Posts tagged "marketing"

Fairfax Metro Media prepares for the next generation of news

Posted on October 16, 2012 by adobeapac | Comments (0)

Paul Robson, Managing Director, Adobe Australia & New Zealand – LinkedIn

Fairfax publications have been synonymous with quality journalism in Australia since John Fairfax purchased The Sydney Morning Herald in 1841. Fairfax Media is now a leading multi-platform media company in Australasia with metropolitan, rural and regional publications and websites across Australia and New Zealand.

Fairfax Media’s Metro Division has taken a bold and future-focused step, one which many other publishing houses are considering. It’s transforming its metropolitan business into a powerful digital media-based business model that also allows it to remain loyal to its roots in print – something only the combination of Adobe digital marketing and digital media technologies can achieve.

Fairfax Media’s Metro Media division is introducing an end-to-end Adobe editorial publishing platform to power its newly integrated, multi-platform newsrooms for Australian mastheads including The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. The full solution will integrate Adobe technologies including Adobe ® CQ,  Adobe® SiteCatalyst, Adobe® Digital Publishing Suite, content creation technologies from Adobe® Creative Suite 6, along with training support to create a complete Web Experience Management solution.

Like many organisations, Fairfax Media has recognised that effective Web Experience Management is the key to successfully managing, monetising and optimising content on the web. Fairfax’s approach will help its editorial team become much more flexible and efficient with content, and will now be able to create all their content through a central web interface that will automatically output to any platform, including print, mobile, tablet, social and IPTV.

The Adobe Web Experience Management solution will be used by Fairfax to create and author all content, and will feature a next-generation dashboard of real-time analytical data powered by Adobe ® CQ and Adobe® SiteCatalyst that will significantly enhance the way it creates digital experiences for its large and highly fragmented audiences. At a glance, the dashboard will show Fairfax exactly what types and specific pieces of content readers are best engaging with and allow it to tailor the content and advertising of its mastheads more towards the preferences of individuals.

In making this move, Fairfax has given its business a solid foundation to address the swiftly accelerating pace of the local and global media market and prepare its newsrooms for new digital platforms, while also providing a simplified process for its print outlets.

Today’s media landscape has changed dramatically since the Fairfax family first entered the newspaper business over 170 years ago. We have moved from the industrial revolution and into the digital future and Adobe is excited to be part of the transformation of a great Australian company. I look forward to seeing the great content and reader experiences that Fairfax will deliver across all of its platforms.

The Digital Pulse at the Heart of Australian Marketing

Posted on October 4, 2012 by adobeapac | Comments (2)

Siva Ganeshanandan, Director, Digital Marketing Suite, Adobe APAC – LinkedIn, @sivagatwork

“Everything is digital now,” said the marketing executive I was sitting down to have a coffee with during a break in last week’s Marcus Evans Marketing Summit, held on Australia’s Gold Coast. For me, digital is so central to the marketing world I inhabit, that I take its ubiquity for granted. But I noticed that for many of the audience of more than 60 marketers attending the event, especially those from the B2B sector, the experience was a real eye-opener.

What really stood out for me was that for some of the leaders in their sectors – such as Virgin Mobile and Qantas, digital was not thought of as a separate channel that required a specific budget. Rather, it was an integral part of their overall marketing strategy. One senior marketer from an iconic Australian brand said he could see major campaigns in the future comprising purely digital – perhaps even leaving out free to air TV from the mix.

With digital marketing fully bedded down into the marketing mix, not surprisingly mobile and social were the areas of interest at the event.  Social played a role in every case study presentation  – but there was certainly a divide between the consumer marketers who were fully engaged  and the B2B marketers, for whom there was still clearly an air of cautiousness about ‘being on social’. But the ‘digital divide’ wasn’t as clear-cut as B2C versus B2B or large companies versus smaller organisations, or about the size of the budget

Marketing guru Iggy Pintado (@iggypintado) delivered a keynote on social, emphasizing that we need to be able to prove its business value beyond purely marketing KPIs – something that even the most sophisticated marketers are struggling with. Another interesting idea that was raised during the summit was from Justin Papps of Chandler Macleod, who has started using Facebook as a channel of payment to their employees.

I sat on a panel to talk about trends and directions in Mobile Marketing. An on-the-podium SWOT analysis done by the panel together with all the networking discussions confirmed in my mind what the reports say: there are more Strengths and Opportunities around digital marketing campaigns, including social, than there are Weaknesses and Threats. Indeed the biggest threat was simply being late to the party, and losing out to the competition.

Over coffee with my new marketing executive friend, we ran a simple search on Twitter. Sure enough, it proved his brand was in fact already ‘on social’. Just because his organization hadn’t started their social strategy, didn’t mean they were not already in the game. Digital marketing really is everywhere, the opportunities are terrific and the time to integrate is now.

The Marketing Events Awards 2012 – get your submission in now!

Posted on October 1, 2012 by adobeapac | Comments (2)

Mark Phibbs, Senior Director Marketing and Global Channel Marketing, Adobe APAC

The first-ever Marketing Events Awards will be held in Singapore this November and I was very pleased to receive an invitation to join a panel of judges with executives from companies such as Adidas, HSBC, Sony and many more.

It’s an excellent time to be holding awards like these. Even in this digital era, events are still a critical avenue for companies to attract new customers, nurture relationships with their existing clients and boost brand presence and awareness. The difference we’re seeing now is that digital technology and social media have really changed the way we promote, hold and measure the effectiveness of events. We are seeing some truly innovative and ground-breaking ways to integrate technology into events, making them more interactive and memorable. For example, events can be held virtually, online, which will allow communities across time zones and geographies to meet easily. Social media is being used to enrich the experience, spread the word, share your thoughts and connect like-minded people. How many times have you ‘attended’ an event just by following the hashtag on Twitter? Not only do you get a great sense of the highlights and key points that speakers are making, it’s also a terrific way to broaden your own network by getting to know new people in your field of interest.

So are you an entrant in the 2012 Marketing Events Awards? If you haven’t already got a submission in, you can still enter any time until 8th October. Here’s the link: http://marketingeventsawards.com/form_submit.html

As a judge, I’m going to be looking for a strong planning process and for great thinking behind the execution. There needs to be a clear measurement and evaluation methodology. Finally, I’ll be looking for visionary, out-of-the-box thinking that showcases the amazing creativity we have here in Asia Pacific.

I’m very much looking forward to see Asia’s best example of digital events and interactive marketing!

LinkedIn CMO Series in Bangalore – Social Media & Digital Marketing

Posted on September 25, 2012 by adobeapac | Comments (2)

Srihari Palangala, Country Marketing Manager, Adobe India – LinkedIn

I was invited to attend a CMO roundtable hosted by LinkedIn and IAMAI in Bangalore. The discussion table had a great mix of senior marketing leaders from the B2B as well as B2C space, from a varied set of industries. My thanks to the hosts (Jaggi and Dhiman) for an evening of interesting discussions and learning.

The event was lively and everyone was keenly talking about and sharing their experiences in digital and social media marketing. I synthesized three key points, and think these will only continue to grow in importance in the future:

1. Linking digital marketing to the sales cycle: The strength of digital is in analytics , with the opportunity to optimize an engagement through real-time positioning of products/services/bundles to the prospect based on context/relevance. The challenges in the digital marketing era are to stay connected with the prospect (multichannel touch points) with personalized and relevant targeting during the consideration/purchase cycle progression. Remember those internal ROI conversations? They just got a lot more interesting!

2. Content & Engagement Strategy: The strength of digital is how it facilitates open and multiple-way engagement with communities. In this context, the opportunity with digital is the option for brands to be part of the right conversations; and the challenge is to monetize the engagements.

3. Digital is increasingly the Central Pillar in the Marketing Mix: Marketing budgets are under strain across the board; all spend is expected to work harder and produce better results.  As marketers we need to be ready to launch and sustain brands online.

Let’s get geared up and ready for the exciting times ahead!

Social Business Maturing in South Asia

Posted on September 18, 2012 by adobeapac | Comments (3)

Will Bosma, APAC Solution Consulting Director, Adobe Australia – LinkedIn, @wbosma

I have been fortunate this week to spend time with a number a larger enterprises in Singapore and Malaysia discussing their current social business situation and their priority needs going into 2013. These meeting were across a number of industries but there were some strong consistencies across all of them.

They have been on a remarkably similar journey. By and large, they all start with an ad hoc approach to social media listening, engagement and moderation. This ‘experimental’ stage see’s social initiatives disconnected and operating in a silo from all other channels. The measures are nearly always the low level ones that focus on ‘how many’. The fixation is on getting more friends, fans and followers.

The history was remarkably similar – at this stage they are using free tools to try to manage the processes – and they are using a lot of them and in a very disconnected way. And as these enterprises are pan regional, in some cases global; the presence grows rapidly and they have a lot of different pages and accounts all over the place. The engagement is almost completely reactive. Its at about this time they begin to discover that social media is far from ‘free’ and that to be effective they need to do something very much more integrated and strategic.

Pretty much during the past few years they have been evolving into social brands. Marketing seems to own all social initiatives and the focus is on brand / reputation management, marketing optimization -  and the KPI’s now turn more to engagement – comments, retweets, customer posts, ‘people talking about this’ metrics are now at the fore. Now, given that Asia has some of the most engaged audiences on the planet  (see figure below) you would expect that engagement rates are high compared to other parts of the world. And its amazing how pretty much every major brand has a sport or famous sporting team connection that features as an important part of the content and engagement strategy. Popular picks are football (soccer) teams from the English leagues; Formula 1 teams and some events like the recent Olympics.

Some of the companies I spoke to had over 1.5M fans on their Facebook pages and hundreds of thousands of twitter followers.

There is a strong emphasis on outbound social campaigns but with so many channels and presences they are struggling to maintain brand consistency; struggling to keep the engaging content flowing and increasingly concerned about governance.  And today, they have evolved from using only free tools to having a real mix of point solutions. Perhaps some freeware for engagement; a paid tool for social listening; a different one for publishing; and perhaps another for moderation.

And whilst social no longer sits in a complete silo; nor is it completely integrated. I saw examples of specific channels set up for customer service which were separated from the outbound marketing channels but if a customer lodges their complaint in another channel it gets ignored. You can literally see customer delight in one channel and customer anger in another

I would argue that many of these enterprises have reached the operational stage of social business, with a focus on marketing. It’s a more embedded part of the business and there is a lot of focus on campaign integration and even some thought on how to utilize social internally.  But they are struggling to get to the next level.  There is even some frustration within businesses that social has gone too far from a marketing perspective. That investments are being made in increasing levels of social campaigns without analysis of results and comparison to other marketing channels. This was pretty surprising to me.

And as the conversation then moved to ‘where now’ there is again a remarkable consistency in what these organisations have as their priorities for social in the coming year. They want order; they want consistency and they want measurable results – in short they want to move to the next level of social business.

Universally, they want to take social out of its remaining silo and make it an integral part of the business – at least from a marketing perspective. They want to centralize some of the governance around key processes to promote consistency of message and brand as well as ensure compliance with increasing regulation. But they didn’t necessarily want to reduce the number of sites they have.

Largely they see the value in having local presence and encouraging the regional / local business to build its own community. This can be difficult to know how far to go – some banks want to have a Facebook page per branch for example whilst others felt a country based approach is enough.

What they did want though was integrated workflows and permissions where they could create a framework which gave them flexibility to decide what could be decentralized and what should be centrally approved.

But over and above all else, they want to be able to close the loop and measure the results of their social efforts. This is really heartening as this truly indicates to me that social business is maturing and organisations are understanding that ROI can and should be measured on social initiatives – after all, that is a primary reason for all forms of digital marketing – its measurable! And of course, there is mounting pressure from the C suite to demonstrate this return as they all know by now that social media is far from free.

A little while ago I wrote a blog piece on the 10 Commandments of Social Business which a few people connected with.  It seems to me that large enterprises in South Asia are doing well on most of those but as yet have not recognized the needs for a social business strategy, not a social media strategy. But they are working hard now on making social measurable.