Brilliant Marketing

4 Habbo 100m – chatroom – 31 worldwide communities.

5 hi5 75m – general, Cyprus, Latin America, Portugal,

Romania.

6 Orkut 67m – Google, Brazil, Paraguay, India. Not liked in

USA.

Confused? You should be. MySpace has the population of the

USA pretty well. Eat your heart out NBC. And Facebook

describes itself as a ‘social utility that connects you with people

around you’.

Fact: spam is the biggest communication phenomenon in the

world today. So what was in my junk file over the past two days?

Only 360 messages. Subjects? Sex aids about 35 per cent,

including one claiming it would turn my bedroom life into a

volcano of pleasure; watches about 10 per cent; other luxury

branded goods 10 per cent; gambling 15 per cent; over-the-

counter degrees and PhDs 5 per cent; cheap credit 5 per cent;

Tesco and other supermarket vouchers 5 per cent; travel

offers/foreign homes 5 per cent; others 10 per cent – a motley

bunch including ‘Explore Kent’, Autoglass Repair, Beefeater

Free Meal Offer and free music downloads. All over the place

and a waste of my time . . . the unacceptable face of digital mar-

keting.

Fact:The usage of email is changing.The 18–35-year-old demo-

graphic use of email is falling quite quickly. Fed up with the

volumes of spam and provided with alternatives such as chat-

rooms, instant messaging and social networking, they use email

about half as much in their social and personal life as an older

demographic will. Even at work, where they are obliged to use it

because it is the de facto communi-

cations system, they seek alternatives

when they can (including the tele-

phone).

166 brilliant marketing

the role of email as a

marketing tool is

changing

Digital marketing 167

The jury is out on whether this is a change of behaviour, or an

age-related thing that will not carry across into future behaviour,

but once established, habits are hard to break. So the role of

email as a marketing tool is changing.

Questions you must ask and things you should do

● Does your email support your brand claims using truth not

hyperbole, and admitting errors . . . lie on the web and die

on the web.

● You’ll need much tighter segmentation of your lists of users

than usual to recognise and reward advocates and

complainants.

● You’ll need to mine other routes, like the customer service,

and have a strong engagement with social network sites.

● The average number of ‘friends’ in the 18–25-year-old

demographic in the US in social networking is 102. So if an

email recipient adds something from your email (or the

email itself) to their Facebook page, all these friends are

emailed an alert automatically: ‘Richard has added this

content’, etc. So this gives a multiplier of two orders of

magnitude – plus a personal intro/endorsement from the

Facebook person.

If spam is the unacceptable face then the acceptable face lies in

great Google ideas like Google Earth, which enables you to see

the earth from space down to street-level detail; Google Alert,

which searches specific topics for you on a daily or weekly basis

– your own researcher; and Google Zeitgeist, which tells you

what’s going on and where it’s at in different countries.