Last week I attended the WebForward Conference in Sydney (which itself is part of the larger CeBIT Australia Exhibition). It was a really good event during which I got to hear from and meet a lot of interesting people.

The conference had two streams: social media and mobile. I hopped in and out of both streams and here are my notes from the talks that I attended.

Latest trends and techniques in the on-line marketing space and a look into the future

Speaker: Tony Keusgen, Head of Technology - Australia/New Zealand, Google
Why is there still a difference between ‘traditional’ and ‘digital’ marketing in a corporation’s budget? Why is digital still considered to be “new” media?
There’s a huge correlation between offline marketing and online searches
- For example, if you were to place your ad on a number of city buses you could tell, by analyzing Google search on the relevant phrase (assuming its unique enough), when those buses first hit the streets
Predictions for the future:
- 80% of screen time will be digital
- Mobile devices will enable two-thirds of purchases and pay for half of them
- Consumers will have more power and 80% of future engagement will be opt-in and 2-way
- Real-time will play a big role; already 30% of Australians consumers access the web via their mobile phones while in a physical store
Use evidence-based marketing; don’t assume you know what the market wants
Don’t be scared to experiment with new things and try new ways of doing things (it’s okay to fail, stop what you were doing, and move on to other ideas)
12% of all Google search queries in December 2010 came from mobile devices
Location marketing is key: A third of all searches conducted on mobile devices are location based
In the US, a quarter of all searches conducted on mobile devices were voice based
Think about doing how-to videos on YouTube
- 2.4 million search queries per month on YouTube for how-to content
- 32% of videos watched on YouTube are of how-to content

Integrating a mobile strategy into your marketing plan to cover multiple channels

Speaker: Antonio Addario, Manager - Direct Channels Strategy, Efficiency & Innovation, ING Direct
The online magazine Mobile Marketer is a great resource
Some of the steps you need to take to figure out your mobile strategy are:

Do lots of research (e.g. find out which apps people are willing to pay for in various app stores)
Know your customer really well (both the people and the technology they use)
Define your success
Identify the key capabilities of all your online and mobile offerings; then select the ones you want to offer on your mobile platform
Evaluate your development options (i.e. reuse/buy/build)
Do plenty of promotion for your new offering
Get your mobile offering to upsell for you (e.g. tell people to your other services from within the app)
Measure success (KPIs, adoption, etc.)
Listen to your customers and make the improvements they want

Utilising mobile marketing to promote your product or service

Speaker: Julian Peterson, Marketing & Online Director, Time Out Sydney
Time Out is 40 years old in London but 3 years old in Sydney and 6 months old in Melbourne
A branded app can work well if your brands are similar and have the same core target audience (Time Out’s app is cobranded with Smirnoff)
Time Out Australia used the app platform already built by London (which, as it happens, was work done by an Australian firm) so that made life easier for them
The app does curated content and is really popular with their targeted audience

Recognising the benefits of mobile marketing to drive innovation and growth

Speaker: Nandor Locher, Manager e-commerce, Virgin Australia
A lot of the time, when you’re doing mobile marketing, you’re not really being ‘innovative’ in the true sense of the word
It’s critical to focus your efforts on the unique advantages offered by mobile technology
Mobile offerings are becoming part of a company’s larger product offering and are not just another marketing channel (e.g. like being able to check-in to your flight from the web, being able to do travel stuff on your mobile is now part of the broader travel services product offered by airlines)
Mobile is becoming a ‘hygiene factor’ in the travel industry; i.e. if it’s not there, people will go to your competitor
The ROI from the mobile offering is low so, for Virgin, their offering is largely a medium- to long-term brand and product augmentation investment
It’s important to have a brand presence in the various app stores
Integrating mobile with social media is important; particularly since social media is used so heavily in the travel industry
Thanks to mobile devices, downtime has become the new uptime (e.g. Virgin increased sales by 150% by moving their happy hour sales to a downtime period for the target market)
Depending on your offering, the usage and usefulness of mobile websites is sometimes greater than that of native phone apps (which many people download and then never use)

Understanding how to drive your brand via mobile

Speaker: Stephanie Carrick, Senior Producer, Triple J Unearthed
Triple J Unearthed is one of the largest online communities in Australia (250k registered users)
They had to had a mobile presence (18-35 is their target market, after all)
Their app focuses on users listening to music (i.e. they focus on their core value proposition)
All their music content is available for downloading (for free)
The app is a huge success, with over 420k downloads in 18 months
Because of the app, they’ve seen a 50% sustained rise in traffic to their website (i.e. they’ve tapped a whole new audience that was inaccessible via radio)
It’s crucial to have app maintenance budget because you will need to update it regularly from now on

Using Augmented Reality Technology to promote your business

Speaker: Glenn Cooper, Executive Chairman, Coopers' Brewery
Brand and brand history plays a huge role in the decisions companies make (particularly in family owned businesses like Cooper’s)
Doing a mobile app – that too, an augmented reality app – was a huge change for the business
This worked well for them because they used it to promote their low carb beer which itself was a huge change for the business (as they are known for their dark beers)
The app helped their marketing promotion be completely under their control (i.e. not under the control of the physical store retailers)

Joining the social media conversation about your company

Speaker: Kristen Boschma, Head of Online Communications and Social Media, Telstra
There are different types of social media programs (i.e. they have different objectives); for example:

Listening
Customer Care
Thought Leadership
Marketing & Sales

The most important part of a listening program is to actually listen (and not jump in every time you’re mentioned or talked about)
A key phrase to remember in social media engagements is “What’s the gift?” (looked at from another angle, that’s the answer to a customer who wants to know “What’s in it for me?”)
Social media is an ecosystem: you must treat it with respect (i.e. don’t pollute it)
In order to get stuff done, you need to have a burning platform
Social media has worked really well for Telstra: 31% of all their online conversations now happen on Twitter
All employees at Telstra have to take and pass their online social media course (yes, all 40k existing employees had to do this)
Sentiment tracking is good, but make sure you provision for human coding in your budget because algorithms don’t understand sarcasm (of which there’s a lot online)

Developing social marketing strategies to transform your organisation

Speaker: Paul Borrud, Head of Australia & New Zealand, Facebook
3 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook per month (globally)
Australians spend an average of 7.5hrs on Facebook per month
Facebook in Australia

10 million active users (i.e. use the site once in 30 days)

68% return daily, 86% return weekly

53% of users are female
The age spread is about even (approximately 17-25% for each of the five major age brackets)

Facebook lets people connect across borders really easily
Facebook is about reorganizing the web around people

In the 80s, the web was all about browsing
In the 90s, it was all about search
Now, it’s all about people

Even gaming is reorganizing around people
43% of all news sharing now occurs in social media
Businesses are reorganizing around people as well; this includes new product development, customer service, and marketing
There are three types of marketing:

Paid (e.g. newspaper ads)
Owned (e.g. websites)
Earned (e.g. word of mouth)

Earned is the hardest to get, but is also the most powerful
Facebook lets you do Earned marketing at scale
‘Fans’ are the new popular metric to quote (like ‘Hits’ was popular in the 80s and 90s)
‘Social’ is not the salt in the fries, it needs to be baked into the product

Panel Discussion: Maximising the opportunities given by social media strategies

Speaker: Joe Millward, Innovation Manager - Social Media, Gloria Jeans International; Kristen Boschma, Head of Online Communications and Social Media, Telstra; Paul Borrud, Head of Australia & New Zealand, Facebook
Ask yourself: What is it that the social media platform can do for you that other platforms can’t?
Telstra has three rules for new social media ventures:

You need a six month content plan
You need someone to run the conversation (interacting at least twice daily)
You have to have a back-end system to deal with questions, complaints, etc.

Remember there are two kinds of social media interactions:

Individual (e.g. my bill is wrong)
Institutional (e.g. your billing system is wrong)

These need to be handled differently (e.g. you need to be prepared to have individual interactions after hours as well as during work hours)

Introducing location-based mobile applications into your marketing strategy

Speaker: Gary Daly, National IT Manager, Surf Life Saving Australia
Surf Life Saving needed to get the beach safely message across to high risk beachgoers (specifically, males aged 16-35)
Their app has two messages:

Primary: be safe
Secondary: get involved/donate (they are a non-profit that is run by volunteers and relies on donations to function)

The app uses the phone’s GPS location to deliver targeted messages
They use web services in the back-end to collect all the information that gets presented (e.g. they get weather data from the Bureau of Meteorology and beach data from their internal Surfcom system)
Build into your app the ability to collect feedback – this will be vital to future app development
A good mobile site is more cost effective than creating an app because the latter needs to be constantly updated

Panel Discussion: Keeping up with latest techniques and trends to gain competitive advantage

Speaker: Gary Daly, National IT Manager, Surf Life Saving Australia; Tony Keusgen, Head of Technology, Google AU/NZ; Andy Ridley, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Earth Hour
Google’s big bet is mobile (hence Android and Wallet and all their other mobile related services)
Three key elements for location based services:

Local
Social
Mobile

Evidence based marketing is very important
It’s important to go where you users are (e.g. websites, devices, platforms, etc.)

This includes following their usage-time patterns; e.g. mobile web usage drops at 9am, spikes during lunch, then drops again till 5pm

Concluding Thoughts

The conference was well organized, well executed, and quite valuable in terms of what I got form it (both information and contacts). I look forward to attending it again next year.

NOTE: All speaker photos were taken from the WebForward website.