Getting It Means Getting It Right

He says:

In a media environment that is increasingly defined by the trendiness that afflicts a whole bunch of other categories, brands run the risk of looking like I must have looked to my niece when I joined Facebook and sent her a friend invite: an outsider trying to seem with it, unsure of why we’re there or what we’re supposed to do to become a valuable member of the community. We’re the awkward adults with disposable income but no idea what’s really going on around us. But we’re there, damn it. And that makes us cool. We bought the sneakers and the ironic T‑shirt. We’re one of you. Want to be friends?

Anderson contrasts how Apple and Pizza Hut use Facebook. Apple does it right. Its Apple Students Community on Facebook has nearly 500,000 members and 15,000 discussion topics and allows members to share their content. That’s what Facebook is all about—and it’s a bullseye.

As for Pizza Hut, well, there are about 40,000 fans; 11 discussion topics; and 214 wall posts. Is that success?

As Anderson points out, it’s not just trendiness that results in wholesale movements from one environment to another. It’s partly due to co-option of a popular environment by the largely clueless, including many marketers who jump in without understanding the mores of the space they’re entering:

Ironically, bad marketing is also part of the reason that people like my niece are leaving one setting and moving on to the next new thing where we’re not clumsily asking them if they want to be friends. The social-networking environment is littered with irrelevant brand applications. But bad brand behaviors aren’t just limited to the confines of media segments such as social-networking sites or to the younger people who tend to hang there. Media innovation has opened up all kinds of new ways for us to embarrass ourselves. Applications that allow people to create, publish, search, categorize, store, share, filter, automate and connect are being misused everywhere.

This is one reason why marketers who’ve embraced image-oriented emails are having delivery problems. Online Media Daily published this story yesterday: Study: Image-Oriented Emails Not Getting Delivered. Turns out that a lot of people [I’m one of them!] set their email clients with “images off.” That really screws up email that hasn’t been formatted properly.

Jordan Ayan, CEO of SubscriberMail, said:

”… email marketers must design emails to work with and without images present and test to ensure optimal image rendering. Marketers whose design accounted for image suppression reported impressive lifts in key performance areas. Still, a significant percent of email marketers realize this issue, yet fail to take action to address it.”

Well, duh!

This is so obvious that I’d almost be embarrassed to say it. The fact that Ayan does is because of the follow-the-herd mentality that Greg Anderson writes about.

The study revealed:

that 23% of retailers send emails that are completely unintelligible when images are blocked. Of the 77% that sent intelligible emails, there were significant variations in clarity based on their use of HTML text and alt tags. Only 42% of retailers designed emails that were a good mix of HTML text and images, and only 63% of retailers used alt tags on their images adequately or extensively. A marketer’s use of HTML text and alt tags are major determinants of the intelligibility of their emails.

And guess what: “By optimizing emails for image suppression, double-digit percentage improvements are possible ….” What an absolutely shocking discovery!
So even though in 2008 email should’t be a nontraditional medium, we get back to Greg Anderson’s point: it’s far more important to understand why and how you’re using nontraditional media than to use it awkwardly.