such participation is Google's "We offer our engineers '20-percent time' so that they’re free to work on what they’re really passionate about", but in this case the free time is for participation.

When Jakob Nielsen speaks...

Jakob Nielsen is the website usability guru, and when he talks about usability, he is credited with complete authority. May seem strange when you visit his site -- it looks like sites of 10 or more years ago. But everyone knew how to use them. His point is not that all sites should be like his, but that they should be as functional: to know when to behave like a user manual (easy to use, easy to navigate, and has all you will need in it) and when like a magazine (visually impressive, surprising, involving).

What Nielsen thinks of online ads

Nielsen's ideas aren't based on personal impressions, but on a great deal of observational research of web users behaviour. Now, speaking at the inaugural Web Experience Forum in Boston, Mass. he has some important news for advertisers as reported by Alistair Croll at GigaOm: Forget banner ads, which are purely interruptive, so users ignore them. Go for search ads, which users click more often than generally thought. Nielsen in this case does not give figures for his survey, but according to Croll:

Jakob showed the audience at WEF08 several videos, including heat charts of eye movement, to demonstrate this process. Some testers skimmed picture ads that contained text — but only briefly...Pictures that are content get attention; pictures that are “fluff,” visitors treat as an obstacle course to bypass, particularly when it’s bland photographs of “smiling lady with a headset” or “guy who looks happy with a service.”
...He even produced an example of a gigantic rat on ask.com (celebrating the year of the rat) that testers didn’t recall seeing. And this thing was half the screen!

Is Nielsen right about banner ads?

Mostly, I think. Banner ads can and do work, but only if they draw the eye and are relevant to the user's reason to be there. Portals are an example, review sites another, and you could find others. But outside of these, when they are interruptive, they are mimicking the display ad world rather than the newspaper classified ads. Even in print media, it's the classified ads that pay for themselves, and that's why search-related ads do so well. Even then, billboards and newspapers often attract your attention when you aren't particularly doing something else -- e.g. waiting at the traffic lights or skimming through the pages -- whereas web users tend to be more purposive, so the bar is pretty high. So although it's too much to say they don't work, they've got to be attractive and relevant at the same time.

Where banners win over search ads, though, is in catching people who didn't already see themselves as potential customers. If a small number of clicks are converted into high value sales as a result, banner ads can pay for themselves many times over. The other important case where banners work is sponsorship, i.e. promotion rather than advertising. Their purpose is brand enhancement, rather than selling, so they don't have to interrupt, just get the name noticed.

A good PR tip from Nielsen's site

While it's worth looking at the resources on Nielsen's main site, it's also worth looking at his biography page - which, despite a bit less navigation than I would like, does a very good job of publicizing him- I particularly like a couple of the spoofs he links to: Jakob Nielsen Declares the Letter "C" Unusable and Davezilla's Jakob Nielsen’s Usability Fighting Styles (as shown above). Not only are they fun to read, but Nielsen's listing them makes his otherwise rather austere presence much friendlier.

Location-based social networks have been a theme for a few years now, but pretty much dropped off the radar until recently. Until iPhone apps, that is. There are different services, but essentially all of them help you locate friends and services the same time and place as you, so you can, for example, see that Joe is shopping in the same street as you right now, and find somewhere to invite him for coffee. Now these apps seem to be making headway, and could be a great route for local publicity, as local as the newspaper and as immediate as local radio - and targeted, too.

The Washington Post did a good review of location-based social networks for the iPhone last week, so here's a very short view of the main players. The early leaders, Loopt and Moximity, came out well before the iPhone, but are heavily targeting it now. Moximity uses your existing contacts from Facebook and Twitter; Loopt has even given TechCrunch its own version so TechCrunch followers can meet each other at conferences. Pelago's Whrrl, for example, is strong on local information, whereas uLocate's "Where" app or the Limbo service, with its own Facebook-style wall, provide the chance to meet new people. Zintin, has a group chat feature, too. All are on Washington Post partner TechCrunch's Crunchbase service for more business background details. Washington Post's view is that none of them is quite a killer app yet, and that it's a matter of time before MySpace and Facebook come in and take over.

What's wrong with this picture? Well, for one thing Facebook was there when the iPhone launched, and that has not stopped others getting the funding or the kudos, e.g. Pelago's recent successful round. I don't think we can be sure Facebook is going to be a winner here despite an early advantage. Location-based services are different from the home social network, because they are perfect when you are not at home, and not much use when you are. "Cometh the platform, cometh the app" could be the story.

It's not just the nature of the service, but the way the market grows. Though Loopt etc. were originally aimed at the whole mobile market, the key platform is now the iPhone, with strong sales, user-friendliness, strong sales, and of course the Appstore. So the market also contains an interesting positive feedback loop that is different from PC sales. The mobile phone is a social instrument at heart, and location-based social networking apps could be as attractive to some users as SMS. If the vehicle is the iPhone, and the app catches on among groups of friends, that will push sales of both phone and app, a from of localized viral growth that depends completely on adoption within particular groups. Perhaps a key to what happens next is how other phone manufacturers will respond to the threat of Apple getting the kind of market traction they did with the iPod.

US marketing and branding company Cone Inc. has just published a survey on using social media to promote businesses, with pretty dramatic findings. According to the survey, 93 percent of Americans believe a company should have a presence in social media, while an overwhelming 85 percent believe a company should not only be present but also interact with its consumers via social media. In fact, 56 percent of American consumers feel both a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment.

When asked about specific types of interactions, Americans believe:

• Companies should use social networks to solve my problems (43%)
• Companies should solicit feedback on their products and services (41%)
• Companies should develop new ways for consumers to interact with their brand (37%)
• Companies should market to consumers (25%)
  

Cone also point out that this is a marketing lifeline for desirable but elusive prospects such as men in general, particularly, young men, and wealthy households. I think anyone would say these figures are high, but a little thought suggests they shouldn’t really be so surprising. In online marketing, the classic AIDA rules, Attention, Interest, Desire, Action, are more like:

• Get attention
• Drive to your website
• Encourage interaction
• Move to action

The middle two points can be weak points in the chain, and this is where I think social media make marketing more effective.

Why "driving to your website" is hard

People come online with a view formed already of where they want to go. Particularly, I suspect, men. Most men I know like to (in theory at least) do their shopping with a kind of military attitude – decide on the shop/s, what they’ll buy, how much they’ll pay, and what time they’ll be home again. If we imagine them transferring that mentality to the web, diverting them is going to be much harder than interacting with them where they are, and much easier if you have already started the interaction there.

Really encourage interaction!

People like the feeling that they are the one holding the remote control. No matter how friendly your website is, users don’t normally get that sense, because you decide the content and the rules. Social media offers a “home space”. If users can interact with you there, they don’t relinquish control.

In Europe, too?

Social media sites, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook etc, are doing pretty well in Europe. Facebook is apparently having difficulty getting the numbers in Germany, and actually hiring students to introduce them, but I think this reflects their being a little slow to localize, and maybe a preference for local rather than US sites. So with younger people social media are important, and the US experience is definitely relevant. For the rest of the market, we may still be a few years behind the US in using web features, so perhaps there is time to let this develop. But there’s no disadvantage to being on the scene early.

Microsoft has decided to drop the ads with Jerry Seinfeld. Personally, I think this is a big mistake - it looks like the company is messing up the biggest-spending campaign most people have heard of, and that's going to confirm many people's impressions that the company are just not getting it right these days. Yes, the adverts were a bit kooky, and Seth Godin may have a point that there is something a little bit fake about it all.

For more than twenty years, Microsoft has relentlessly commodified itself and the software it makes. It has worked to become a monopoly, a semi-faceless organization that cranks out very good (or pretty good) software that gets a job done for the middle of the market. It's been a profitable strategy. But now they have Apple envy.

But from my point of view, Microsoft had made a good start to a difficult but limited job. Basically, they needed to show the benefits of ubiquity and affordability, i.e. that they had brought computing and communication between computers to huge numbers of ordinary folk. At the same time they needed to defuse Apple's advertising message without giving Apple more ammunition. I thought they put across the message in a funny and oblique way, even if it was not hugely accessible. They just needed to move it a little further to show that they have done a pretty good job that no-one else could have done, and they will carry on doing a good job for ordinary folks.

Instead they decided to go head-to-head with Apple, which always looked like a no-no to me. It sends the wrong message: That Apple are setting the agenda and Microsoft doesn't like it. The new ad is trying to imply that Apple ads are disrespectful to the people that use Microsoft. But by doing so, they've put the ball in Apple's court and, on past evidence, I doubt Apple will waste their chance.

I can imagine the Apple guy in the guise of the therapist, for example. A user worries, "My friends think I bought my Mac to look cool, but I just wanted a computer I could use without having to call the helpline all the time". The response could remind them the user that "Apple just doesn't see why you have to do it all the hard way. That's why we introduced the desktop and mouse to personal computing all those years ago - which everyone else copied. Anyway, why shouldn't you enjoy looking at your computer? It's a great machine. It should look good." OK, I'm not an ad copywriter, but you get the idea. Apple can just tone down the cool, emphasize reliability and that they see the user as a friend. They've done it before, and it worked. Now's they've got the chance to do it all over again.