With all the excitement over the internet in the marketing world, you’re often left thinking that if your marketing plan doesn’t include a Facebook group, a ‘viral’ YouTube video or a Twitter campaign you might as well not bother. Apparently, people aren’t interested in traditional marketing anymore, and printing off brochures and direct mail is a waste of trees.

So, is traditional marketing a waste of time? Are people so engrossed in looking up old school friends and online shopping that they don’t have time to read anything you print?

Well, you’d certainly think so based on recent Advertising Association research, which found that one in five marketing pounds are now being spent online, whilst traditional budgets appear to be in freefall.

Last year, spend on press advertising fell 11.8% and TV ad budgets fell 4.9%. But spending on the web grew 19.1% to £3.6 billion, which means it’s now snapping at the heels of the wheezing £4.4 billion TV ad market.

Nearly 60% of web budgets are spent on search

According to an eMarketer report, 59.3% of online budgets were spent on search marketing in 2008 – an increase of 4.9% on the previous year. Whilst growth has since stalled to 0.9%, the proportion of web budgets being spent on search shows that driving traffic is top priority.

But is this the smartest approach? Is investing in search the best use of your shrinking budget? Or are there other methods of driving traffic that marketers are missing out on?

60% are most likely to visit a website in response to print

Bastions of the print world, Pitney Bowes recently reported that it’s actually good old traditional direct mail that might be the most likely medium to trigger a visit to your website.

In fact, 60% in the survey said that addressed mail was the most likely to trigger an online purchase, whilst only 24% believed emails and sponsored links would send them to a website they hadn’t visited before.

This follows on from previous Pitney Bowes research in which 73% said they’d prefer to receive special offers and product announcements in the mail rather than in digital form.

Print can be the trigger for digital marketing

It’s easy to get carried away with all the excitement on the web’s potential: people are spending more and more time updating Facebook, looking up product info and shopping for the best services. So it’s easy to see why shifting your budget from print to search marketing seems to be the smart thing to do.

But as the Pitney Bowes research shows, print still has a vital role to play. It can act as the introduction to your digital marketing and trigger people into visiting your website.

Just remember that direct mail can be binned as junk as easily as an irrelevant email. So make sure your printed offers are relevant, personalised and delivered to the right person at the right time.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

With the announcement of this year’s top ten Superbrands, there’s likely to be a few CEOs banging their desk demanding why they’re not in the list, and others taking their marketing team out to lunch. The results also offer us marketing bods some juicy tidbits on what people in the street are thinking.

With a recessionary thunderstorm still raging, the big climbers this year have been comfort and convenience foods. Krispy Kreme doughnuts are basking in the spotlight of being the highest new entry, whilst fast food retailers have leaped around 150 places up the table.

But the brand grabbing all the headlines is Microsoft, after marching to snatch back its crown as the top Superbrand, and smiting its rival, Google, into third place. Could Google’s fall from grace be a backlash against its controversial Street View? Or is Microsoft now the plucky underdog against Google’s plans for digital domination?

You can’t become a Superbrand overnight

Along with Apple, tech companies Microsoft and Google perform well because they’re seen as innovative, forward thinking and vibrant.

However, this technological sparkle has yet to start appearing on the younger online brands, such as Facebook, YouTube or Yahoo. They continue to languish outside the top 100 despite all the headlines they attract or their millions of users.

Perhaps this is a much needed reminder that not everybody spends all day on the web, and that there are plenty of everyday brands that continue to be more relevant in people’s lives (more on this next week).

What makes a Superbrand?

Many brands come and go in the list, but there are a few that are safe bets to make the top ten, whatever Daily Mail headlines they appear in.

British Airways, the BBC and Mercedes Benz are in the top ten virtually every year because they’ve spent decades developing positive associations with their brand. In the eyes of their customers, they offer tangible benefits in terms of quality, reliability and a sense of pride of ownership.

Having such a well entrenched brand perception is built by having an obsession to deliver excellence in everything they do. This includes customer service, the promise made in their marketing and, most importantly, the quality of their products. It’s this dedication that means they stand for something in the eyes of their customers, whatever else is happening in the marketplace.

So if you want to become a superbrand, whether you’re a solo enterprise or a global conglomerate, you should take some notes from those at the top and strive for excellence in everything you do.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

If you haven’t heard, the impact crowds can have on the news, and society in general, is a hot topic at the moment. Recent examples include the use of Twitter in the Iranian elections and the Guardian newspaper inviting its readers to audit MPs’ expenses.

But is all the hype around crowdsourcing just an excuse for laziness on the part of those who present that content as their own ‘work’’? After all, the concept has been tarnished by being linked to cheap labour and ways for companies to cut costs by outsourcing to the lowest bidder.

As with everything, it all depends on context.

One of the more controversial current examples is Antony Gormley’s art project in Trafalgar Square, where 240 members of the public have the chance to stand on the Square’s famous plinth for one hour each over the course of 100 days.

Should he take all the credit for his ‘crowd’s’ ideas about what they will do once they’re on the plinth – such as the guy who stood there dressed as a poo?

Is Gormley an artistic genius or a lazy sod?

I’m a little out of my comfort zone when it comes to commenting on modern art, but I do know good online crowdsourcing when I see it.

You only have to consider the high quality of some open source software, to realise how effective mass collaboration on the web can be. Linux’s creator Linus Torvalds, can now only be responsible for 2% of its code, whilst Wikipedia and Wordpress wouldn’t be the globally popular services they are today without the input of thousands.

Is crowdsourcing the future of how brands evolve?

Crowdsourcing is now starting to impact branding decisions and product development. Major brands, such as P&G, Starbucks and Dell are now all using social networking tools to help engage customers and get feedback on what people want their products to do.

Some even think that crowdsourcing could dictate how brands and products evolve in the future, now that people are having more input into how decisions are made. Are such predictions correct?

Well, these eight examples of crowdsourcing should give you some indication of the potential crowdsourcing offers:

8 Examples or Crowdsourcing

1. Unilever – Why pay millions to an ad agency, when you can plug into the creativity of your customers? This leading consumer product brand is offering prizes of up to $60,000 to whoever can create the best commercial for Axe’s Hair Crisis.

2. Threadless – An excellent example of how a community can build a brand, Threadless relies on its members to submit T-shirt designs which are then voted on before cash prizes are dished out. After all, who knows better what T-shirts people want than those who’ll be wearing them?

3. We Are Hunted – Ever wondered what’s the most popular song on the web? Well, this website ranks the most popular music on blogs and social networks – certain to be popular with ageing commercial record execs, wanting to know what the kids are listening to.

4. James Patterson’s ‘Airborne’ – These days, with blogs and witty Facebook updates, everyone’s a writer. So it seems apt that earlier this year the world’s first ‘chain thriller’ was born. James Patterson gave 28 competition winners the chance to write a chapter before reaching in to pull all the strings together at the end.

5. Galaxy Zoo – When you’ve got a quarter of a million galaxies to classify, you’re looking at a lot of overtime for an army of temps. Thankfully, so far 200,000 eager stargazers have helped to complete an otherwise impossible task.

6. Brand Tags – Finding out what people really think of your logo can be scary. Has the millions spent on its design and marketing paid off? One way to find out is to ask your customers what they think on this logo tagging website.

7. Oxfam poster boys (and girls) – How can you inspire others to fight poverty? Well, this was the question Oxfam faced in designing new billboard posters. Who better to ask than your loyal members, by requesting suggestions on the Oxfam website.

8. The Game Cartel – With some video games now costing almost as much as Christiano Ronaldo, getting enough funds together can be tricky. So, The Game Cartel, is aiming to make history by offering 100,000 gamers the chance to choose how they’d like their game designed in exchange for $50. They estimate that the game should cost $3m to make, leaving them with a nice $2m profit (if their plan works of course).

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

NZ tennis players, like Brett Steven, know short = sweet!

As we turn up the radio coverage of Andy Murray playing Andy Roddick in today’s Wimbledon Semi-Final, I have a confession to make.

I have very mixed feelings about tennis. Basically, I find it inexorably dull. However, I can handle watching matches where one player absolutely whips the pants off another – like when Venus Williams beat Dinara Safina earlier in the week – because it means the games are really short (53 minutes).

What I cannot stand is a) actually caring whether one of the players wins (and therefore being emotionally involved) AND b) the game taking a long, long time to play. Andy Murray requiring five sets and four hours to win against Stanislas Wawrinka in the fourth round of Wimbledon would, therefore, have been an excruciatingly painful experience … had I been watching it. (I wasn’t.)

With cricket, you know you’re in for the long haul, and can gear up accordingly. You know it will take all day (or five days) to play so you don’t feel the need to stay glued to the radio or TV. You can go to the loo, or to the fridge for another beer, fairly safe in the knowledge that the game won’t be over by the time you get back.

But tennis. Well. The shortest Wimbledon match ever involved one of my Kiwi compatriots – Brett Steven – who put his back out in the first rally of a doubles match in 1995, thus ending the game after mere seconds. Compare this to the game Todd Perry and Simon Aspelin had against Mark Knowles and Daniel Nestor in 2006, where they lost the Wimbledon doubles quarter final 5-7 6-3 6-7 (5-7) 6-3 23-21, after being on court for six hours and seven minutes. That’s just ridiculous.

And now I find myself tuning in to Murray and wanting him to win. If I hear the words ‘tie-break’, ‘7-6’ or ‘sixth set’ within the next one to six hours I shall scream.

People don’t like it when they feel they’ve been tricked, cheated or treated badly; the same applies to how people engage with brands. Whereas in the past, companies could choose to ignore letters and phone calls, now people with an axe to grind can make themselves heard. If they find other people online with similar grievances, brands can find themselves confronted with an army of angry customers. As the popular blogger Jeff Jarvis put it, “Now consumers do not just consume. We spit back. We have our own printing presses.”

In fact, failing to respond to criticism in social media can cause severe damage to a company’s reputation. Here are a few examples of what can happen when a brand’s involvement with social media backfires and what you can learn about running a word of mouth campaign:

Dominos

Earlier this year, two Dominos employees thought it wise to post a video on YouTube of them playing with customers’ food. A few million hits later and their employers failed to see the funny side. Dominos posted an apology on YouTube and starting Tweeting to try and limit the damage. However, they have still been criticised for being slow to respond, instead hoping the fuss would die down on its own.

Lesson: You can’t bury your head in the sand if you don’t want to listen to what people are saying about you. Criticism will simply go unchallenged if you don’t use social media tools to respond to it.

Squarespace

Last month, this web design software company ran a competition to win the latest 3GS iPhone in exchange for Tweeting the company name. Whilst the campaign attracted over 36,000 followers and 95,000 Tweets, some have complained at the amount of irrelevant messages and that the giveaway was actually a gift voucher, rather than for an actual iPhone.

Lesson: You should tread carefully when using Twitter. The success of your word of mouth campaign could be short lived if it annoys people with irrelevant, inauthentic messages they don’t want to receive.

Habitat

This minimalist style furniture chain should have applied the same approach to their marketing after they thought it wise to send out promotional Tweets featuring popular search terms such as Iran, Apple and iPhone to lure people to their tweets. With time and attention being so tightly guarded these days, the Twitter flock were none too pleased about Habitat’s blatant spamming. Habitat has since apologised (but not on Twitter, surprisingly).

Lesson: This is a perfect example of a brand jumping into social media without first taking swimming lessons. They didn’t understand how you should engage with people on social media. The internet isn’t the same as TV. You can’t just broadcast irrelevant messages at people and expect them to listen.

Ryanair

When a freelance developer blogged about usability problems on the Ryanair website he might have expected a polite message from Ryanair saying they’d look into it or to point out his inaccuracies. What he wouldn’t have expected was to receive anonymous, insulting messages from Ryanair’s staff (their ip address was tracked to Ryanair HQ).  This unfortunate, and easily avoided, incident made Ryanair look unprofessional and that it had little respect for its customers.

Lesson: Once you’ve published content in the social media world, it’s out there for good. So you should apply the same common sense and company policy to responding to criticism in social media as you would to customer emails or to journalists in the traditional media.