Birth of a thought leadership website

dotMobi is a mobile Internet services company and the registry for the .mobi domain name. It’s backed by leading mobile operators, device manufacturers, and Internet players, including Microsoft and Google. Essentially, .mobi is the only domain name that tells users, ‘This site will work on your phone’.

We needed to get brand marketers and their agencies to start using the mobile web and the .mobi domain name. Marketers didn’t seem to realize that the mobile web is different from the desktop web: users want different things, mobile devices do different things, and the staggering diversity of devices means that you can’t just squash your old content into a mobile-friendly site. It has to be thought of as a mobile experience from the start.

To add to the challenge, there was enormous confusion over the different naming conventions used for mobile websites. dotMobi needed to inject a little clarity.

Clearing some space

Our response to the brief was to differentiate between ‘.com thinking’ and ‘mobi thinking’. We portrayed .com thinking as clumsy and heavy, compared to mobi thinking which is lean and agile. This image appeared first in some of our creative roughs, but the client liked it so it made it all the way through:

.com thinking just isn't as nimble as mobiThinking

What we did next

In order to get the show on the road we designed, wrote, and built a new website for marketers with plenty of the usual Velocity specialities: thought leadership, video, interviews and .mobi site tours. We also did a load of case studies, best practice advice, e-newsletters, eBooks and set up a mobile marketing blog, edited for us by journalist Andy Favell.

Andy’s editorial approach gave the site an independent tone, so users knew they could trust it. He got straight to the heart of the industry in record time, and built links with all the head honchos in the business. He’s got a genuine interest in mobile internet issues and it shows: he’s produced some great stuff.

We also created new identities for all dotMobi brands including mobiThinking, mobiForge, and mobiDomain, designed campaigns for mobiThinking, and created content that drove traffic.

The website is constantly evolving with new content, blog posts, interviews and short pieces. It’s built around key pieces of content that have proved extremely popular including The Best and Worst of the Mobile Web and The 2009 Top Ten MobiThinkers.

And it worked

The results were excellent. The press gave the site masses of coverage, vendors want to be part of it, industry people are queuing up to write for dotMobi for free, they got over 24,000 mentions on Google in the first few months alone, they’re invited to speak at events and they’ve recruited some big names to the .mobi fold: Coca-Cola, Sony, Amazon, and Reuters. The site also achieved the best indicator of success: Barack Obama created one of the most popular .mobi sites ever to track his presidential campaign (and he used the .mobi domain name!).

In a very short time, mobiThinking.com has become one of the leading sources of best practice advice for mobile marketers, with traffic topping 7,500 views a week.. From a standing start, that’s not bad.

© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, B2B marketing, Identity, Mobile Marketing, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

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ShipServ is the shipping industry’s #1 e-marketplace, and, as of today it’s also winner of the Red Herring 100 Award for European innovation.

It’s a very cool company.

Eight years ago the shipping industry was awash with e-marketplaces making bold promises of new beans for the ‘new economy.’ Today, only ShipServ flourishes (the others are toast). They got in touch with us towards the end of last year to see how we could help revamp their brand and their online presence.

Here’s what we did.

We took them from this:

…to this:

Along the way we’ve worked hand in glove with ShipServ’s VP of Marketing John Watton, and CEO Paul Østergaard to redefine their core positioning and messages, turbo-charge their corporate pitches and plan their next brave moves into the world of web 4.7.

So, we’re thrilled that the new site is now up and sailing.

Thanks to John and Paul for giving us the space and direction to do work that we’re really proud of.

Big thanks also to the extremely talented Ben at Jackfruit for his superior web development skills (Ben’s the guy who did the physical build); and thanks to Rob and the team at RMA for their work on another top drawer piece of design (they’re the guys who created the site templates).

…And watch this space – because there’s more to come.

© Roger for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, Branding, Clients, Identity, Innovation, Marketing, Petri Dish, Sites We Like, Web Design, Web Marketing

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I’ve been mulling on this one for a while: how does Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, blogging, and every other web 2.0 BlaBla service change what we need to be doing in marketing, and what are the concepts that matter?

Well, an aborted journey around the M25 in the rain today provided a little thinking time. Here’s my conclusion…

Firstly, a Disclaimer – Reports of Death are Usually Exaggerated

I’m not a doomsayer. The internet does not spell the end for traditional marketing. In fact, the best of it seems to be getting more and more engaging and creative. In fact it has to be by virtue of the environment I’m about to describe…

Fact: The Media/Marketing Environment has Changed for Good

We have all this new Facebook-ish stuff which didn’t exist yesterday – and most of it is great entertainment. Predominantly, it’s all ‘me-media’ – the services themselves don’t provide content, but their users do.

This in itself is exciting: as a publisher I can create whatever I want to, whatever my interest is; as a consumer I can read/view/access an infinitely richer set of content than I could a few years ago. I can also now connect with folks and share stuff in easy, fun and exciting new ways (Facebook, Flickr, etc).

An Introduction to Pico-Branding

These new things are both a threat and an opportunity for marketers…

Threat: unless everyone’s playing hooky at work on Facebook, then we have fewer opportunities to engage with them in traditional ways because less and less time and attention is devoted to things like TV, newspapers, email or web sites. (Proof: yesterday I was really dedicated to being a couch potato; today – whilst a Sopranos binge on the couch will continue to be highly desirable – I also tend to devote a bit of time to reading blogs in the evenings.)

Opportunity: we have a mass of new ways of connecting with people.

So if you’re a marketing agency, you need to think about acquiring some new skill sets to compliment your standard work (and to safeguard your fees). And, if you have a brand to manage, it’s time to think about how to capitalize on all of these new-fangled destinations.

When thinking about how to engage with the market, we need to bring two different strategies into play:

Mega-branding: press, posters, big web sites, mass email campaigns, TV, etc.

Pico-branding: Facebook, YouTube, blogs, Google AdWords, Twitter, Flickr.

Mega-branding is an exercise in ‘gorilla marketing’ – it has a large footprint; it reaches many people; lives a long life; and it can be (hairily) expensive.

Pico-branding is an exercise in ‘guerilla marketing’ – it has a small footprint; it’s opportunistic and targeted; it’s fleeting; and it’s (relatively) cheap. Importantly, because it’s delivered via the web, Pico-branding is also extremely measurable in a way that Mega-branding can’t always be – and so ‘cheap’ can also be very cost-effective.

How to Get With the Pico-Program

Most importantly, Pico-branding requires us to think in new ways…

Pico-branding is not about building grand audience destinations (like the mega-bucks web site of yesteryear), because if you spend lots of time and money building it there’s no longer a guarantee that they’ll come (there’s every chance they’ll be polishing their Facebook profile instead).

No, Pico-branding is all about building smaller, more discrete stopping points across all of these new online outlets, with the aim of capturing your audience’s attention and either complimenting (and informing) what they’re doing or diverting their interest towards a destination that you do own (ie, something from your Mega-brand bucket of work).

A good analogy is with the board game Monopoly. Everyone knows it’s a bad strategy to invest in only one area of the board. Too random and not enough traffic. A better way to generate cash is to buy lots of smaller properties at all of the places that people visit regularly, as well as investing in the big stuff: so, collectively, a bunch of houses on Whitechapel and the Old Kent Road can add a great deal of strategic, money-making value to those expensive hotels on Park Lane.

In Pico-branding terms, this translates as:

Reaching out to the blogs that your audiences read and engaging in valuable discussions with them

Publishing your own blog in a focused way that adds value to (and interacts with) the discussions surrounding your marketplace

Using tools like Twitter to broadcast snippets of information that you own and other people care about

Posting engaging videos on YouTube that show you and your wares in a new light

Creating Facebook (et al) groups or applications that either provide users with content services that they couldn’t get elsewhere or add value to their experience of your brand by helping them connect with like-minded people

…and so on.

Conclusion: Go Small

Pico-branding is all about accepting that your audiences spend as much time on a varied bunch of web-based media, forums and services as they do in their armchair in front of their TV…. and making whole hearted attempts to engage with them in new ways that add value to these online experiences.

So here’s the new rules for marketing…

1. Go ‘Pico.’ Build more small things than big things
2. Do this in all the places that your audiences are to be found
3. Don’t spend less or more – just spread budgets across a wider variety of stuff

Footnote: next up from Velocity….a ‘how to’ guide for finding your audiences online.

© Roger for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Advertising, Branding, Identity, Marketing, Social Media, Web Marketing

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© Roger for Velocity Partners, 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Branding, Copywriting, Identity, Marketing, Thought Leadership

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Answering the Three Questions that will earn you the right to sell…

Technology marketers (especially the ones who live in agencies) love to make marketing more complex than it really is.

While there’s a lot of craft in the practice of technology marketing – and some of it does start to resemble rocket science – the core of the discipline is very, very simple: you have to be able to answer three questions quickly, clearly and compellingly:

1. Who the hell are you?

2. Why should I care?

3. Why should I believe you?

That’s it. The whole enchilada of technology marketing.

If you can answer these three questions well, you’ll have done the hardest and most important part of your job. You will also have made the other parts of your job a lot easier.

This short paper is about The Holy Trinity.  Hope you like it:

Download The Holy Trinity of Technology Marketing Now

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2007. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Add new tag, Branding, Content Marketing, Identity, Marketing, Thought Leadership

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Velocity on new company names

A friend used to be in a variety of rock bands. None you’ve ever heard of. And there’s a very good reason for that: the members tended to spend twice as much time trying to think up clever band names as they did playing music.

So instead of getting an inside view of the birth of a great band with a stupid name, like The Rolling Stones or The Beatles (‘Beetles’, but with an ‘a’, get it?), we suffered the distorted stylings of never-to-be supergroups such as ‘Please Don’t Shoot My Dog’, ‘The Dinette Set’ and ‘Munchie & the Vegetable Commandos’.

Well, company names are the band names of marketing. If most companies took half the time they spent coming up with the perfect name and put it into actually selling stuff, we might have a few more Microsofts to compete against.

Microsoft is not a great name. It’s a boring name. But if young Bill Gates had spent more time on a better one and less time getting IBM to license his primitive operating system, he’d be a middle manager showing people his ‘IBM Employee of the Month’ certificate instead of a demi-god showing people his 963-room mansion.

The fact is – and we could get banned from the Soho Club for saying this -company names don’t really matter all that much. And in business-to-business markets, they matter even less.

Do you really want to change it?

As marketing consultants, Velocity has often been asked to come up with a new name for a company that’s going through big changes. Our first advice is usually ‘don’t do it’ (what the hell — we never liked the Soho club anyway).

Name changes, we say, cost too much money for too little return. They take months of management time and tens of thousands in design and print. And you end up with a name that’s not really much better, having sent a message to the marketplace that, under the former name, you failed.

But sometimes, a name change is really the right thing to do, to reflect real changes in the company, such as:

• fundamentally changing the business
• distancing from a chequered past
• growing beyond a limiting name
• entering markets where the name is taken

These are all good reasons for a name change.

Aim lower

We always start by giving our potted lecture on naming, in an effort to ‘manage the client’s expectations’. ‘Managing expectations’ may sound like a euphemism for getting people to lower their sights. And that’s exactly what it is. We should lower our sights when it comes to naming.

Because company names, like pretty much everything in life, fall on a bell curve. There are a few fantastic names, a whole bunch of okay names and a few truly awful names.

The problem is, the surest way to end up with an awful name is by aiming for a fantastic one. More to the point, extreme names are polarising – some people love them, others hate them. Fantastic names and awful names are the same names.

For most companies, we don’t think a polarising name makes sense. Better to have one that’s simple, memorable and has an available web address.

Simple and memorable aren’t that difficult. But finding a simple, memorable name with an available URL is not easy. Since you’re not going to get ‘customer.com’ or ‘profit.com’, you’ve got three choices:

• Combinational names – names formed from two words (like Worldpeace or BigSoft). Can be fun, but even these URLs are getting scarce.

• Coined names – formed from morphing a word or combination (like Technion, Omnia, or Consignia). You’ll get teased for a few months until people get used to it.

• Supplemented names – names that combine a word with a descriptor like ‘software’, ‘solutions’ or technology’, to find an available URL (like Portrait Software or Island Solutions). A creative cop-out but often the most practical solution.

Here are a few guidelines for any approach:

Don’t get hung up on descriptive accuracy – A name doesn’t have to tell people exactly what you do. It just shouldn’t mislead them, implying things you don’t do.

Make the name the URL – Don’t’ make people guess. They should be able to type your name between www. and .com and arrive at your website. If you can’t get the un-hyphenated URL, try something else.

Think internationally – A name like Trillium is as hard for a Japanese speaker as Boehringer Ingelheim is to the English (though we do love that rhythm).

Don’t forget the lawyers – It’s no good getting excited about a name you can’t trademark. Sounds obvious but you’d be surprised.

Avoid cute – Cute sucks.

Avoid trendy – Names come in waves. Motorola probably sounded really futuristic in the fifties. In the eighties, tech names had to have an x in them. During the Internet bubble, ‘groovy’ or cheekily abstract names were in (like ‘Monday’). In the nineties, names were often two words stuck together with no space, so a capital letter stuck out like the tall kid in a team photo. Check out what’s really in… and avoid it.

Try automation – Some URL registration sites (like nameboy.com) have name generators that stick words together and only show you the ones that are available as URLs. Kind of fun.

Embrace the abstract – Your name doesn’t have to imply what you do. Sometimes just a nice name works fine.

Don’t futz with spelling – You’ll get really tired of telling people, ‘It’s like Quest but with a w instead of a u’.

Set a time limit – Naming exercises can take months of senior management time. Don’t let it. Give the job to two or three people and set a deadline. Don’t survey the staff. Just pick one, trademark it, get the URL and move on.

I guess it’s time to come clean. No, we don’t have the URL ‘Velocity.com’. I wish we did. Our legal name is actually Velocity Partners Ltd and we do have velocitypartners.co.uk. Maybe that time limit was a bit too strict…

Names we like

Fair Isaac (a fairy tale character)
Adobe
Apple
Xerox (the last great X name)
Hyperion (fun to yell from the top of a hill)
Ariba (fun to yell at the end of meetings)
Cisco Systems
Peachtree Software

Names we don’t like

Unisys (is it contagious?)
Metastorm (run!)
HandySoft (pass the tissues)
Groovy Gecko (pass the spliff)
UniPlan (shouldn’t you have a backup?)
Egenera (named in the lab)
Avokia (say what?)
ezGov (oxymoron)
Fluke (see ‘Think International’)
Micromuse (tiny little pretty lady)

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Branding, Identity, Marketing

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