Nick Baggott's CRM and Digital Marketing Blog

Digital Training in India

Thank you to Valiant Business Media for arranging a wonderful 2 day digital training workshop in Mumbai last week. I was really impressed with the desire to move to digital and the knowledge and open-mindedness of the delegates. The channels that are popular in India are similar (Google, Facebook, Twitter etc), but you need to really understand the cultural differences and the compexity of Indian society to make campaigns effective.

I have also been impressed by the desire of the delegates to network with each other and share knowledge post training. Here is a picture of the Mumbai delegates...

 

Business Biscotti Day Pics

I really enjoyed speaking at the Business Biscotti day in Burnham, Berks last week. If you are running a business in Berks, UK, I would definately recommend joining this group. Have a look at the Business Bioscotti site.

Here is a review of the Business Biscotti Digital Day

Here is some pics....

Presenting an award at the CIM Awards

I really enjoyed presenting an award last night at the CIM Awards in Grosvenor Hotel, London. The host was Rory Bremner and I had the pleasure of his company over dinner too. Here's a pic of us in action - "and the winner is....."

I have joined the international school of advertising and communications faculty

The headline to this blog post says it all!

I have joined the faculty for the International school of Advertising and Communications. You can see my biog and mug shot on the web page as well as a full description of the services offered by the School. Here is some copy from the school site, which explains their proposition:

The School was launched in 2009 by the European Association of Communication Agencies (EACA).  Its purpose is to help raise professional standards across the communications industry by training and developing the skills and talents of its practitioners.

To do this, we have recruited 20 experienced trainers, all of whom have many years experience both within communications agencies and as professional trainers.  Our vision is to become the premier pan-European training and education partner for the communications industry.

The EACA believes that it is only by raising their members’ professional standards that communication agencies will increase both their real and perceived value in the eyes of their clients and thereby ensure that their long term contribution is more highly valued and, ultimately, they become more profitable.

“The School has been developed for the benefit of all EACA members, and will continue to consult with them to ensure it offers the training and direction that brings maximum value. The success of the EACA International School is in the long term interests of all our members.”

Dominic Lyle, Director General, EACA

In planning the curriculum, we have focused on the three key skill areas required by practitioners throughout the industry:

Craft Skills The specific skills that individuals in the different communication disciplines require to do their jobs; these will range from creative, media and strategic skills to finance, production and writing/presentation skills.

Business Skills The skills needed to understand business, looking at how client companies work, the roles and interaction of the different departments and the role of marketing, sales, communication and procurement, and the central roles of finance and operations.

People Skills The softer skills needed to work in, and manage, teams and ultimately run agencies. They include skills such as change management, team building, leadership, negotiation, feedback and coaching

 

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone

To all of my clients, training delegates and alliance partners, I thank you. It has been another great year and I appreciate your support. Thank you

My new web site is now live

Thanks to Oe:gen for building such a great site for me. My new web site is now live. I have added in the social media links, Oe:gen have updated the design and also added a new content management system. So I can now update it easier. What do you think? I'd love your comments.

Great free Seminar for Professional Services Marketers (I am speaking)

If you are in Professional Services and you haven't signed up already, please sign up for the Touchstone Professional Services Free Marketing seminar. It takes place on Friday 23rd November in London. I shall be speaking, just click on the link below to sign up: 

How Professional Services can increase productivity without cutting corners

My article in the Times

In case you missed it. Here is the link to the article that I wrote for the Times newspaper on using social media for exporting. It is on page 10 of the supplement.

http://np.netpublicator.com/netpublication/n78647746

Q&A With Marketer Magazine

Following the seminar I did with Marketer magazine at the start of the summer, I have answered some of the questions that we had no time to do on the day, as have the other 2 guest presenters. Here is a link to the Marketer site with all of the answers and below is a transcript of just my responses....

I recently read a blog on LinkedIn where people were discussing the difficulties of gathering statistics about your audience on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Do you have any tips on capturing this information?

 

There is not a perfect solution. Facebook and Twitter provide limited information, but there are tools available that can help you. In fact, monitoring social media and online PR is challenging, not just Twitter and Facebook. There are many sentiment-tracking tools available that scan the web, including social media, for mentions of your brand or products and produce reports. Most of these are subscription based, such as Radian 6 and Buzz Metrics. They are not perfect, but provide a wider view than just individual social media mentions. If you are in B2B, you may well get more mentions on blogs than in social media, so you should keep your analytics as wide as possible.

 

We have a Facebook page and my boss wants us to keep it very bland, with no mentions of client names – she is worried that our competitors will see them. For example, we have to say “pharma company in Swindon” rather than Pfizer. Doesn't that fly in the face of the open nature of social media?

 

Yes it does, however you also need to be aware of commercial sensitivities. You need to treat social media as you would any PR. So if you need client permission to mention them in PR, then you should also get it for social. I would be driven by client issues rather than competitor issues. I am sure there are many other ways that a competitor can use to find out who your clients are (they only need to ask one of your employees for an interview for example). So if your clients don’t have an issue with it, then I would be as specific as you can be, without giving away any commercially sensitive information. If in doubt, check with your clients first. Social media is all about content; you need to have an opinion, a view of some kind. Bland content will probably defeat the object of doing it. So try to persuade your boss to ask your clients if they have any objections, in fact whether you can help them by talking about them in your PR. Find a story or two which helps your client relationships and the benefits with your client should outweigh any information that a competitor could use. If you are helping your clients, why would they want to switch, even if they are approached by one of your competitors.

 

If you operate in both B2B and B2C markets, can you combine your social media approach or should you have a separate presence for each market?

 

This is a good question. It depends on whether you have different products, brands and distribution networks. My advice would be that if you operate in different markets, whether the markets are B2B and B2C, or UK and abroad, or high-end and low-end, then you should have different tailored communications for each audience. Therefore the logic is that you need different communications channels. In B2B you may focus on blogging and Twitter for example, with a B2B Facebook page just being a hub that drives viewers to the blog and tweets or the consumer Facebook page. Content should be relevant and specific for whichever markets you operate in. Your social media activity should be thought-leading, using whichever expert you have in your organisation who has credibility in that sector. Bear in mind that this person may not be the marcomms person. It could be the technical expert, engineer or sales person, for example. 

 

I shall be a judge for the CIM Awards

I am delighted to have been asked to judge the CIM awards this year in the catetgory of New Marketing Talent. I am looking forward to finding about who the future stars of marketing are and what they are doing. If you want to know more then follow @CIMinfo on Twitter.