I was recently giving an associate some advice on marketing his sons new website. It started off with “make sure you’re targeting your keyword phrases at the audience you want to attract”. It moved on to “chasing the long tail”, which was closely followed by “gaining links”, “consider ad-words” and installing Google Analytics. When I asked if the son had any marketing budget it became apparent the company was a single one-man band that was building up a new business and trying to make a name for itself. Nothing wrong with that, in-fact in my eyes this is to be admired. However one thing is for sure, very few one-man bands have a marketing budget and even fewer have time to spend on marketing even if they do.

Many will therefore decide to use an agency. Which is fine. But when using an agency it’s important you are giving them direction to make sure they are spending their time – which equals your money, on the most productive areas.

Many sole-traders however, will not consider an agency for online activity if they have a bit of knowledge of how things work online. They have used the Internet before, searched on google, have their own facebook page and even dabble with internet banking so how hard can marketing their website be?

Therefore I wasn’t surprised that after I had given some SEO and PPC advice which would keep a marketing team happy for a good few weeks, he asked the inevitable next question…

“OK, that’s good – What else could he do?”

Armed with the fact there was little budget, I took a deep breath and started talking social media marketing. Viral videos, Facebook business pages, Twitter profiles, status updates, Digg it, Like this, Buzz that, Tweet the other… It was all in there. I looked at his face and he didn’t have to say a word, “How the f*** are you suppose to do all that” was written all over it.

That’s when it struck me that an awful lot of companies, not just one man bands, will be trying to cover everything in a blind panic that if they don’t they are missing out. I’m not going to argue that the media multiplier effect works. But is it the best use of the marketing coffers to spread it over all forms of media?

The answer is of course simple. Yes… If it works! No… If it doesn’t.

Social media is just that – media, just the same as the telephone, carrier pigeon, postal service or smoke signals! And in turn needs to be measure and quantified in exactly the same way as any other marketing channel (although, good luck measuring the impact of smoke signals!). It may be new(ish) and exciting but it hasn’t necessarily made the revolutionary changes everyone seems to attribute to it.

It boils down to spending the time you have most productively. Which can only be understood through measurement of your activities.

Many people attribute social media with Barrack Obama being in power today. I don’t.
If the massively impressive PR train that was employed for Obama wasn’t using social media they would have been using other channels. Who knows which would have been most effective?
There are too many variables in this case to truly understand if social media had the impact many say it did.

If we look back to a time before social media there have been figures that have changed the world quite easily without one single tweet or status update.  I’m sure Martin Luther King would have had a Facebook page during the Civil Rights era if it had been around. That wouldn’t have meant Facebook caused social change.  It appears the founders of social networking sites would have us believe they have invented a media channel that is far superior to anything we have experienced before.  And this is the reason it is capable of such great things.  I believe it’s simply these now multi-millionaires are simply shouting louder than inventors of the past.  Just think how many important decisions have been made over the humble telephone.  Yet I don’t hear anyone attributing wars that have been won, disasters that have been averted and lives that have been saved to the humble dog-n-bone, do you?

Social media marketing is a worthwhile channel, but only by measuring its impact when compared to other forms of media can you know if this is the channel you should be investing your valuable time in.

This is why the single most important piece of advice I gave my associate was to install Google Analytics.  Unfortunately I suspect it is the one piece of advice he may act upon but never follow up.  To delve into Google analytics and use it to ensure you are choosing the best suited media to your campaign takes time and a lot of it.  Time that a single person battling to make a new company work just doesn’t have.

So within the next 24 hrs we are going to be witnessing the dawn of a new era, the phoenix rising from the flames, the revenge of a scorned facebook victim! Well, maybe nothing quite so dramatic. But we will be exposed to the all new myspace.

With an all New logo (which i’ve already blogged about) and what is promised to be a new cleaner design to “showcase you and your interests”, the new myspace will apparently be more magazine-like for content and more tv-like for video. This all sounds good to me as I felt the current design was a mishmash of widgets and content you were interested in was too hard to find.

I hope that myspace has found something of a middle ground between control of the design and flexibility of allowing customisation. In comparison to the current mobile os’s, a sort of in-between an ios platform and android. If they have they will be on to a winner.

Myspace will let you add friends and then make it as easy as possible to share your discoveries of music, games and tv shows. This will be building a massive pool of data in the background which will be analysed to push you recommendations based on your interests.

The new myspace will also let you Sync all your social accounts for simple sharing across networks. Myspace are obviously hoping you will use their website as your hub rather than leaving to talk about your interests.

To me this all sounds very impressive and a much needed step in the right direction for myspace. What has surprised me though is the marketing, or rather the lack of it, surrounding the launch. A fair amount of coverage online was made of the logo change, but apart from that nothing much has been announced about the new myspace. Certainly not when you compare the coverage a new feature like “Facebook Places” received.

This just goes to show how much ground myspace has lost over the last few years. I only hope this new site can help it grow once again into the powerful online presence it once was. This will only be a good thing for the Internet as too much emphasis is now put on facebook and google – we need some competition!

A re-brand rarely comes when a company is thriving. If Google, Facebook or Apple re-branded today there would be more than a few raised eyebrows.
A re-brand often occurs when a company needs to revitalise or force a change in direction to once again steal a lead on the competition.

That’s why re-branding comes at more of a cost than just agency fees, consultants and re-tooling for their shiny new look. The real cost is in the customers perception of a re-brand. A brand is more than just a nice looking logo, but it is inevitably the logo that should define the brand.

This is why the aesthetic appeal of a logo is so vital to a companies success. Ask anyone in marketing and they will tell you the best brands in the world are those that a clean, simple, unique and distinctive. The big 3 I mentioned at the start of this blog tick all of those boxes… but then so did GAP and pretty much so did MySpace, yet they have both recently decided to re-brand.

The reasons why we rebrand and what makes a good brand are clear, but should we ask MySpace and GAP if re-branding is the right thing to do? Well, let’s see if we think they’ve done a good job before we start thinking they’re experts in re-branding.

Gap Old	Gap New
MySpace Old	MySpace New

Let’s analyse the two.

GAP – Both old and new tick all the boxes in being simple, clean, unique and distinctive. However I have to question why GAP have re-branded their 20 year old logo at all. This updated brand stands for nothing new. As far as the design is concerned I have no problems and given time, it will no doubt become as recognisable as their old incarnation – but that hasn’t achieved anything.

As far as the brand is concerned GAP will only be at the same point they are now 10 years down the line.

So why have GAP re-branded? Well that’s not too difficult to answer. They seriously need to breath new life into its slumping sales. With their old brand image it would be difficult to imagine any new type of marketing campaign, any new style to their outlets and in turn any new custom. For me it looks like they have therefore decided to re-brand in the hope a new softer logo may present opportunities for a new marketing direction and a new customer perception.

The outcome – in short, GAP fans have been outraged! They have been posting on social sites and forums like mad accusing GAP of creating a logo more suited to a bank than a clothing retailer. I have to agree. The most surprising outcome of this though is how GAP have responded. They have said – “If you think you can do better, go ahead!” (not an exact quote!). They’ve done this by opening the floor to the public to create a new GAP brand. I’m really not sure if this is a desperate or ingenious move?

MySpace – I don’t think we can compare this situation with GAP’s. MySpace have so seriously fallen behind the behemoth that is Facebook that it needs something that is innovative, dynamic and even pioneering to turn around its fortunes. The other aspect that is for certain, is that MySpace will need to do more than just re-brand to make this happen. They need to pull together an experience for the user that in-compasses everything MySpace has to offer into a simplified and uniformed quality online offering.

That’s a big job – but I think this re-brand is a step in the right direction. I know this logo is going to be brutally treated with all sorts of photo-shopped shenanigans posted all over the web. But that is part of its appeal. It will devide opinion and create discussion after discussion on what in the world MySpace were thinking about but again, that’s part of its appeal.

MySpace are saying this is not our website, but yours. Fill in the blank. Make it what you want. With everything that MySpace is trying to offer – this is spot on.

I saw one fantastic comment on the TechCrunch blog about this saying “Only two more characters left and myspace will forever be deleted from the internet”. While this is a fantastic comment, I don’t think it could be further from the truth.
I like what MySpace are trying to represent with this new logo and most of all I like the fact this change is brave.

It hopefully signals a new era for MySpace – and at last competition again for Facebook.

Of course, this is only my opinion – so please take part in the poll below to share yours!