What is the correct role of marketing in government? What do we even mean by government marketing anyway?  Is government really anything but marketing?

Since we don’t have any major government business here at MZ, it’s probably safe for me to say that a cut in government advertising is probably a good thing. Wearing my voter’s hat, I have a sneaky suspicion that not all government advertising is entirely necessary. Wearing my professional hat (which is far less fetching, but more pointy), I can’t believe that it’s particularly cost-efficient.

Is TV, for example, the best place to spend a multi-million dollar budget to reduce domestic abuse? (I’m not saying it’s not – I’d need to see the brief before forming a definitive opinion.  I’m just asking the question. Your thoughts are most welcome.)

Notwithstanding thorny issues of funding and access, it’s fine for political parties to advertise to get themselves elected. But once a party wins government, the voters are not prospects any more – they’re customers. So a CRM approach would be more appropriate. And given that we know it costs 7-10 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one, CRM would also be more cost-efficient.

And the best CRM tools are effective personal service and, increasingly, intelligent use of social media. Above the line advertising is not particularly useful.  I’m not sure what the new government’s plans are for these activities, but whatever they are, they should be considered whenever anyone talks of ‘government marketing’.

Clearly, there are some areas where government advertising is necessary. Recruitment is an obvious example. And when there’s a change in the law or a public health issue that needs to be communicated quickly to a mass audience, don’t we have public service announcements for that? (Or do these not exist any more…?)

In any event, there does seem to be a lot of money spent on telling us how we ought to behave. It’s hard to argue with the sentiment – we should all behave nicely. But the medium is problematic. When an unfriendly foreign regime uses advertising techniques to tell its population how to behave, we call it propaganda.

So my question is this: is it a good or a bad thing that the government is cutting the propaganda budget?

Simon is still trying to figure out whether or not he agrees with Nick

For the uninitiated, South By Southwest (or SXSW) is a carnival of creative energy; a nine-day celebration of new technology, music and film. Michel Gondry, Johnny Cash and Mark Zuckerberg are just some of the visionaries that have been drawn to the event over the years to share stories, ideas and advice with us lesser mortals.

2010 saw David join this prestigious list of speakers, inspiring crowds of would-be entrepreneurs with his ideas on unplanning your business. Having picked up a hatful of accolades, he’s back on the list of potential panellists for 2011.

This time round he’ll be enthusing about the spectrum of marketing possibilities opened up by the new-media explosion, explaining how tech start-ups have never been better equipped to turn a great idea into a great business, regardless of budget.

If you fancy finding out more, or want to add your vote for David’s inclusion at SXSW, head over to the festival’s PanelPicker. And, needless to say, if you have the chance to make it to Texas for the event, take it.

Charlie Thorogood is headin’ out west

OK, on second thoughts, maybe it’s best left to the professionals. But if you’re commissioning a web build, it’s worth understanding the process the professionals go through to deliver a site that’s as effective as it is attractive.

Here’s how we do it at Mason Zimbler:

1. What are we designing?
We resist the urge to start designing immediately in order to show you something pretty, quickly. Instead, we ask lots of questions, listen, learn and make sure we understand you, your customers and your goals.

2. Let’s all hold hands
We include you – and your colleagues where appropriate – in the research process. This is really important as we need as much information as possible about your customer base; who’s using your product or service? How? And why? We also think that including you in this part of the process helps build a strong and trusting relationship.

3. Call The A-Team!
After the needs of you and your customers have been established, we form a team to thrash out a solution.  If possible, this team includes you, and encompasses the strong elements of the agency: visual designers, creatives, developers and project managers. We believe that good ideas come from anywhere and there’s no such thing as a bad idea… because even bad ideas can act as a catalyst to problem solving.

4. Lather-rinse-repeat
Always repeat. We never assume we’ve nailed it and sit back to marvel at our creation.  We continuously test and refine our web design until all the user goals are met, even if that means going back to the beginning. Iterating the design is the key to success and is a great way of promoting open-mindedness.

5. Provide the bread and butter, as well as the caviar experience
We ensure the core functionality of the website is available to all users, but we also take advantage of advanced techniques to provide a richer user experience option for those who want it. Websites don’t need to look the same in every browser. So…

• Bread and butter: ensure basic functionality works without Javascript (important for SEO)
• Chicken satay: provide a Javascript site to enhance the experience
• Caviar: add Flash and multimedia to provide the richest possible experience

6. Check out the semantics
We make sure all code is well structured and make appropriate use of HTML tags, and validate the site to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards.

7. Give your best performance
Your site performance can affect search engine positions and user experience. Both Google and Bing confirm that faster page-load times lead to higher views, while slower pages have increased drop-off rates.

This might get a bit techy, but here’s how we ensure peak performance:

• Place any script at the bottom rather than the top of the page
• Reduce the number of scripts used
• Minimise scripts and CSS to improve loading times
• Reduce image requests by using sprites and modern CSS techniques
• Use caching to improve performance of frequently requested content

8. Your website on the move
The mobile web is out-pacing the desktop so we always consider mobile platforms and future scalability. We’ll highlight core messaging and functionality and build your site on a scalable platform, allowing for centralised content to be served to multiple platforms.

For more techie stuff from our Interactive team, check out their blog, The Lab.

This ‘mobile movement’ is already building up a good head of steam. The last 18 months have seen geolocation social networks such as Foursquare and Gowalla take off, particularly the former who recently passed 100million check-ins since launch. These are social games, so to speak, that give you points and rewards for ‘checking in’ to different locations you visit, allowing you to leave recommendations for a venue/shop/restaurant that can be seen by others when they check in to the same location.

These tools have got the early adopters talking, with both experiencing notable growth following SXSW in March. And unsurprisingly some big brands have also decided to trial these platforms as marketing tools, most notably Starbucks who are offering the person with the most store check-ins $1 off their coffee every time they stop by, and Diesel who offered Foursquare users who checked in close to their New York outlet a free t-shirt if they came in to the store. Both campaigns returned mixed results, especially in Diesel’s case where the offer only ran for one day.

With the average geolocation social network user being 18-35 and male, both these brands have good cause to trial these platforms. And we can garner some simple learnings from their experiences: geolocation communications need to be quick to grasp, seeing as they’re being accessed on the go; and should run over a considerable time frame. Just because people are being exposed to location-relevant content, doesn’t mean they have the time to go out of their way to take advantage of an offer – as was the case with Diesel’s one-day-only deal. As with other social media strategies, these offers take time to spread to the relevant audience.

In terms of geolocation social networks becoming mainstream, the recent announcement that Google will no longer continue to support Google Wave shows that drawing the early adopter crowd isn’t enough to carry a technology into the mainstream. Google Wave failed due to its inability to demonstrate how it can easily help people improve what they already do. And if geolocation social networks like Foursquare don’t quickly provide their users with better rewards for interaction, we may see a similar decline.

Ultimately, the full effect of location-based social networking may not be seen until the behemoth that is Facebook decides to enter the landscape. 40% of the time that users spend on Facebook is already via mobile devices, so the integration of location-based elements into their social network is likely to be the tipping point for the masses to interact with each other and brands based on their location – and Ronald McDonald seems to agree with me.

Nick Davies is going places

So how do you make money online today?

The web has thrived on a culture of free and open access to information, willful disregard for intellectual property and a collaborative, inclusive ethos. Without it, we’d have no Wikipedia, no Apple, no Firefox… hell, there wouldn’t even be an Internet.

The news industry in particular has been hit hard by the web’s open nature. Organisations like the BBC and the Guardian Media Group, who have based their business models on a commitment to public service and journalistic independence respectively, have less of an ideological leap to make to fit in in this brave new world. Whereas strictly for-profit organisations such as Rupert Murdoch’s News International are doing their best to change that culture back to one where people pay for what they get.

As of July 1st, The Times online instituted a paywall to lock down their content. Now, it’ll cost you £2 a week to access The Times’ content (£1 for the first 30 days). It’s not a new idea but few have managed to pull it off. Given the myriad free/ad-supported sources of news on the Internet, this is a pretty huge test of reader loyalty.

Perhaps even more importantly they’ve prevented Google, Yahoo et al from syndicating their content. Even paying users can’t share content with their social networks. On a link-based infrastructure like the web, this is tantamount to moving your shop to an underground bunker. In the desert. And stopping anyone from signposting the way.

So how is it going for The Times? Not good. Results last week from Experian say there’s been a 66% drop in traffic and The Guardian is claiming a 90% drop in traffic for The Times. Other sources are reporting only 15,000 people have paid for access. There are no official stats from Murdoch but even the rosiest figures are painting a pretty bleak picture, considering everyone is still in their initial £1-for-30-days phase. Guess what will happen to those numbers when the £2-a-week price-hike comes?

The real question is: do The Times’ subscribers get something that’s really that valuable? The notable examples that have made a paywall model work – the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times – have a specialist appeal that gives a (real or perceived) value in return for access. The Times is lacking that killer USP.

And this same battle is being waged in lots of arenas at the moment: the closed iPhone vs Android’s open ecosystem, the recording industry’s obduracy vs the subscription model of Spotify, Hollywood vs The Pirate Bay…

Everyone needs to get paid somehow but it’s time for more innovative solutions than Murdoch’s.

Shane Casey is pondering e-conomics

Shirky, widely lauded as an Internet guru (no less) heralds the end of the professional content creator’s stranglehold on public discourse. In the old days, he says, there were a handful of people who created media content, and the rest of the world consumed it. Nowadays, everyone is both producer and consumer, giving and receiving freely in a fabulous new egalitarian exchange of ideas and information (it’s just that someone forgot to tell Rupert).

As always when a guru speaks, it’s interesting and compelling. It makes you think “Yes, he’s definitely got a point; and the implications are far reaching and big.” But then I couldn’t help wondering why Clay Shirky, Internet guru, was propagating these thoughts in a book. Like, a paper book. I mean, doesn’t his analysis kinda make the book redundant?

I can think of three reasons why he might have come over all old-media:

1.    Because as a professional thinker, he needs to make his living somehow, and writing books has always been how idea people have put food on the table. You can’t make your living as a thought-producer when all your consumers are also producers, giving and receiving freely in a fabulous new egalitarian exchange of ideas and information (that someone forgot to tell Rupert about). Based on this explanation, Shirky’s book makes itself, by its own existence, pointless. So that can’t be right. Which suggests reason 2…

2.    Because he’s just a teeny weeny bit cynical, gleefully trumpeting the new age of free information, while rather shamelessly charging a not inconsiderable fifteen quid for the trumpet (or maybe I’m the cynic).

3.    More charitably, maybe he reasoned that it’s only the old-fashioned book-buying types who need educating about the fabulous new egalitarian exchange of ideas and information that’s going on without them (e.g. Rupert). No point preaching on the Internet, since everyone on there is, de facto, already converted.

The truth of the matter is there is no fabulous new egalitarian exchange of ideas and information replacing the old fashioned production/consumption model in the media. The media landscape is changing every day, as it has always done. Digital social media is an exciting addition to the rest of the milieu in which ideas are sold, traded or given freely, but it’s not the end product of an evolution that renders all previous iterations obsolete.

So while the radical, sweeping utterances of gurus are usually delightfully appealing and an excellent starting point for a conversation, don’t forget that the guru’s currency is mysticism, magic and unsubstantiated belief. So probs not a great idea to take their prophecies too seriously or literally.

Simon is meditating on the meaning of Second Life

But the blood and broken bones laying strewn in the wake of our past few weeks of training (seriously) belie the more highbrow associations with bees.  Let’s ditch the tough guy image for a second and look at the significance of the bee in mythology. Did you know…

-    The Kalahari Desert’s San people believe the first human was created from a bee.  They tell the story of a bee that carried a mantis across a river. The exhausted bee left the mantis on a floating flower but planted a seed in the mantis’s body before it died. The seed grew to become the first human.

-    In Egyptian mythology, bees grew from the tears of the sun god Ra when they landed on the desert sand.

-    Apollo’s gift of prophecy came to him from the Thriae, a trinity of pre-Hellenic Aegean bee goddesses.

-    The bowstring on Hindu love god Kamadeva’s bow is made of honeybees. Oh yes.

So come on! – let’s make some beautiful honey on Sunday.

Charlie Thorogood is King Bee

They’re inviting entries of anything, from anyone. So there’s no reason why your creation couldn’t soon be on display alongside masterpieces from the likes of Picasso, van Gogh and Kandinsky.

Admittedly, you’ll probably need to go beyond the tried-and-tested ‘kitten on a skateboard’ formula if you want to make the judges’ cut on this one. But assuming you have a half-decent mobile phone and an Internet connection, you’ve already got all the technology you need.

And that’s what I find genuinely exciting about this project: everyone can play.

It’s easy to forget that as little as five years ago, video recording equipment was over-priced, over-sized and over-complicated. Now, you can pick up everything you need to shoot, edit and distribute a half-decent video for the price of some watercolours. Getting your work shown at the world’s greatest modern art gallery is just the icing on the cake.

If you want to find out more about YouTube Play, watch their promotional video or check out their website.

Charlie Thorogood is feeling cinematic

So how do you get people talking?  How do you get them to listen when there’s so much going on?

We say: make it easy for yourself. Get your audience to do the work. Develop a concept that creates an emotional reaction – whether this involves a shock factor, humour, controversy, spectacle or even sentimentality.

And what better medium to use than online video? Taking U.S. Internet users as an example, this April a whopping 178 million of them watched video – that’s 84 per cent of all U.S. Internet users.

If you create a great video people will want to share it with others. You stimulate emotional connections with your brand, which inspires active engagement. That way, you deliver your marketing message through peer-to-peer recommendation. People will talk.

Of course, you need a great idea or it won’t work. Ultimately your video must inspire a strong desire in the viewer to share it with others. That’s where creative reality comes in – you’ve got to know the difference between an idea that’s just good and an idea that will go viral.

As with politics, so with business. And the B2B marketing world is now mature enough to change its way of working.

Agencies that currently work in a vacuum will have more confidence to form alliances with their competitors, and the overriding perspective will change – from threat to opportunity for mutual benefit.

In the tech marketing industry, we’ve seen a lot of inter-agency collaboration.  A large number of our clients have several marketing agencies on their roster.  We are also working increasingly with our sister companies at Harte-Hanks, both on UK and global accounts. So we’re already doing it.

While this isn’t actually unusual – many other agencies work in a similar way – I believe that this trend will escalate hugely across the board, to involve large and small B2B agencies alike, and even collaboration amongst individual marketers.

This can only be a good thing for the industry. After all, none of us is as smart as all of us.

I’d love to hear what you think.

James Trezona is feeling collaborative.