Welcome to the Escape Blog

Radiohead have fans - lots of them. They could have just released a new record, got some airplay and sold some records. But they allowed people to pay what they thought was a fair price for In Rainbows - marketed online and distributed online.

And today it’s Coldplays turn with the new single of their next album announced as a free download.

How much traditional marketing spend have they saved? You can bet the cost is less than the publicity this ’stunt’ will generate.

Let’s face it thought - it’s not even a marketing stunt. It’s just the way things are moving with cheaper distribution and the nature of a viral message and social tools (I just Twitter‘d it). It goes hand-in-hand with the thousands of un-signed bands on MySpace and YouTube.

Oh yes, did I mention that these people have fans? So, what’s so special about you?

Do vertical markets play a large part in your business marketing online? Perhaps you are interested in how you can leverage your specialist skills to your advantage for marketing?

You may be interested in this article just posted on our website - How To Appeal To Vertical Markets On The Web.

Next time you find yourself saying that social media won’t work for your business, you may be interested in these stats via NMA.

They are taken from some research by Universal McCann into social media, surveying 17,000 people across 29 countries, including the US, UK, Brazil and Pakistan during March 2008. Highlights include:

• 59% of internet users worldwide view at least one video clip every week
• 73% of internet users have read blogs while 48% read blogs every week
• 83% of internet users watch video clips, up from 62% in 2007
• Podcasts are listened to by 48% of internet users
• 57% of respondents said they are a member of a social network

If you don’t start talking, sharing and collaborating online, perhaps your customers themselves will. And, perhaps your competitors will join in too.

Other findings include that 31% of respondents have started a blog themselves. Maybe one of those is already talking about you?

Me and Debs are in Canada to see a client and there are two massive differences to where we are staying in Mississauga and Basingstoke (or any UK town).

Firstly, the place is huge. The roads are huge, the cars are huge; you don’t walk anywhere - you have to drive.

Secondly, despite lots of malls and shopping arcades, things aren’t that centralised (and I get that a lot of the US and Canada is like this). There are pockets life, interspersed with massive roads and housing, and every road seems like the M25.

After a hard days work, we need somewhere to eat so firstly, we have to drive. Secondly - and this is a weird one for me personally - there is a massive choice. As well as all the standard chains of Tim Hortons, Tony Roma, etc. there are lot’s of other independent restaurants. A MASSIVE choice. Last night we went to Mr Greek (a chain).

So, I have to ask myself, with so much generic choice, how could you compete if you set up a small restaurant? Why would people choose you? You could run adverts, hand out flyers and get people through the door, but then what? Could you get them to come back, especially with all that choice?

We had a discussion the other evening in a bar with John, one of the guys out here, about customer service in Canada and how I thought everyone was really on the button. The waiter was attentive and at one point came over to ask us, “Is everything alright with your food?” Being from the UK where customer service is not so keen, I was impressed with the level of service. John then said, “Yes, but you say no, and he wouldn’t have a clue what to do.”

He also got it spot on in a meeting yesterday when he spoke about infrastructure on a new web project - not the infrastructure of getting the business through the web, but the infrastructure of being able to deliver in THE best possible way - the experience.

So, really, are you different from the McDonalds of the world? And, how do you prove it… time and time again? What does your customer service say about you, or the experience a client gets?

Google is like my Mississauga - the choice is overwhelming.

As small businesses, we can only differentiate as to why we are NOT like McDonalds, or Mr Greek. We can offer the reason to return and the reason to spread the word - the experience.

Great Article on Search Engine Land by Brian Kaminski about B2B marketing priorities for 2008.

With tough times ahead, focus seems to be the key:

• On budgets
• On vertical markets
• On cross channel consistency
• With your customer data

2008 should be an interesting year in many markets - a tough one, but interesting all the same. And, as Billy Ocean once said, “When the Going Get’s Tough, The Tough Get Going”.

A bit late in now but I needed a snappy title. I thought I’d share my web predictions for 2008.

Feel free to come back in December and rub them in my nose if I am wrong - like that is gonna happen!

You may have heard the phrase - Never Assume because you make and ASS out of U and ME? We all do it.

Which reminds me that we all generalize as well (see what I mean).

Put the two together and you have a generalized assumption.

So, next time you hear someone in a meeting say, “People want to see that”, or, “then they will do this”; wonder if it’s really true.

Assumptions are there to be challenged.

You probably hear them all the time (there’s another one), along with negative reasons from individuals about why ’something won’t work’.

The guys at Google were told that there’s no money in search, people want portals - did they?

Established retailers thought people wouldn’t buy online - now they are scrambling to climb aboard.

As marketers, sometimes the opportunity is found on the edges, rather than in the safe middle ground. Have you got the balls to take a chance?

More importantly, can you afford not to?

I have to be honest, a don’t have a degree in marketing so everything I talk about usually comes out of a book, is applied and tested and re-worked into an ideology - it works for me.

Anyway, I had a marketing meeting this morning about The Escape and something hit me like a brick… marketing campaigns are not linear, they’re radial.

By having an epicentre for a campaign you can spread outwards. I’m not sure if this is driven by my work with the web but by creating multiple epicentres you will also inevitably end up with cross-over from different directions. A bit like sowing multiple fields of seeds with the idea that someone wants “food”.

Another great advantage of this approach is implementation. A campaign that starts at a centre and moves outwards it a lot easy to manage, can be measured and can still be scalable.

This may be obvious stuff to the more studious followers of marketing but for me… I feel like I have been hit round the face with a big wet fish.

Thoughts anyone?

Via E-Consultancy comes details from a report from the Direct Marketing Association that asked contributing ESPs (Email Service Providers) what value their clients could allocate to an email address? The average result being £9.11.

This figure obviously isn’t finite and is industry and business dependent. For instance, if your average sale value is £1m then I would guess an e-mail address is worth more than if your average sale value is £30.

What interests me is that we have an average figure to work to and of course there is nothing from stopping you doing your own specific research.

This begs a question that’s worth pondering (and acting on). How much would you spend to aquire a quality e-mail address lead and, more importantly, how much would you invest to keep hold of it?
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So, this week it emerges that Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo and Google’s share price (independently) dropped 9% (FT). We may have a scrap on our hands for online domination. But, the key point here is the rise of the user - yes that’s you…

Kjell Nordstrom and Jonas Ridderstrale talked about the fall and rise of social tribes nearly ten years ago in Funky Business. Today, we are obsessed with social networking - the Internet makes this very easy. We connect to people we want to, and talk about things we want to discuss, directly - no intermediaries and no matter how obscure the topic.

For instance, I want to buy a new TV this weekend. I went to the shop and got bombarded. So, I went online and read a number of reviews. Even the users reviews were voted on by other users so I could filter those out.

Around the same time business was getting funky, Seth Godin was talking about Permission marketing: The fact that we don’t actually want to be marketed to arbitrarily - and how we won’t have to as technology will enable personalised communication.
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