With over 90% of the world’s emails classified as spam, it’s inevitable that scammers will try to infiltrate the latest technology to fill their pockets. Social media services are under increasing attack, with phishers desperate to snare people’s login details.

Last month, Twitter was subjected to a series of outbreaks of phishing emails and direct messages sent to its members. High profile victims included Ed Miliband MP and First Direct, whose hacked accounts were used to advertise dodgy knock-off pills and post links to scammy websites.

This video explains the outbreak in more depth:

Since the outbreak, Twitter’s technicians have been busy in their lab devising a solution. This week they emerged to announce that Twitter would now be screening all links in direct messages and emails to make sure they didn’t send people to fake phishing websites or anywhere else a little iffy.

Twitter has yet to confirm whether it will also start screening links in Tweets as well. But maybe it should – according to a recent study 10% of Twitter traffic is already junk, and it’s only going to rise…

Four Twitter Spam tactics

If you’re a Twitter user you might recognise a few of these by now:

1. Profile picture of a pretty girl and endless, moronic Tweets pitching products. The aim of these accounts is to follow as many people as possible so that when users check to see who’s following them they see the spammy messages
2. The hijacking of hashtags and popular topics by adding keywords to promotional messages. Habitat faced a PR disaster after it used interest in the Iranian election as an opportunity to flog its latest in-store discounts
3. Auto posting Tweets with scraped content to direct people to spammy websites filled with Adsense ads and affiliate links
4. Although this isn’t strictly spam, it’s still annoying – accounts with autoresponder messages which ask you to download their eBook or signup for their webinar the moment you start following them

MySpace has already been ruined, for many people, by its abundance of fake accounts and ‘friend’ requests from spammers.

Let’s hope Twitter doesn’t go the same way and steps up its efforts to combat spam. Otherwise it risks the user experience becoming ruined and having to watch its chances of making money fly out of the window.

_______________________________

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.

It could be said that there are two key factors to delivering a marketing message:

1. Knowing what message to deliver
2. Knowing which platform to deliver it on

Based on some stats recently released by the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA), it would appear that mobile web is fast becoming a platform to focus on.

The survey’s highlights include:

• 10 million people in the UK now browse the internet on their mobile every week
• Those accessing the mobile web do so for on average 6.3 hours/week
• That’s more time than they spend reading newspapers (5.3hrs) or magazines (3.7hrs)
• 46% use the internet whilst watching TV

These stats simply reinforce what us marketers already know: marketing on mobile is going to be huge. Very soon, having a mobile element to your marketing campaign will be a must, rather than an option.

But before you rush off to start designing your mobile apps and widgets, you need to consider whether your customers are active mobile web users. After all, the mobile web is still a predominantly young user base.

Whilst the EIAA survey found that 43% of 16-24 year olds and 26% of 25-34 year olds are accessing the mobile web regularly, I expect the numbers plummet past 35.

The fact is that despite all the fanfares on the millions now accessing Facebook and using branded apps on their mobiles – millions aren’t.

Why Labour’s focus on direct mail is a smart move

Some have been quick to judge the Labour party’s decision to allocate most of its budget to direct mail as a sign that it ‘doesn’t get’ the internet and is past the times. But focusing on direct mail might, actually, be a smart move.

With modern digital printing technology, they can create campaigns which are personalised to feature local issues, as well as those of national concern. Making their marketing more relevant to each individual means it could be more effective than a high profile poster campaign delivering the same message to every passer by.

If they had the budget for it, I’m sure Labour would have happily blitzed every platform. But focusing on direct mail is probably their best chance of engaging with their traditional Labour support base. Spending millions on mobile isn’t, yet, the most suitable strategy.

If Labour were really smart, they’d be integrating their direct mail with personalised URLs leading voters to websites customised with policies to match each voter’s interests. Maybe by the next election their marketing will have caught up.

_______________________________

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.

David Mitchell wrote in The Guardian this week about a company that gives teenagers vouchers in exchange for mentioning ‘key campaign messages to friends, both on and offline.’ Essentially, they’re being paid to spread advertising propaganda and, as a parent, I can understand why David is concerned.

But this type of word of mouth marketing is nothing new.

In the last decade Procter & Gamble (through its Tremor and Vocalpoint campaigns) has recruited millions of teenagers and mothers to hand out coupons and drop brand names into everyday conversations.

Should we be worried about this cynical approach to word of mouth? Or is there a more authentic way of integrating brands into daily conversations?

Viral marketing is difficult to fake

Many marketers hoped that social networking would make it easy to spread their campaign messages. But creating content in the marketing lab that people want to share is easier said than done.

Often, it happens by chance. People are now suspicious of videos featuring brands, and faked ‘viral’ videos can soon get exposed. You then face a potential backlash and damaged trust because people hate it when they’ve been tricked by a cynical marketer.

Instead, consider giving people an incentive to create authentic viral content for you…

Ford’s Fiesta Movement Campaign

Last year, in the US Ford gave 100 people Fiesta cars to borrow for 6 months.

The catch? They had to complete a series of monthly missions, such as delivering gifts to the National Guard or finding celebrity lookalikes. They then had to upload their adventures onto social networking sites.

The result? 6.5 million YouTube views, 50,000 requests for car information and increased brand awareness at relatively small cost.

The Fiesta Movement campaign succeeded because it offered authentic videos of real life experiences. It wasn’t contrived simply to force the brand into people’s conversations.

So when creating social marketing campaigns give your customers an incentive to create content for you, even if it means your brand taking a backseat. Bribing people to talk about you will soon be exposed, leading to people losing trust in your brand and each other.

_______________________________

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.

Is it time to start worrying about what details we’re storing on social networking sites? If the relaxed attitude to privacy taken by Facebook and Google is anything to go by, we certainly should be.

Back in December it was Facebook feeling the brunt of a backlash after it ‘updated’ its settings and released information users thought was supposed to be private. This came after it had already faced lawsuits, a media frenzy and public outcry over its controversial Beacon contextual ad system. Trust in Facebook is already beginning to wane.

So have any lessons been learnt about looking after people’s information? It would appear not…

People prefer to pick their own friends

If you haven’t heard – last week Google bolted on ‘Buzz’, a social networking feature, to Gmail. In a rather clumsy approach to data mining, Google pulled information on who its users had been emailing and chatting with to automatically generate lists of Buzz ‘friends’.

Predictably the wheels fell off because Google had failed to see the harm in making these lists public. This meant, for example, if you’d been emailing an ex-girlfriend or chatting to someone you shouldn’t this was immediately made public for all to see.

There’s already one story doing the rounds of a woman’s abusive ex-husband being able to follow her after Google added him to her newly created friends list.

Google’s ‘confusion’ over people’s privacy

The lack of thought and testing that went into Google Buzz suggests a rather relaxed attitude to people’s personal information.

People are already getting fed up of playing cat and mouse with Facebook over their privacy settings. So as more incidents like this occur you could see people starting to abandon social networking altogether if they don’t think their personal content is safe.

One example of the dangers of social networking is PleaseRobMe.com – a website which claims to reveal when people aren’t at home by publishing the Twitter feeds of people playing Foursquare (an online game based on people’s location). It highlights how people are only too happy to publicly share details about themselves they’d have kept private only a few years ago.

It’s not just brands that should be worried about ‘transparency’

You hear a lot about how the internet is bringing in a new era of transparency and authenticity in marketing, where businesses are forced to reveal themselves, warts and all, because social networking is making it impossible to gloss over their misdemeanours.

Well, it would appear that it’s not just the marketing departments of big brands that should be worried. Social networking is making more of our private lives more public, whether we want it or not.

_______________________________

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.

One is Steve Jobs’ latest gift to the world of technology. The other is a treatment for sickness using highly diluted substances. So what can they possibly have in common, I hear you ask?

Well, in the last two weeks both have been the subject of online backlashes against what their critics say is marketing hype. More than ever, using hype to promote your product is a dangerous game. Making exaggerated claims might be a fast track route to building interest and exposure. But when your product fails to live up to the hype you’ll find your credibility derailed.

These days, people are only too happy to blog, Tweet and share their rage when they think they’ve been hoodwinked by a cynical marketer.

‘iPad Sucks’ – 667,000 Google hits and counting

When Steve Jobs chose to unveil the iPad with the adjectives ‘revolutionary’ and ‘magical’ he was met by a wave of criticism from people with adjectives of their own.

Within hours the internet’s influential tech bloggers had unleashed a barrage of negative posts, comments and articles on what they saw as the iPad’s failure to live up to the hype.

From the way the iPad was promoted people were expecting it to have a new slick interface or built in projector. When it was shown to appear little more than an enlarged iPhone (without the camera) people felt misled, and a backlash ensued.

‘Homepathic overdose’ – 622,000 undiluted hits

Two weeks ago hundreds of ‘sceptics’ gathered outside branches of Boots to ‘overdose’ on homeopathy remedies in protest at the selling of remedies they said were ‘scientifically absurd’.

Now, this blog isn’t the place to debate whether taking highly diluted substances will cure your cough. But it’s interesting to note that, according to a Guardian article, one homeopathy pill maker spends €108 million on marketing and only €6.5 million on research.

Awareness of the homeopathic overdose campaign was spread, largely, by the online community of sceptic bloggers and podcasters. The fact that it generated so much exposure in the traditional press reflects how people now have the tools to challenge what they see as marketing hype and can more easily take their protests into the real world.

Be careful about your marketing’s claims

So will brands respond to the changes in consumer power and cut back on the exaggerated claims made in their marketing? I’m not holding my breath. I read today that luxury soap maker Dove plans on promoting a new range based on scientific knowledge that took 15 years to develop.

Let’s hope those claims prove to be true. Who knows, there might be a community of dry skin bloggers already with their hands hovering over the keyboard.

_______________________________

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 people are spending most of their online time on social networking sites, is this where most of your digital budget should be going? Well, Coca Cola certainly seem to thing so. It recently announced it would be abandoning campaign websites, for future product launches, and focusing on social networking sites instead.

And they’re not the only big brand to do so. Kellogg’s and P & G have also announced similar moves in going to where their customers are, rather than trying to entice them to their branded sites.

So is this where online marketing is heading? Are social networks the future of online marketing? Or are Coke, Kellogg’s and P & G abandoning campaign websites too early?

Well, to work out the answers to these questions, let’s assess the benefits of both:

Benefits of Facebook

• It’s where your customers are spending the majority of their online time
• You’re only a mouse click away and don’t need to build a time consuming and expensive SEO and site awareness campaign to attract visitors
• Creating a Fan Page is free, quick and easy
• Did I mention that it’s free?
• People actively engage on Facebook commenting, uploading photos and sharing interesting links, helping them to feel like part of the campaign
• Awareness spreads virally when people joining Fan Pages appears in the news feed

Benefits of Campaign websites

• You have more freedom in the type of brand experience you can create. You’re not reliant on people clicking through the tabs or having to squeeze everything into their template
• You can capture email addresses and contact details for follow up marketing activity
• You have access to metrics on number of visitors, time on site and where people are clicking to gauge the success of your campaign

Based on the above, I think it’s a safe bet that Facebook will be offering marketing packages to brands, which give them access to metrics and user data, in the near future. Facebook is, after all, still struggling to make a profit and will want to take full advantage of its gargantuan (and active) user base.

Advice on campaign websites

When it comes to building a successful campaign site, our advice is to consider how you’re going to engage visitors’ interest and encourage repeat visits.

Are you hoping they’ll sit through your Flash presentation and then immediately want to buy your product?

Or do you want to build a place where likeminded people can congregate and interact over their shared passions and interests, and build an affinity for your product over time?

_______________________________

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.

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been offering suggestions on engaging with customers using social media. Now, giving advice is easy. Following through on it is the tricky part. So to prove we’re not just hot air at bda, here’s a rundown on our social media marketing strategy:

1. How we engage

As you might have guessed, our primary tool for engaging with social media, and the online marketing community, is through our blog. We publish a variety of posts to share our views, offer advice and give readers some insight into the thinking behind the work we do. The types of articles we write include:

• Discussing what’s happening in the fast paced marketing world
• Sharing the results of marketing surveys and commenting on their significance
• Advice on implementing modern marketing strategies, notably email, PURLs and integrated campaigns
• And the occasional post about who’s pulling the levers at our agency

As well as sending weekly posts to subscribers, we repackage our blog posts into an email newsletter which we send to existing clients. We also occasionally pull articles together to create a ‘Greatest Hits’ eBook, which people can download and share without a pesky email signup box getting in the way.

2. Contributing to our networks

With our blog the engine running our social media marketing campaign, we like to ensure our posts get spread around and shared with as many people as possible. So you’ll often find links to our latest articles featured on a variety of marketing websites, including:

Internet Marketing News Watch

Marketing Service Talk

Business Week’s Business Exchange

Junta42 Content Marketing

UTalk Marketing

You’ll also find the bda team active on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook as well as taking part in discussion in a variety of online marketing forums and websites.

3. Earning positive attention

When writing blog posts, we always aim to provide readers with practical advice they can actually use and apply to their own marketing. We also like to offer fresh opinions and to challenge hype (which, let’s face it, can be fairly common in the Web 2.0 marketing world). It’s through being useful and offering practical advice that we earn the positive attention that we do.

With Twitter being the yardstick for measuring interest these days, a couple of recent blog highlights include:

When Social Media Backfires - Tweeted 53 times

Conversational Marketing – Should You Believe the Hype? – 36 Tweets

What someone should tell Tiger Woods about marketing in a crisis – 27 Tweets

4. Gauging success

It’s no secret that blogs are great for improving website rankings and attracting links from other sites. In the month prior to starting to blog regularly our website received 360 visitors. Less than two years later and our visitor numbers have nearly quadrupled to over 1200 a month. We’ve also amassed 212 comments and links from other blogs sharing our posts with their readers.

How these figures translate into sales is a conundrum that’s still baffling social media experts. However, we like to approach its value in the same was as any type of marketing: does it boost our reputation for thought leadership, build credibility in our expertise and make our website a more useful resource to potential clients?

When choosing a marketing agency clients also want to know whether you’re switched on to what’s happening in the marketing world and plugged into the new ways of engaging with customers. We like to think that’s what our social media marketing strategy achieves for us, and helps spread the bda brand name at the same time.

_______________________________

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.

Knowing what to do with social media has a lot of businesses scratching their heads: Should you be creating a Facebook fan page? Tweeting? Pasting links in forums? Or not bother with social media at all (because it’s all just hype)?

Well, as my recent experience of buying a tent shows, the fact is that people are sharing opinions on all sorts of products, services and brands online. Someone somewhere might be writing about your business right now, this very second. So you need to be able to engage with the online conversation if you want your voice to be heard.

Here are four steps for engaging with social media:

1. Join the conversation

Rather than go to the library or pick up the phone, the internet is now the first port of call for many people when hunting for information. They want answers to problems, not sales pitches; your marketing can feed this hunger for info. This is one of the reasons why you always hear marketers preaching all the time on why you should be blogging.

Instead of writing about what happened in the office, your blog should focus on providing customers with useful information. This can include product guides, industry insight, case studies and as a forum for answering the questions that regularly crop up when customers place an order.

Similarly, Twitter is another tool you can use for sharing relevant links, product tips and other useful titbits of information.

2. Find your networks

With a bigger population than Russia or Japan, you’d think Facebook was the only social site worth bothering with. But the fact is people are visiting all sorts of forums, review sites and social networks to discuss their shared interests and passions.

The internet is, after all, a vast place. If you imagine the internet is like the sky at night then constellations represent the different groups of websites where your customers might congregate. To track them down, setup Google alerts to notify you whenever your brand, product or service is mentioned. You can then plot a course and zoom into where the most relevant conversations are taking place.

3. Earn trust and positive attention

Once you’ve found your industry’s online community, you’ll need to make friends with the natives. So make sure you’re engaging in a helpful, useful way, rather than assaulting them with sales messages the moment you arrive.

Answering people’s questions, objectively responding to criticism and offering useful advice in an authentic, transparent manner is the only way you’ll become a valued member of the community. The key is to focus on being helpful and contributing to the conversation, rather than tiresome self promotion.

4. Finding success

Some marketers might fear what impact the spread of reviews and opinions will have on marketing when people can sidestep your sales pitch to find out a product’s true value. But there are benefits to engaging with social media.

Feedback, and even criticism, can be harnessed to improve product design and find out which areas your services are lacking. The other side of the coin is that superior products, which receive better reviews, will be easier to sell, with customers acting as (dare I say it) ‘evangelists’.

Offering useful content, whether it’s in your blog or commenting in forums, will build closer relationships with your brand. People are inherently inclined to repay generosity, and the brands and businesses offering value in the way they engage are more likely to be regarded as valued members within social media communities and rewarded with increased sales.

_______________________________

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.

In this year’s marketing predictions (ours included) there’s no shortage of people preaching on how influence is being plucked away from the fingers of brands. No longer are people settling for what they’re fed in the sales pitch, but are now checking for reviews and real life experiences online. Well, I experienced this firsthand when shopping for a tent to take my kids away on holiday to the Lake District.

In previous years, buying a tent would have involved jumping in my car, heading to the nearest outdoor activities shop and then picking up whatever appeared most suitable. Whatever I chose would have been decided purely by the sales information I found in store.

Not so now. These days you can use the web to track down the opinions of other consumers in minutes, and find out all the nitty gritty details missing from the brochure.

Word of mouth is more trusted

Initially, I’d thought one of the cheaper tents would be adequate. Being relatively warm and, of course, waterproof seemed the only factors I needed to worry about. However, after reading a few negative reviews I discovered that whilst the cheaper tent was waterproof it was prone to leaking at the entrance. Not wanting to wake up with wet feet, I decided based on positive reviews to opt for the more expensive model.

What this brief example shows is just how important word of mouth is becoming in marketing. People are more cynical of marketing than ever; thanks to the web they can sidestep the sales pitch altogether to get the ‘real deal’ on a product’s true value.

This new age of transparency has some marketers worried. But it also presents an opportunity.

Harnessing word of mouth in your marketing

The ease with which people can share opinions means poor products and services can no longer be disguised behind clever copywriting and Photoshop. Complaints and criticism can spread in hours, undermining million pound marketing budgets in the process.

As my example shows, superior products (even if more expensive) will become easier to sell because of people’s trust in real life reviews. Customer feedback can also be incorporated into product design – no amount of testing is going to be as effective as the real life experiences of thousands.

So, as the transparent age approaches, marketers can choose to bury their heads in the sand, and ignore what’s being said about their products, or they can hail the rise of the consumer and incorporate the online conversation into delivering better products and more authentic marketing.

Next week: How to develop a social media marketing strategy

_______________________________

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.

Is your marketing aimed at building closer bonds or telling people how wonderful you are? If it’s the latter you might want to head back to the whiteboard. The fact is that consumer mindsets are changing; the ability to share opinions globally, in mere hours, is irrevocably changing the nature of marketing.

No longer can we simply spoon feed people advertising whilst they’re slumped in front of the TV, or carpet bomb messages they’re now adept at sidestepping. People just aren’t listening anymore when there’s so much noise to contend with.

Added to this is the recession tightening purse strings and hardening people’s resolve not to be bullied into buying ‘stuff’.

So what we’ve now arrived at, in 2010, is the rise of the cynical, sceptical and often critical consumer, who’s not shy of sharing their opinions with friends, followers and the search engines. With consumers now less trusting, building more personal relationships will be the key to marketing in 2010.

Here’s a rundown of some of the trends to watch out for this year:

1. Driven by the proliferation of laptops, smartphones and internet enabled TVs, people will be going online more often and from more locations – positioning digital closer to the centre of marketing campaigns, rather than an offshoot

2. Despite what some digital fanboys might say, direct mail still has a role to play. Surveys show that people prefer to receive offers in print. But to help print survive it needs to be supported by email, personalised URLs and mobile to enhance its relevance and impact

3. Digital advertising will become more targeted as advertisers start using data on where visitors have been and what they’re doing. Expect a backlash when complaints on privacy lead to rushed government legislation. You can pre-empt this (and build trust) by making it clear what data you’re collecting and what visitors gain in return

4. Expect more cases of multi million pound marketing budgets being ruined by critical or mischievous consumer generated content

5. Brands will create their own media channels (and sidestep the traditional media) offering consumers valuable content, useful apps and branded live events

6. Search gets social –Tweets and status updates will start appearing in the search results, making customer service more integral to marketing

7. Crisis marketing – the ability to spread negative opinions globally in hours means you must have a plan in place for monitoring what’s being said, and have the tools to respond and be a part of the conversation

8. Social networking will fragment as teenagers abandon Facebook to escape snooping parents and as people form private networks amongst those whose opinions they actually care about. This will make the job of identifying where customers are congregating that little bit trickier – you won’t be able to just slap up a Facebook fan page and tick social media off the list

9. Mobile will come of age as people start buying more than just ring tones. Short code and coupon marketing will become more widespread, and smartphone apps will evolve from mere gimmicks into useful tools

10. 2010 is going to be an interesting year for marketers, and one in which you’ll need to significantly update your job description as marketing becomes integral to everything a company does

_______________________________

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.