More information
We get new insights about online branding all the time. This page is where we post some of them. Once a week, every week.Rasmus Bech Hansen's own blog (in danish):
Rikke Nalepa Olesen, Senior Brand Strategist, 25.01.10
There is no single formula for how to use social media in your marketing, PR or product development. But the model below from the course, ”Taking Marketing Digital” at Harvard Business School October 2009, can give marketeers a structured approach to social media. 
1. Immerse
Start to learn the language of social media and conduct small experiments. This will give you the capabilities, the confidence and the support you need from your organisation to proceed with the use of social media. Identify people within the organisation with a passion for social media and make them champion the effort.
2. Reflect
Consider the following questions to define if social media is right for your company and brand:
- Are you prepared to hear negative feedback about your brand?
- Are you willing to change your brand based on feedback from consumers?
- Are you prepared to be authentic and open?
- Will brand advocates appear online and stimulate positive conversation?
3. Define
Set clear objectives for your social media activities and define measurable KPIs. The objectives can vary and most companies use social media to accomplish a variety of objectives. Common objectives are:
- Market research
- Brand building
- Drive purchase
- Leveraging users for product innovation
- Consumers as creators
It is key that your objectives are aligned with your overall business and brand strategy.
4. Engage
Create engaging content with the following characteristics:
Relevant – know your target group needs and the value propositions from your competitors.
Personalized – give the user a feeling of a customized offer. An example is Nike+ that offers a customized home page that tracks the runners’ individual progress and statistics.
Interactive – make it possible for the user to interact with other users or share content with friends.
Authentic – the content should be consistent with over all brand promise, your products and other off-line activities.
Distributed – distribute content across several platforms and websites.
5. Evaluate
Determine the Measure of Success and follow up. The return on investment of social media is not firmly established yet, which is why it is essential to find other KPIs to measure the success of your social media strategy.
Examples of possible KPIs are:
- Time spent on site
- Buzz
- Number of friends (if your brand is on Facebook)
- Consumer engagement (sign-up, downloads, Tip a friend etc.)
- Conversion of click-throughs
Lasse Bech Martinussen, Project Manager, 11.01.10
A great aspect of the web, is the way it allows for people to share information beyound time and place. Paradoxically, a poor aspect of the web is the way the same information accumulates and clutters over time. Despite the excellent search- and filtering services online, we all know that sometimes its just hard to find the most relevant information.
For instance, I like to look at blogs. I try to follow my favorites every day. With millions of blogs available, however, I find it difficult to choose which ones to spend time on. So, in an effort to offer you a helping hand on this matter – lets call it my own little filtering service – I have listed five of my favorite blogs below.
Who knows? Maybe one of these blogs will have just the information you are looking for!
It’s Nice That is a blog that promotes the best work from studios and individuals across the creative industry. The selection is varied but alway high end – an irresistible online source of inspiration.
Magnum in Motion features a really interesting series of photo essays from the world renowned Magnum Photographers. The format that combines photography and audio tracks (typically the voice over of the photographers) poses an engaging kind of storytelling which is excellent for the web.
The Selby is a great blog for looking at photos taken in the private homes of a varied bunch of artists, designers, writers and other cultural personas. The photos are intimate and personal as well as candid and inspiring.
JJJJound is good for browsing through an interesting collection of vintage- and contemporary photos. Although it’s hard to pinpoint, the common denominator of these photos could be labelled, ’things that are cool’ – as in beautiful people, stuff, places and moments in time. Whatever the label, it’s well worth a visit.
Finally Seth Godins blog is a must for everybody that enjoys reading about the era of digital. The best-selling author’s perspectives derives from technology as well as sociology and business, and if you are wondering where the digital age will take us next, you may find clues here.
Anders Hallundbæk Mortensen, Web Developer, 21.12.09
For the better part of a decade now, we have been spectators to the death agony of the music industry. We have watched how they, in every thinkable way, have tried (and failed) to control their content - music.
Now it seems like history is repeating itself - just on a different platform and with a different type of content - news.
The media mogul Rupert Murdoch (picture below) is leading the crusade against 'free' and earlier this year, he announced that users should start paying for content on his 30 media sites starting from Summer 2010. Following this line of rhetoric and mentality his latest conquest is now Google News.
To put it briefly; Google News is the worlds largest News service measured in users. Quite impressive considering the fact that they do not create any news themselves. Google News collects headings and contents bill from established newspapers websites and thereby makes it easy for a user to navigate through the daily news. If a user wants to read the full story, Google News provide a deep link to the specific article on the newspaper's own website.
This way Google News secures newspapers 4 billion clicks a month. 4 billion.
"They are stealing our stories" Rupert Murdoch said during an interview in November 09.
As owner of The Times, The Sun, New York Post and Wall Street Journal he wants to prohibit Google News in collecting and showing news from these newspapers.
Why?
Due to the general downturn in the newspaper business, owners like Rupert Murdoch are blaming Google and trying in every thinkable way to control their content - news.
They do this by cutting off Google News, by adding pay-to-read solutions and generally by building fortified walls around their business.
I am not sure what the logic behind this is. It sure did not work in the music industry and it will not work in the newspaper industry.
Why not try to use the 4 billion clicks constructive instead of shielding them?
Newspapers needs to stop fighting 'free', embrace content sharing and rethink their business model in order to survive.
Times has changed. The music industry already proved that.
The era of intelligent marketing has begun
Rasmus Bech Hansen, Managing Director, 14.12.09
In my experience, a lot of marketing departments view the growth of the web as a major challenge - as a disruptive force that makes marketing more difficult. But in fact the web has the potential to make life easier and strengthen most marketing activities. All it takes is web intelligence.
Consumer research for instance, can be done a lot cheaper and better if firms learn to collect and interpret web data in smarter ways. The web can also support direct sales activities in more efficient ways for instance through clever lead generation. Direct marketing is obviously much more efficient online, not to mention customer service and after sales. Also many aspects of the mobile revolution, e.g. augmented reality, holds great promises for point of sales promotions.
I say, the only activity that the web is really, really bad for is advertisement. People online click away from advertisement, they even get annoyed by it. That type of push communication will only become less efficient as web content gets more and more debundled and widely distributed.
So instead of continuing to put many resources into advertisement, marketing departments, must learn to leverage the online opportunities in new and innovative ways.
Time has come for intelligent marketing.
Katja Norved Hansen, Senior Service Designer, 07.12.09
You already have a website. So, now you may be thinking about getting a website for mobile phones. What should you consider? Below, you’ll find five of the approaches we at Kontrapunkt Online use in designing a mobile website.
1. We design for the small screen
With a variety of different phones we consider screen size, colour, contrast and layout in general and we always test the look on several phones. The amount of content that can be shown on a phone is less than a computer screen and therefore it’s important to understand and address a selection of content. Choices often need to be made in this phase and decisions must be taken on what is most important.
2. Navigation
When designing navigation for the mobile phone we try to simplify the options and (like when designing for PC web we consider the fold) on mobile we try to place the most important information on top of the screen for easy access.
3. Speed and Costs
Users expect the experience on mobile web to be just as easy and fast as on PC web and it is important to address this expectation by not designing mobile websites that are to heavy on graphic elements. Costs is another issue as many users still pay for traffic, this however varies a lot in the different countries it is something we consider when we know the specific target group.
4. Name of the site
All websites both on mobile and PC should have a strong name that’s easy to remember. We believe that having a '.mobi' name makes it easier for users to remember the name of the mobile website.
5. We are designing for a phone
Therefore it makes sense to enable the phone’s core functionalities, like camera, use of phone numbers etc.
The true or false of Facebook
and Twitter
Rikke Nalepa Olesen, Senior Brand Strategist, 30.11.09
Most business leaders ask themselves: How do we deal with the world of social media? Many self-appointed gurus within this area claim that social media is the answer to everything. In my opinion, it’s not!
Social networks such as Twitter and Facebook are very hyped due to the enormous increase of users over the last year. Therefore we see several companies rushing into activities on Facebook and Twitter with more or less success.
In September I attended an executive education on Harvard Business School with the title "Taking Marketing Digital". Some of the lessons were tought by Harvard Professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski who focuses a lot of his research on how to understand the users of social networks. His lessons about Social Networks were really inspiring and lead to the true or false statements about Facebook and Twitter below:
Twitter makes your customer-service more cost effective
FALSE: Dell integrated Twitter in their customer-service but only experienced an increase in the number of enquiries from customers, because the Twitter feeds they received did not replace the phone calls they got. Twitter only opened up yet another channel for people to get in touch with Dell and therefore increased the total number of customer enquiries.
Facebook is the place to push product promotions and increase sale
FALSE: Your fans on Facebook are willing to pay full price for your products because they already love your brand. Offering them products at a discount only reduce the revenue you already get from this group of fans. Instead you should push new products or limited editions to your Facebook fans.
Facebook and Twitter are cost effective channels for market research
TRUE: ...but with a caution: On Twitter 90% of the content is created by 10% of the users. Therefore a market research on Twitter would not give you a representative picture of a target group. Instead you would get the opinion of the few that like to talk whenever they get the chance. On Facebook you can get a more representative picture of what you loyal customers think because the content here are created by a larger group of people. Keep in mind though - you won’t get the opinion of the people that do not support your brand today but potentially could in the future.
Facebook is perfect for targeted banner ads
FALSE: Yes, you can target you banner ads down to the smallest detail on Facebook, but the problem is that the click rate is far lower than on other sites. Imagine if you were at a dinner with your friends and a stranger enter the room and tries to sell you something! That would probably not work very well.
Facebook is a platform for peer to peer recommendations
TRUE: Turn your Facebook fans into brand ambassadors and give them something that they can share with their friends while they at the same time promote your brand and encourage their friends to become a fan of your brand as well. Learn from Starbucks that gave their fans coupons to a new ice cream that they could send to their friends.
People on Facebook want the same as they want in the real world. They want to better the relationsships with their friends, and they want to meet new friends. So if you - as a marketer - can offer the users of Facebook a product that help them become better friends you are on the right track!
Rasmus Bech Hansen, MD, 23.11.09
Most companies fail at online branding for a simple reason: they don’t have a good digital product. As in the physical world even the best branding programmes in the world fail if the product isn’t good.
You won’t succeed online without offering anything interesting and substantial. Many companies use banner ads to lure people to their main sites, but their sites often work as pure glossy electronic brochures. It’s like inviting people to a store and then only show advertisement to the visitors who bother to come by. For sure, they won’t return.
Push strategies, that in different formats have served companies well on tv, radio and on the print media, simply don’t work online. All statistics show that people click away from banners, flashy campaign sites and other types of one-way communication on the web. There are too many things to do online to waste time on advertisement when you don’t have to.
So before a company starts thinking about increasing their investments in online marketing, they need to think strategically about their digital presence. Simply put; they need to make sure they actually have a great digital product.
Learn from IKEA, Nike and Apple
Unless you’re not a company with an existing digital product, such as media, music and game companies, the challenge is to develop a product or service that complements and increases demand for your core products (you can of course also sell your offline products or services online at knock down prices, but this is often a dangerous cannibalization strategy).
There are a few good examples of companies who have succeeded in building great online products that increase demand for their other products.
IKEA offers planning tools on their website that empower people to decorate their home in a better way. This indirectly fuels demand for IKEA’s products and increases traffic in the stores. With the intelligent Nike+ service, NIKE offers a free product that helps runners improve and share their running experience. This again fuels demand for Nike’s running shoes.
Apple’s iTunes is a third good example. Contrary to IKEA and Nike, Apple has made a business in itself out of its digital products and services. In the long run this might be the best, but also the most difficult, way forward.
A wealth of opportunities
The good news is that the web offers a tremendous amount of opportunities for developing great innovative products. I have yet to meet a company who doesn’t have a dozen of obvious services they could offer online.
The bad news is that this is a much more difficult, creative and strategic challenge than creating a cool-looking online branding campaign. It requires completely new web competencies. But for companies who want to grow and achieve brand leadership in an Internet dominated world - its the only way forward.
Anders Hallundbæk Mortensen, Web Developer, 16.11.09
At Kontrapunkt we have a long and proud tradition of branding clients through type faces - fonts. We believe that a unique font has a recognizability and flexibility which combined is an invaluable branding tool.
In an online context, using this way of thinking often means going up against a brick wall. Mostly due to the fact that Internet standards are determined by the lowest commen denominator. The list of ’web safe fonts’ is not particular comprehensive which means that the brand value in these fonts have been totally depleted and exhausted for years.
Of course there are ways to render and use unique fonts online like cufón and sIFR. We do it ourselves in our left menu and other places on this site. However none of the existing methods are particularly effective when it comes to paragraph text. Readability and usability are two key factors when developing websites today and rendering paragraph text unselectable or like Flash is just not an option.
Well – the Internet just got upgraded. Lucky us!
TypeKit offers a wide selection of fonts that are applicable everywhere on the Internet. I will not get into any technical details, but I will say, from a web developers view that it looks very interesting and scalable. In our work with brands online we now have a much wider range of fonts available. Fonts we can use without compromising the user experience as the text behaves exactly like the user expects it to.
Today TypeKit chooses which fonts to make available. The next step would definitely be for them to allow users to host and use their own fonts – the Kontrapunkt font perhaps?
Let’s go beyond Verdana!
Tapping into Brand Community Innovation
Lasse Bech Martinussen, Project Manager, 09.11.09
How can Brand Communities organized around User Innovation be so successful?
Take Dell Computers’ “Ideastorm” or Starbucks’ “My Starbucks Idea”. These two Online Brand Communities have things in common that make them successful. Each website has generated way over 10.000 ideas, close to a 100.000 member comments and ½ a million votes. The phenomenon has even earned its own name; Brand Community Innovation (BCI). BCI happens when companies invite their customers to collaborate on the co-innovation of their products on websites specifically designed for the purpose.
Ideastorm and My Starbucks Idea are first of all successful because they cater for a shared consciousness among members. They identify themselves as groups of Dell users or Starbucks consumers. The actions, rituals and moral within these groups act as symbolic identification for the online communties as a whole. In other words, members use the same products, so they have something in common to talk about! Dell and Starbucks are simply there to nurture the conversation and benefit from the innovations in it.
Secondly, Ideastorm and Starbucks are successful because they have a specific purpose. They motivate the members to innovate. Why do members care? Because their product innovations can lead to better lives as consumers. Better PC’s, better lives! The role of the companies as moderators of the conversation is the third criteria for success. By providing members with ongoing feedback, the members feel they are being heard. They feel their innovations matter.
Hundreds of news ideas from members have been implemented on both Ideastorm and My Starbucks Idea. Its a win-win situation for both parties! The possibilities for similar initiatives seem endless, and tapping into the ressources of your customers can pose a major competetive edge in the future.
Touch me if you can
Katja Norved Hansen, Senior Service Designer, 02.11.09
How come all mobile phone manufacturers these days are focusing on touch screen technology?
It’s been all over the news for a long time. "Nokia challenges iPhone with a touch screen cell phone" and "LG unveils New Touchscreen Phone, the GD510". The news are about the same challenge. That is, challenging the iPhone market dominance and trying to win customers by launching yet another, but better touch screen.
But what do touch screens do for the user experience? The touch screens enable a significant different user experience. It allows for a more user friendy navigation, especially for elderly and disabled people. The bigger touch screens give the user a better browsing experience. Following this development, the mobile Internet will soon be bigger than the existing web. The devices also become more engaging and playful. For instance with sensors built in to the phones, they are already becoming serious gaming devices.
The touch screen phones are here to stay and they will make it a lot more fun to experience the real and digital world around us.