The new book… dubbed “The Best Digital Marketing Campaigns in the World – mastering the art of customer engagement”… is coming together nicely, but the deadline for delivery of the finished manuscript to our publishers Kogan Page is imminent.

So, it’s all hands on deck in a mad scramble to pull the everything together… and that means precious little time for anything else… including this blog, other websites, my various social media accounts and sundry other projects I have on the go. I will do my best to post the occasional update here over the coming month or so, but things are likely to be pretty frantic.

We’re sourcing case studies from various places, and will feature a mixture of different online campaigns in the book, from award-winners to more obscure but successful campaigns from all sorts of businesses spanning a variety of industries.

We’re a bit short of time to truly crowdsource all the case studies for this edition – but we are looking for your nominations to help us identify truly exceptional examples of online marketing that we may miss through other channels.

You can use this form to submit your favourite campaign for consideration. We’ll let you know if it goes on to be featured in the book.

Thanks a million for your input.

While it might be a bit early for that, I have to admit that some of the stories they come up with are surprisingly good, as long as you’re prepared to gloss over the spelling and grammar errors endemic to an eight-year-old’s writing. They’re entertaining, have a good balance of dialogue and narrative, compelling characters and even a workable plot. It’s fantastic to see the girls ready to engage with and explore written language at this age, but I guess making up stories is an intrinsic part of childhood, and writing those stories down is simply a natural progression of that.

For the last week or so they’ve been putting their love of stories to good use on the web, in an online competition being run by smoothie-maker, Innocent. The company has taken the classic paper and pencil game “consequences”, and adapted it for kids to play online. Traditionally the game involves writing a sentence on a piece of paper and passing it on to the next person. They then read it, and fold the paper over, hiding the original sentence before writing their own… and so on until the conclusion of the story. The web version Innocent has come up with is much simpler… and all the more ingenious for that.

They asked children’s author Francesca Simon, of “Horrid Henry” fame, to write the first sentence of 26 consequences stories, one for each letter of the alphabet. Every day from the 19th of October to the 12th of November anyone between the ages of 4 and 18 can go to www.innocentkids.com and add a line to any or all of the 26 stories. At 4pm a winning line is chosen for each letter, and the story moves on, with everyone’s free to enter again. The daily winner for each letter receives a set of Innocent alphabet fridge magnets and vouchers to buy innocent smoothies. At the end of the competition the writer of the overall winning line wins a book containing all of the stories and a Horrid Henry goody bag.

The twins are hooked! Every day after doing their homework they scan the entries and come up with new lines for a selection of stories. They spend ages at it, all the time on the heavily branded Innocent website.

It’s a clever bit of marketing by Innocent, tapping in to children’s natural tendency to connect with stories and keeping them coming back to the site and engaging with the Innocent brand day-after-day. As a marketing concept it’s brilliant… even if the online execution could perhaps have been better.

On one level it’s a bit of fun with some cool prizes that exercises children’s brains and nurtures their budding creativity… that’s the good part. On a more cynical level I can’t help thinking that this is a highly targeted marketing campaign designed to build brand awareness and encourage consumption of innocent’s range of drinks by children and, by association, their parents, who do the shopping.

I’m always a bit wary of marketing that’s targeted specifically at young children. Kids don’t have the same filters in place as adults when it comes to making sense of advertising in all its many guises. They’re much more inclined to believe what they see, hear and read. As adults we can look objectively at the message being peddled by marketers, identify the motive behind it, and process it in the relevant context. Children on the other hand are much more accepting, and therein lies the danger.

The Innocent campaign, while not necessarily “innocent”, does stay on the right side of the line in terms of responsible marketing for children. Other brands may not….

Image by lism. via Flickr

Only four days to go before Understanding Digital: CREATIVE, when Damian Ryan and I will be hosting four leading speakers in the online creative space at the National College of Ireland in Dublin.

The event is on Thursday 05 November at 4pm.

On the agenda we have:

• Dave Birss, former creative head of Poke London, now Head of Digital with OgilvyOne in London.
• Nick Suckley, Managing Partner of Agenda21 Digital.
• Matt Butterworth, former Managing Partner, Founder and Digital Strategist with Folk Creative.
• Robin Grant, Founder of We Are Social.
• … and of course the co-authors of Understanding Digital Marketing: me and Damian!

That’s four award-winning digital creative thought-leaders and a couple of widely acclaimed online marketing authors ready to share the secrets of creative online marketing with YOU!

But that’s not all… there’s also a drinks reception afterwards courtesy of Design Week sponsors Bombay Sapphire!

The cost to tap into this extraordinary pool of digital marketing insight, including drinks and a valuable opportunity to network: just €50!

That has to be a bargain in anybody’s book….

So, what are you waiting for? Head on over to the Understanding Digital: CREATIVE site now to secure your place at what promises to be an amazing digital marketing event! And don’t forget to come over and say “hi” .

Speakers at the Understanding Digital: CREATIVE event

Disclosure: Shameless self promotion to follow

As most of you reading this probably know, last year, together with my co-author Damian Ryan, I had a book called “Understanding Digital Marketing: Marketing strategies for engaging the digital generation” published.

The book is doing well… and we signed contracts with our publisher, Kogan Page, last month for a follow-up book. This one will highlight the world’s best examples of online marketing. We’re very excited about it… but more about that nearer the time.

Creative online marketing is the key to better ROI

There’s no getting around it, online marketing is the key to maximising the return on investment from your marketing spend, but to do it effectively you have to get creative. Try new things, analyse the results, experiment, and use the unique measurability of online media to inform your decisions.

Do more of what works, stop doing what doesn’t, and never stop innovating.

Get creative with your online marketing… think outside the digital box… and you’ll reap the rewards. But where do you start?

Well, you could join us at the National College of Ireland in Dublin of the evening of the 5th of November for Understanding Digital: CREATIVE. We’re bringing four of the brightest creative minds in online marketing together to share their expertise with you as part of Design Week 2009, in association with ICAD and Results International Group.

Check out the event micro-site for more details and to book your place… see you there!

Researching the book meant I had to delve deep into the world of the online marketer, and increasingly the mainstream marketing masses who are adopting electronic marketing strategies to reach an increasingly “wired” customer base. And guess which segment of today’s society is among the most connected? That’s right… our children — especially as they enter their teens!

It’s frightening how much spending power teenagers seem to have these days, and with a ready, peer influenced market spending lots of time online, you can bet that marketers are reaching out across cyberspace and reaching into your wallet through your children.

Marketing to young people is nothing new of course… companies, especially larger brands with massive advertising budgets and seemingly limitless resources, have been targeting children for years. Television adverts for toys, games, fast food, snacks and confectionery do an excellent job of appealing to a younger audience, applying indirect pressure on parents to spend, spend, spend.

But there are a few important differences for parents to consider as mainstream marketing leaps the digital divide and brands start to engage with our children online.

• What are they looking at?: When children are sitting in front of the television, listening to the radio or reading a particular magazine parents are generally aware of the kind of advertising they are being exposed to, but do you really know where your children like to “hang out” online, and whether the sort of targeted advertising they’re being influenced by is appropriate?
• How much information are they sharing? Unlike traditional channels like TV, Radio and Print, online marketing is a two-way-street. This is not a broadcast medium, it’s a specifically targeted conversation crafted with the marketers’ goal in mind. How much information is your child sharing with the brands they engage with online?
• Low barriers to entry mean more brands: compared to traditional media online marketing opportunities are still relatively cheap, and because young people are volunteering more information online campaigns can often be focussed to reach a much narrower and more responsive audience. It means more businesses can afford to engage online, which means teens are likely to encounter a far broader range of advertising than they typically do in other media.
• No geographical boundaries: the internet transcends geography — so depending on where they go online, children can be exposed to advertising and marketing messages from around the globe — advertising that isn’t necessarily governed by the rules and conventions that parents take for granted in their own country.
• It’s not just the computer: it’s very easy for parents to assume the computer is the hub of their child’s interaction with the online world, but increasingly mobile devices (like phones, MP3 players and organisers) can hook up wirelessly to the internet. Home games consoles too are often connected… and the in-game advertising your children see when they play the latest games are often streamed in real time from the internet in response to actions taken in the game.

There’s nothing inherently sinister about marketing to children online — in fact, if it’s done responsibly more targeted, measurable, open and accountable marketing can be a good thing. As parents we need to be aware of changes in our children’s use of media, of the way businesses are using digital channels to reach out to them, and the potential impact it can have. Ultimately it’s our job to shield them from harm — in the real world, and the virtual one.

Got an e-mail this morning from our publishers Kogan Page with a link to our new Digital Marketing book on their website.

I’m more excited than I thought I would be. Somehow seeing the book up on their website makes it all seem very real, and I just wanted to share it with everyone.

We’ll be launching a new website over the coming months to support, develop and build on the book. We’re hoping to build a dynamic and constantly evolving, community driven digital marketing resource. It should be quite an adventure… will keep you posted here and over on Digital Marketing Success.

It’s the first in a series of articles I’m doing for the Evening Echo on using the internet for market research when setting up/growing a small business.

Off I went to Google.ie to search for Prince Ireland. The first entry in the results page that was for Prince concert tickets was this one, from a crowd in the Netherlands called worldticketshop.com. All of the right bells and whistles were there… verified by Verisign, SSL secure server, etc. – but the cheapest tickets on offer were for €265, which seemed a bit on the steep side.

This was going to be more expensive than I’d anticipated… or was it?

I went to Ticketmaster.ie, which of course is where I should have gone in the first place, and bought two tickets for €66.50 each (and before I’m labelled a cheapskate let me just say that I looked for the the €89 category, but it had sold out, and the higher priced tickets seemed a bit on the extravagant side – so we’ll be a little way from the action, but hey, we’re there for the music, right?). Total cost for two tickets including Ticketmaster’s do f**k all fee handling fee (who are they trying to kid on an automated website with e-mail ticket delivery?) €145.70. Or about €120 cheaper than one ticket from Worldticketshop.com. Sorted.

What this really illustrates is that you need to be careful what you search for on Google, and shop around before you buy. Searching for Prince Ireland returned a few results for books from Amazon.com, followed by the rip-off worldticketshop.com site. Had I searched for Prince Tickets instead, two of the first three organic results returned would have been for Ticketmaster.ie.

So buyer beware – and remember that Google’s results are only as good as the queries you throw at it.

Apparently this local search engine will help me to find web sites, companies, goods and services in my local area. I haven’t had chance to play with it yet, but it certainly sounds interesting.

I didn’t win on the scratch card, but if you click on the link above or the one below to go have a look at the site for yourself I’ll be with a chance to win their monthly draw for a , so why not take a look, and while you’re there sign up yourself to be in with a chance to win.

It’s an obvious link bait strategy, but hey, last time I entered one of these things I won!

Just had a quick look, and the jury’s out. The results pages are a bit sparsely populated, and I’m not convinced by the user interface… but you decide for yourself.