For more info watch the video below or visit Twitter.

Debenhams is one of the latest national retailers to get on board with the emerging location-based social network Foursquare. If you’re not familiar with this new phenomenon, the basic idea is that you ‘check in’ to real-world places from your GPS-enabled mobile device and earn points for doing so. And what do points mean? Well, free coffee in Debenhams’ case but the possibilities are endless for retailers to utilise this service to retain their customer base and gain new customers.

When you check in, your foursquare friends are notified of your whereabouts (hmmm… a bit Big Brother) and you can automatically Tweet and update your Facebook status too. There are other features of the service like ‘tips’ (if the place you’re in does the most awesome hangover bacon butties) to help you spread the word about what’s great … and what’s not so great about where you are.

Of course, the potential for bricks & mortar retailers to capitalise on this are significant. Offer discounts, freebies, new services to loyal customers who check-in with foursquare and they’ll spread the word for you. And hopefully a good word at that.

Foursquare in the UK is in its infancy. But it looks set to become big in 2010. Who knows, with national retailers like Debenhams coming on board, it might even see growth like Twitter saw last year. Watch this space.

Ouch.

Disgruntled employee perhaps? Or ‘innocent’ mistake posting to the wrong account? After all the apologising that they did, it seems it was a “A severe breach of rules by staff in our building“. Either way, despite their swift attempts to delete the tweet, it had been re-tweeted and captured for posterity for all to see. A quick Google now shows over 1,200 results for the exact offending phrase.

Interestingly, the blunder gave them a bit of a boost in followers. People wanting to witness in person their next public fail? Hmmm…

Just goes to show that measuring social media success by number of followers alone isn’t appropriate! I guess Friday’s incident just highlights the power and speed of social media. And the inability to retract our digital utterances, thanks to it’s real-time and re-publishable nature. Social media can be quickly damaging to a brand if care isn’t taken.

In this increasingly socially digital world of ours, brands are being forced to be more open, more honest and more able to engage in real-time conversations. All power to the consumer! Not since the birth of the internet itself has something had such a levelling effect on the way we all communicate.

Of course, social media is here to stay and it will reap significant benefits to those who use it well. And for those who don’t?  Well, they’ll probably be left out on the street - presumably like that Vodafone employee.

No emotional reaction means no response or action.

Bigger, better, faster, cleaner, tastier is all very well. But it doesn’t ‘get’ you; like Don Draper does in this fantastic scene from the first series of the excellent Mad Men.

Good luck in your next meeting…

Chris Barraclough wrote on his Brand Republic blog that some elements of the marketing fraternity seem pretty smug and sneery about the postal service…

“we don’t really need the post these days, do we? I do everything on my Blackberry…” the subtext being “do we really have to subsidise the post for Ethel Miggins living in rural Cumbria?” (Yes, you do).

Well, we at The Real Adventure tend to agree with him, and not just because we create award-winning Direct Marketing campaigns…(!)

The mail service in the UK is Universal, and that’s not something to be taken lightly: very few things are any more. 26m households have a letterbox of some form, more than have a TV or a phone. The Post connects people in a way email or twitter can’t. Its predicted demise will impact most on the people who are least able to use or afford the internet - the old or very young, the isolated, the poor. ONS statistics for 2009 indicate 64% of the over 65s claim to have never used the internet. 30% of UK households (nearly 8 million) don’t have internet access. My daughters squeal with excitement if they get anything in the post.

Crucially, it’s the important things that get put ‘into writing’; contracts, Christmas / Birthday / Mothers’ Day cards, presents, thankyou notes or holiday postcards… All these are things that show ‘we’re thinking of you even if we can’t be with you’. For the recipient, post can be truly tangible, keepable and have historical value. We keep cards and letters. We print ‘important’ emails. Because if it means something, we like to have a copy. Letters, diaries, photos are the lifeblood of personal and family memories, the everyday history of us all.

And on a commercial level, Direct Mail still delivers high quality customers and donors for many brands and charities, without even thinking of the vast new market for online rentals and purchases. We have created many long-running campaigns and programmes that deliver tremendous returns for our clients, and offer great value and experiences for the consumers. Coupons incentivise trial for well-targeted groups of new consumers, and we also know that up to 40% of the incremental sales from our door drop campaigns come from people who received the door drop, then trialled the product without even redeeming the coupon: proper through-the-door media for only a few pence per person…

The postal channel is real, tangible and meaningful to many groups of consumers and businesses. Offline and online activities should and can be integrated to achieve an impact greater than the sum of the individual campaign elements. Direct Marketing is eminently measurable and as such we can actually prove its worth to our clients.

So it’s myopic (to say the least) if marketers anywhere are questioning its relevance…

The detail is below, but in summary:
I now expect brands to respond to me when I tweet about them. Those that do, I like. Those that don’t… they don’t think I’m important enough…so they go down in my estimation.

Experience 1 - Gist

I recently signed up to Gist – a service which aggregates information about all your contacts from different sources (outlook, facebook, twitter, etc) and puts it in one place. Sounds great. After setup, however, I couldn’t log in.

So (not expecting a reply) I tweeted…

They got back to me… 3 times… Initial contact was only 2.5 hours later (read bottom up)

So I @replied, again on Twitter.  And they got back to me again.

I spoke. And they listened. Not only did they listen, they actively engaged me in conversation. They made me feel special. That’s a good thing. I like them. I’ll recommend them. That’s great for them.

Experience 2 - Xmarks

Xmarks is a bookmark synchronising service which syncs your bookmarks between PCs (and Macs) and allows you to share them online too. It’s great.

But I recently had to re-install it (new laptop…old one died)… and it caused a problem.

So I tweeted…(again not expecting a reply)…(and note, didn’t do @xmarks, just a simple xmarks)

3 days later…they got back to me.

OK, so it took 3 days.  But at least they bothered. I’m about to email them.
Both brands above are clearly actively monitoring the social space in order to pro-actively engage with their consumers. And benefiting from my improved perception of them by so doing.

Many brands could learn from these experiences and grow their advocates through social media-enabled customer service.

Marketing teams spend millions of pounds in manangement time and agency fees developing briefs, tone of voice guidelines, and executions for every single broadcast message they put out. Every comma becomes a trauma, is that wardobe choice dynamic enough, does that font project our innovativeness? And once they’ve fine-tuned these messages and filmed them in glorious technicolour, they seem to sit back, their labours complete, and rest.

We like to think of marketing in human terms (see our previous post on this). I’d like to suggest this behaviour by brands and their owners is the equivalent of me seeing someone across a crowded room, falling in love with them from afar,  going home and crafting a perfect declaration of my love and why I am the ideal person for them, dispatching this missive, then sitting at my open bedroom window, gazing at the stars, sighing wistfully.

The time and resources devoted to enabling relationships between brands and their consumers can still be achingly inadequate. People who make an effort to find a brand and try to engage in conversation often go unrewarded, faced with impersonal automated email systems or glossy brochure websites.

But this can be easy: it certainly doesn’t need to be hard, or even expensive. But it does require a change of mindset, it does require brands to think of their customer relationships more like, well, real relationships; which need to be 2-way, they need maintaining, they need work. Otherwise, they’re not really relationships.

Tools to ‘enhance productivity’ are rife. We can integrate reporting across multiple platforms. We can create ‘decks’ with far more flexibility and creativity than before. We obsess about animation and builds, about ‘the message’. Death by Powerpoint and Analysis Paralysis are phrases born in the last generation.

But these tools often inhibit and distract us from more rewarding, direct, and meaningful interactions. Why not talk to each other, face-to-face, rather than hiding behind a presentation or an email. Powerpoint comes with built-in protocols and assumptions how charts should be laid out: titles and bullets, graphs and commentary. The Marketing profession has created its own language and terminology, at least partly because…

• marketers are innately aware and guilty that our ‘profession’ is largely Applied Common Sense, so we create ‘technical’ language to lend it more credibility (noone likes to admit this)
• as in other spheres, the jargon is a defensive mechanism to hinder or prevent ‘outsiders’ from realising that marketing is largely Applied Common Sense (see above)…

In marketing parlance, it’s a strategy to create barriers to entry in order to add value to our own core proposition and thereby add value. See what I did there?

Take (for example) two very common marketing strategies, and an alternative description…

Drive Penetration = get more people to buy some

Build AWP / FOP / Loyalty / Share of Requirement etc = Get some people to buy more

But by speaking in tongues, by overlapping objectives, strategies and plans, surrounding ourselves with TLAs, we get bogged down in our own process. Clusters and segements don’t buy brands and products, people do. And all these tools, applications and acronyms simply isolate marketers from the people they claim to want to understand.

As Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign famously realised, the election was about the economy. Well, marketing is about people. If we can get past the jargon, we can start talking as people, in human terms, about what people want and why they want it. Then we can start thinking about how we can give it to them, and make them feel better.

But the largely unstoppable momentum of e-banking, e-shopping, e-everything seems increasingly driven by companies trying to drive down cost without passing these benefits back to their customers.  I haven’t had a paper electricity bill for nearly 3 years, since they suggested I did everything online, in return for which I would get a £15 annual saving on my bill. Not much, you might say, but definitely more than nothing.

Those generous days seem to be long gone. I’ve banked with First Direct for nearly 15 years, and handled most of my transactions online for the last couple. But every time I log on, they smack me in the face with this…

No hint of  ‘what’s in it for me’, nor a word about the savings FD will make from not having to process, print and despatch 12 monthly statements. Hmmmm.

And only last week, my mobile phone provider (from whom I also get broadband) wrote to inform me

More and more customers have asked us to provide full details in their bills, so we’re replacing the summary bill with itemised one for everyone. You’ll now be able to see exactly how you’ve used your phone - down to the time, length and cost of each call.

As it costs more to provide you with these itemised paper bills, these will cost you £1.47 per month.

I seem to remember a few years ago, when I was first a customer, I had itemised bills as standard. It was a great help for deciphering business vs personal calls. But now I have to pay for the privilege. I was going to shame them with a clue, but nothing rhymes with their name. Hmmmm.

Not everything is better online. The Argos and Ikea catalogues are staple items in households across the country. Glossy magazines and weekend newspapers help us create small windows of tranquility. Paper bills delivered through our letterbox can be important reminders to review what we’re spending, a useful event each month that makes us feel secure, or at least enables us to take action.

Online accounts put the onus on the customer to do the work, so I logged onto my electricity account for the first time in ages yesterday and discovered my account is in credit by over £100. They evidently thought I didn’t really care that I’ve effectively been overpaying and they’ve been sitting on my cash for months. So I’ve taken action on that.

Online relationships with brands can be more convenient and easier for all parties, but they should still be a dialogue, they need work, and they should not be taken for granted.