The Creative Britain report was about helping creative business move from the margins to the mainstream. The Digital Britain report is about establishing a proper platform for the digital economy, and will have far reaching impact across many industries, not just this one.

From a creative perspective, the Government is keen to leverage Britain’s internationally-recognised talent in online, as well as move on from a leading position in global entertainment formats, advertising, marketing services and research. There is indeed a lot to do to take the economy back from gloom to boom, but there is no doubt that a strong position in digital knowledge and understanding around content generation and ‘how to code’ is as important as the massive infrastructure issues facing the telecoms sector to deliver economically viable broadband to everyone in the nation. And what is the ‘second public service’ provider to consist of? All this and more will be debated over the coming months. I felt the Creative Britain report was about looking backwards to how great it was being a digitally illiterate creative director in the sixties. The Digital Britain report is about looking forward to how great it should be being a digitally literate creative business in the future. I, for one, welcome it.

Let your inner paparazzi get its fix by keeping track of celebrities
using Twitter.com

This is fun – the blog for all things whiz bang and super
special in technology Shiny Shiny has posted a list of who’s who among A-listers on Twitter,
the micro-blogging service. They’ve found the likes of uncensored Jonathon Ross, Stephen
Fry, Imogen Heap, John Cleese, Ashton Kutcher and a fake and real Dave
Mitchell, among others who probably qualify as more Z than A-list stars.

The Guardian also points you to Celebwitter.com where you can find a comprehensive look at what celebrities are Tweeting about.

I’m following Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry and wonder if Paris Hilton is keeping up with Twittering,

-Lisa

Just in case the ‘Obama bounce’ fails to cross the Atlantic and relieve some of our economic woes, online marketers need to look to their laurels and focus harder than ever on servicing their existing customers in 2009. Here’s my top 6 resolutions for online marketers this year.

1) Don’t forget Pareto. His advice maybe 100 years old now but his 20/80 rule is one of the ineluctable truths of marketing; 20% of your customers are responsible for 80% of your income so segment and reward them for their loyalty and help them become advocates for your brand.

2) Make your website as friendly and easy to use as possible and make sure it contains lots of information. There’s been lots of development in how to improve online experience in the past 12 months so apply the latest techniques to ensure your website is super sticky.

3) Be clear about what you want your website to do and make the calls to that action clear. Websites are all about funnelling people to a certain outcome.

4) Clarify your email communications strategy. The market is seeing a lot more email being sent out with brands more comfortable with sending out three or four emails a month. However be careful that each message is unique and offers something not available on your website – otherwise customers may start to experience ‘email blindness.’

5) Differentiate or die, as Jack Trout dramatically titled book has it. Make sure you’re offering customers something they can’t readily get elsewhere. There are thousands of companies out there offering products and services online but it’s the ones who personalise their pitch and have great customer service that hold on to customers and even turn them into brand advocates.

6) Cycle more!

Advertising Age reports on a study of 400 CMOs (that’s Marketing Directors in English):

Only 16% of respondents said their companies have any routine system in place for monitoring what people are saying about them or their brands online.

 

The survey comes, however, as big marketers are paying growing attention to monitoring and leveraging social media. Procter & Gamble has a Social Media Lab that’s about 18 months old, and Unilever last month hosted a word-of-mouth summit at its US headquarters dedicated largely to understanding how social media affect its brands.

 

Another big marketer, Johnson & Johnson, became acutely aware of the trouble social media can cause when complaints on the microblogging site Twitter led it to pull the plug on an ad campaign for Motrin in November.

 

One problem for marketing executives is that they’re not clearly in charge now of managing the customer experience, customer loyalty or social media today, given that public-relations, sales, consumer-affairs and research-and-development departments all have a stake in those areas now.

 

Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council, said marketing should take the lead in overseeing the customer experience and satisfaction. And he said addressing deficiencies in tracking and analyzing consumer feedback and buzz may be the key way CMOs can stake a claim to leadership.

 

This accurately reflects reality as we experience it – we work into both Marketing and Corporate Communications Directors on different clients. Although the most effective engagements tend to be when we’re working with a combination of the Marketing, PR, Customer Service and Research departments, there’s clearly a land grab in progress. It’s those that commission us whose careers’ are seeming to benefit – and not just for the mercenary reasons the CMO council gives, but because they’re the ones doing the valuable learning as social media changes the face of business for ever…

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Rumours have been swirling around the eBay-camp as CEO John Donahoe recently hinted that the company is willing, if not ready, to sell its lucrative Skype business.

Donahoe, speaking to analysts about eBay’s drastic Q4 profits, said Skype was a “great standalone business”, which is apparently enough to get industry-insiders buzzing and giddy these days.

However, he also admitted that “synergies” between Skype and the rest of the eBay portfolio were slim, which could plausibly mean: sell, sell, sell.

Despite the slim-synergy, Skype is clearly a winner, and could attract some decent bids, although eBay might have perhaps been a little too enthusiastic when pulling out its wallet for the online-telephone service in 2005, paying $2.6bn.

Some analysts predict Skype could fetch as much as $1bn, which could provide a much needed boost to the suffering internet company, which reported a 30% drop in net profits in the fourth quarter 2008, $367m to $531m.

Dismal, especially after eBay’s usual triumphant Christmas season.

On the other hand, Skype continues to impress, with over 400m users around the world (I myself one of them) and recent reports of a 26% rise in revenue.

Just because it can afford anything and everything, Google’s name has been associated as a possible interested party, along with major telecom networks Verizon and AT&T.

Should eBay sell? I don’t think so, Donahoe admitted Skype wasn’t much getting in the way of the eBay business, which is hurting. He should focus on fixing eBay first (cough, PayPal) as it should surely weather the ugly storm that is braced to decimate the digital industry over the next two years, Skype could very well be its water-wings.

Cocoa is now at its highest price for 24 years and the premium brands, those that use the most ‘cocoa solid’ content, will inevitably have to pass those raw material costs on to the consumer first. This swings things favourably for Cadbury’s and Nestlé, as they tend to use less cocoa solid in mass-produced bars, so may be able to hold prices for longer. If you compare the cocoa solids content of Dairy Milk to say, a bar of Green and Black’s you can work out the relative strength of pure chocolate for yourself.

As belts tighten, even for the indulgent, can purity at a price overcome the celebration of a joyful moment expressed in Dairy Milk advertising? The kerfuffle over ‘shrinking’ chocolate sizes (where’s my last rolo gone?) at countline level indicates that when the British consumer thinks about chocolate a tiny bit more than the three seconds it takes to snap up a KitKat as you head out of the tube, manufacturers have to sit up and take notice.  Mind you, I liked one succinct Yahoo answer on that question “it’s not the chocolate bars getting smaller, it’s the people getting bigger.” Let’s see how consumers react as wallets get smaller.
 

The Macintosh turned 25 on 1/24/09. Here is my first Mac. It really did change my life, because it shaped my career. Technology for the artists, not just the scientists. So Happy Birthday, my friend. You are the only computer brand I have ever bought and the only one I’ve ever used. (Except for two traitorous weeks starting a new job with a temp PC while IT got me sorted.)

Now, for all the publicized cult love of the Mac, and all the PowerPoint presentations (some of our own making) most of us have sat through celebrating Challenger Brands!, Apple still holds a secret other companies find hard to decipher. The products have real personality. (Their ads are usually good simply because they express that personality, they don’t have to invent one.) The reputation and image match to the extent that most users become natural evangelists. Our Macs are companions, not just computers. In fact, I may have to go buy my MacBook an iPhone as a present. She’d like that.

Follow me on twitter asking about best iPhone app

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–I just got cheered up on this cold Friday afternoon by Lloyd
Davis who, among other talents in the social media space, plays the ukulele.

Get a quick winter happy fix by checking out Lloyd’s
strumming fun on his blog Perfect Path.

Lloyd also organizes The
Tuttle Club, a Social Media Café for London, that takes place every Friday morning
at the ICA and attracts a great bunch of people from all types of industries
for coffee, working together, and friendly chat.

Today, and every Friday, Lloyd makes London a happy place to
be.

Happy to know Lloyd Davis,

-Lisa

This week, the IPA published a report snappily titled Social Media Futures – The future of advertising and agencies in a networked society. A 10-year perspective, the launch of which was covered both by the FT:

Two-thirds of advertising agencies are not prepared for the industry changes prompted by social networks and new forms of digital media

and Campaign:

For agencies used to what one senior executive calls a “broadcast mindset”, the social networking phenomenon and the way it empowers consumers can seem seriously scary. Which makes this week’s warning from the IPA that, when it comes to social media, the majority of agencies “aren’t getting it” all the more disturbing.

The Campaign piece includes some good analysis of the state of play, including this from Mark Collier, Managing Partner at Dare:

Social media should be viewed as a discipline in its own right and doing it properly will require genuine specialists who live and breathe it. But it will need to be closely allied to core marketing strategy and execution if it is to be relevant and effective.

And this from Steve Henry, the former TBWA\London Executive Creative Director:

The current agency model needs rethinking because it’s run out of steam. Remember that a lot of digital agencies are ten years old and you have to ask if they’re flexible enough to seize the opportunities on behalf of clients. Many clients are starting to feel that the agency they need doesn’t exist. That’s to say one that understands the mechanics of social networking as well as delivering the upstream strategy and thinking.

These are the very reasons we set-up We Are Social in June last year (combined with a similar malaise in the PR industry), and I’m confident that what we’re doing addresses Mark and Steve’s concerns head on.

As part of the launch of the report, the IPA also held an event on Monday evening, which Nathan, Sandrine and myself went along to – nicely summed up by PHD’s Dan Hosford:

Essentially, the IPA gathered a group of industry social media champions across agencies & media owners. Then bored them

There’s more detail, if you want it, in posts from Anjali Ramachandran, Graeme Harrison, Amelia Torode and John V Willshire.

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Does today’s report that Obama will be the first US president to use email mean digital is normal now? Mind you, yesterday the FBI announced an investigation into hacks who got hold of Sarah Palin’s email.

A whole new world of complication for authoritative and paranoid institutions opens up.

One wonders if Obama’s Candide-like attitude to technology will shift the attention from the real reason people take up email, Facebook, Twitter and so on – they want to communicate with each other, freely and without fear, to the miserable place of recrimination and arse covering, the downside of corporate communication management.

I recently receive hundreds of messages from around the world as I left MRM Worldwide, wishing me luck with my new venture and other kindly comments.

Many of them were *not* by email on account of big brother concerns. It’s a sad reflection on corporate life that individuals are subsumed to the corporate will without a second thought to the perfectly reasonable human desire to communicate with people they like.

There is of course, email etiquette and certain guides to successful email life that I have promoted. Don’t send email when you’re a) pissed b) angry c) very angry. Do a) spell correctly b) make the message title relevant and c) consider the recipient may have two hundred unopened in an inbox.

One excuse I’ve heard from corporate apparatchiks for not doing something they were supposed to was they were too busy dealing with hundreds of emails. Don’t confuse activity with progress was my advice back. Let’s hope Obama doesn’t either.