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Friday 22 March 2013

Newsletter Issue 232, March 2013



Sam Young Newsletter

Issue 232, March 2013
Hi guys,
What new trends have you spotted? See if you have anything you need to tell me about! Check out So What's Hot? below.
Seen any ad placements recently that made you laugh out loud because of the incongruity of their surroundings? Read When Advertising goes Bad
Don't forget, if you want to be taken off my mailing list, click here to send me a reply e-mail and I will remove your name.

So What's Hot?

There are a load of trends that will increasingly impact us - and largely in a positive way - as 2013 unrolls.
  • Social media is driving a lot of change. It is now central to home and work, and the collective communities are reshaping companies from without. Social media is helping business build broader, agile networks so they can create and deliver value to customers. B2C is creating what feels like a one-to-one relationships, but is using one-to-many technology to enable it. About two thirds of the wired globe is on Facebook. LinkedIn is growing (and is increasingly being used for head-hunting). Expect to see many more people automatically touching base via social media as time goes on (The Economist, Nov 2012; Caligiuri, 14 Dec 2012).
  • Companies are growing a social and economic conscience, trying to build legitimacy in the eyes of their demanding consumers, employees and stakeholders. Increasingly, their stakeholders can din companies on Facebook and various review sites if companies muck it up or greenwash. Where companies truly have mutual benefits with society, it works. Beware the company who puts on ethics like a cloak: it will not be the cloak of invisibility! (The Economist, Nov 2012)
  • Cheques are on their way out. Internet banking is in. Malaysia is phasing out cheques by April 2014, as more people chose internet banking (Yong, 20 March 2013). Like money orders, cheques are an anachronism. The change is being driven by the ease, information-richness, immediacy and low cost of automatic & online payments. Accounting software now automatically codes bank transactions: a cheque has no information with it, so it means additional manual adjustments. Cheque costs are likely to increase to more accurately reflect their processing cost too - bankers drafts now cost about $30 each…There will be even fewer once banks start charging realistic processing costs... from 2008 to 2011 we went from writing 204 million to 60 million cheques; and cheques have gone from making up half of all banking transactions in 1993 to 2% in May last year.
  • If you are still watching broadcast TV, you are so old hat. According to eMarketer’s 2012 digital media usage report, those of us viewing TV and video on computers, tablets or mobile devices will increase to over half the population. This looks set to increase. Additionally, more businesses now use video to communicate info about their company, their products and their services (eMarketer, 2012). 
  • There is some awesome technology convergence allowing those of us with smart phones to tap into a new marketing trend which will be a biggie: “SoLoMo” - Social, Local, Mobile. More B2C companies are working in that sector such as Foursquare, which converges users' GPS and the users' 'likes' and advises the companies located close by and what special deals are currently available. And 96% of smart phone users are also on the web (Caligiuri, 14 Dec 2012).
  • Online conferences, video conferencing and online meetings will increase. This will mean we can save travel costs. It will not be a replacement for getting face to face, but will create more choice for participants. Expect the BNZ Business Centre facilities to get very booked out!
  • MOOCs will get bigger. Courses will continue to go online, and we will end up with some great deals as students, but bad deals as academics and teachers. The model will shift more towards learners actually learning from individuals in order for teachers to earn money from teaching... though I am not sure this is a bad thing either.
  • Open Access academic writing and eBooks will continue to gain ground. Open Access is about not tying up academic publications with profit-making publishers, but by-passing them to publish articles as a public good. EBooks in various formats will continue to gain ground over print. Expect some of the slower adopters to move to Kindles, iPads, Tablets and audiobooks.
  • The customisation of content to fit the context will increase. Companies will create tailored communications that talk to specific customer problems in the customer's industry, targetted at the customer's company and how their product or service will benefit the customer. The seller will have to ensure they tell the customer what the WIIFM is, else their message will be ignored. Company marketing will have to shouts their “calls to action” in all their comms. Companies will need to be even more savvy about bridging their content to action, and how they get information from potential audiences and target them more effectively in future campaigns. Look for more calls to action via some more unusual content in 2013, especially from free information exchange such as blog posts, white papers, articles and case studies (Caligiuri, 14 Dec 2012). 
  • We will see more news-jacking, where people get their own expertise in to breaking news by creating a connection between the story and themselves. Caligiuri reports that a "lawyer client of mine specializing in privacy has been having some newsjacking success. When stories about Google keeping consumer information came out this year, for instance, he reached out to the media to offer his opinion, and has now become recognized as a privacy expert to whom media turned multiple times in 2012 on privacy-related matters. This has done much to raise his profile" (14 Dec 2012). 
Sources:

When Advertising goes Bad

In our businesses, we spend loads of time putting together advertising that works beautifully, fits our brand personality, uses the fonts and colour parameters our designers have specified. Advertising is not cheap, and any advertising spend must give us good value for money. 
We send our items off for publication, only to find that in placing the ads, the channel distributor has undone all our good work. If you don't know what I am talking about, check out the placement of the stadium Yahoo ad alongside the seat block number at http://adfailure.com/ad-fails/popular/32247-error-seating-area-not-found, and check out the ads in this Imgur photo album called "23 Most Unfortunate Advertising Placements" at http://imgur.com/a/7shrP . The Imgur album even includes a Kiwi ad - check out the message redirect the school bus sign unexpectedly creates for the Quit programme.
Bad examples will end up re-circulated on the internet for years. How do we guard against channel distributors being thoughtless with our hard work? 
A few ideas:
  1. Have a brand manual specifying all aspects of your branding. Give a copy of your brand manual to each of your distribution channels
  2. Have a contract with your distribution channels assuring you of appropriate surrounding item placements (including, but not limited to text, articles, images, advertising materials, installations and video)
  3. Ensure you not only approve the proof, but see mockups of the final placement to be sure that the environment itself will not compromise your message
  4. If you are developing vehicle livery, specify the vehicle types the artwork is to be applied to, and think through the different parameters each vehicle type will present. Use computer mockups to view what vehicles will look like with doors open, around wheel arches, around other signage and around tinted windows. Ensure you use channels who will report back for guidance when something is outside the design specifications.
While these items are going to cost you more, they will prevent your brand going viral on the web, year after year, circulating in emails.

Look Ma, No Mouse!

PC Magazine have a great tip for those of us using MS Office 2010. 
You can avoid having to mouse-click your way through Office's Ribbon with a single tap of the Alt key.  Tap it, and little boxed letters will appear on all the ribbon tabs, with numbers appearing in the Quick Access area. Then all you have to do is key the letters for the item you want.
For example, if you are in Outlook, in an email folder view, with an email selected. If you key Alt, then H, this will take you to the Home tab, where you can see a selection of command letters. Then key "RP" and a reply to selected email will pop up, ready for you to type into. Drop down and expansion lists also have lettered items you can select. Once in menus or lists, you can use also arrow keys to select items.
To get back to normal view, just click Alt again. So easy.

TLAs for SMEs

Here are this newsletter's TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) for you:
  • WWW, world wide web. Usually pronounced "dub, dub, dub" - but only in NZ. If pronounced in full, in English, at nine syllables, this is the longest TLA to pronounce - longer than the words it replaces (three syllables). In written English it is an abbreviation. Author Douglas Adams - of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame - remarked "The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for". (Academic Room (2013). Internet, World Wide Web. Retrieved 20 March 2013 from http://www.academicroom.com/topics/what-is-internet

Please feel free to email me with any TLAs that you want to get the bottom (meaning!) of.

Tips, Short+Hot Keys
In this newsletter, we are going to look at all shortcuts for Replace:
  • Access, Outlook "Find the next occurrence of the text specified in the Find and Replace dialog box when the dialog box is closed" Shift & F4 
  • Access, Frontpage, Publisher, Word "Open the Replace dialog box" Ctrl & H 
  • PowerPoint "Hide the pointer and button immediately or replace text, specific formatting, and special items" Ctrl & H 
  • Word "Display the Go To tab of the Find and Replace dialog box" Ctrl & G 
  • Word "Display the Go To tab on the Find and Replace dialog box or update the files visible in the Open or Save As dialog box" F5 

Hot Linx
Get your latest Hudson guide to a range of sector salaries, employment conditions and work practices from a survey of 4,921 employers and 5,853 employees in Australia and New Zealand at http://nz.hudson.com/KnowledgeCentre/2013SalaryEmploymentInsights
The lovely MS Office gurus from Woody’s Watch have compiled a comprehensive, searchable list of all the Word 2010 commands at http://office-watch.com/commandlist/Word_2010.aspx
Be able to explain to clients why they need a clean online presence. Check out the recruiter's online toolbag at http://employerblog.internmatch.com/25-ways-to-recruit-through-social-media/?goback=.gde_2115428_member_216458989
So, what is the hype about 3D printing? Is it really going to be such a disruptive technology, and, as some pundits are saying, ‘bigger than the internet’? Read on at http://video.ft.com/v/1700835179001/3D-printing-bigger-than-internet-?utm_source=taboola

                                Catch you again soon!! E-mail your suggestions to me here

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