Mobile marketer Helen Keegan aka Technokitten has been blogging since the days of yore, and has been working in marketing and retail for even longer. It seems a natural fit that she’s now combining her passion for social media with her passion for fashion by doing some rather interesting online projects with Bicester Village, a chic outlet shopping village near Oxford.

I had the opportunity to visit Bicester Village a while ago as part of a bloggers’ day, in which Helen used word of mouth and tools like Twitter to invite a wide range of bloggers to come along and check out the place, with the hopes of getting a bit of blog coverage. While there, I thought I’d ask Helen about this and her other work with Bicester Village.

So tell me a little about today (bloggers’ day)…

This is the first one, an experiment, to see what bloggers think of Bicester Village and to see what kind of coverage might come out. We’ve invited some people because they have fashion & lifestyle blogs, but we also wanted to reach out to bloggers whose audience was ‘normal people’, because ‘normal people’ go shopping, and we wanted to reach people that other blogs or media might not reach. This is a small experiment; if it works we want to do larger events next year.

Were you inspired by the Stormhoek campaign or other similar ideas?

I took part in the Stormhoek campaign as a blogger, I got my bottle of wine and everything… it’s certainly been interesting to follow the results, but ultimately we want to reach beyond the blogosphere, beyond the influencers, to reach real people. I don’t know how far the Stormhoek campaign reached Joe Bloggs as opposed to Joe Blogger.

Have you been involved in other projects similar to this blogger’s day, aside from Bicester Village?

When working on a mobile launch last year, we persuaded the client to steer away from the traditional press launch and more into a blogger’s outreach event. Instead of a fancy press junket, we hired a room in a central London hotel for the day, and bloggers could drop in for tea & cakes and a chat. It was that relaxed, there were no 1-1 interviews, you could just come and have a chat with the CEO or the tech team. That worked brilliantly well for them, as the people who came were actually enthusiasts, rather than journalists who just turn up because they have to, because it’s their job and they have to tick the box saying they went. Sometimes for these journos to write something meaningful about it, it’s a step to far, but if you’ve got a blogger who’s enthusiastic about that particular interest, and who’s flattered and excited to have been invited at all, to have been recognised for their enthusiasm, I think you get much more careful copy out of it. The result was that the coverage was very different from the usual regurgitated press release, you had people analysing it and covering it in different ways. With apologies to the really good journalists out there, and there are some really good ones, there are also a lot of people who just rewrite the press release, and there’s not a lot of value-add there. I think where bloggers are more interesting, is that they want to add some value, they want to do something a bit different and have their personal take on it.

Can you talk a little bit about the handbag project, which is another strand of what you’re doing with Bicester Village?

Yes, we’re really excited about this one, it’s thrilling. Basically, we wanted to promote the 30 new stores that have just been built here at Bicester Village, and to get pre-December traffic. We wanted to offer people a 10% discount for registering their interest on a website. We started thinking about what we wanted the website to be, and eventually came up with the idea of ‘what’s in my bag’ or what’s in my handbag. It turns out one of the management team does handbag therapy, where she analyses people’s handbags, so there’s a real element of psychoanalysis going on.

We have been working with people at Tuttle Club in London to seed the campaign, and got people to empty out their bags and take pictures of them, and get them onto the website, to help people understand what was expected. And last week Debbie Percy who analyses the handbags, did some live video analysis of handbags at Tuttle and on the street. The reason for the video is so people understand what the handbag analysis involves, so they wouldn’t feel too scared or shy to have it done. Now every week, Debbie chooses a few of the photos that have been uploaded to the website to analyse. Everyone who registers on the site to either upload photos or vote on handbag photos gets a 10% discount, and we’ve already had fantastic success with it. The results so far are already way above any promotion I’ve ever done before, in terms of actual redemptions of the vouchers. Not just people registering and downloading them, but actually turning up and using them.

How have you gone about setting targets and success measures for the campaigns?

For the handbags, it’s about number of registrations, numbers of photos, and ultimately, about numbers of vouchers redeemed – and we’re definitely on target there. For the blogger’s day, “I don’t know” is the honest answer, because I don’t know what kinds of content or coverage we may get out of it. It’s only after we know what kinds of coverage we might get, through Facebook, blogs or other, that I can start to think about how we might gauge that in terms of success criteria.

How has your client felt about going into this kind of uncharted territory without having ideas of measures in advance?

We know we want to have measurements, and this is an experiment to see what kinds of things we should measure in this area for the future. It’s quite easy to measure something like the handbag promotion, because there are hard figures. But with blogging, it’s more esoteric. It’s more about media coverage, but what we haven’t yet worked out is how to weight those different types of coverage and different audiences. I don’t think anybody’s really cracked it. If someone says ‘I went to Bicester Village’ and it’s seen by 1000 people, it’s worth more than if someone writes a really in-depth article that’s only seen by 10. So it’s quite difficult to do that weighting. And moving forward, I’m hoping to work on some blogs for all the different villages, so that will be part & parcel of working out what the actual community criteria are. But the client has been really brilliant about wanting to experiment, and they are committed to getting some learning out of it.

How does this kind of marketing compare with Bicester Village’s other more traditional marketing?

We’ll be comparing registrations from the handbag site to registrations from their email marketing, but we’re using email to promote the handbag site as well, because not all of their audience are Web 2.0 clued up. Email marketing may seem a little old fashioned, but to people who aren’t accustomed to getting 150 emails in their inbox every day, it’s really nice to get an email newsletter, so we have to be careful not to alienate people by using different media for different audiences.

Which leads to my next question: do you think the people who are using the handbag site really represent the average Bicester Village customer, or do you think they are more the usual (Web 2.0) suspects?

Well, at first I thought they might have been ‘the usual suspects’ but so many of them have come to redeem their voucher. At Bicester Village, there are more than 120 shops, ranging from high end designers to high street, so it’s very difficult to say who the core customer is. Also there’s this myth that people who are interested in designer fashion and luxury items don’t do digital. Well, that’s just not true. But there is that myth in the luxury goods world that digital isn’t for them, so we’re trying to dispell those myths and challenge some of those perceptions.

I look forward to hearing more about the results of these social experiments, and will be following the developments so I can keep you posted. At the end of the interview, Helen & I had a nice chat about the current state of mobile marketing, web marketing and social media, so I’m thinking I might edit that down into a nice lil audio file for your aural pleasure

Haque explained that the reason for the huge crash in the financial markets was that Wall Street had sliced, diced and rebundled securities and sold them on, to the point where it was no longer sustainable. What made them fall is that they were doing this ‘remixing’ within an old paradigm. He drew a parallel between this scenario and the new online trend for widgets: after all, most widgets simply take existing content, and slice it up, mix it up, chunk it up and then spit it out for consumption. According to Haque (and I’m in pretty close agreement), most widgets today are just glorified redistribution methods for the same old junk, just streams of ads no one wants, repackaged with the shiny badge of being ‘widgetised’.

Haque went on to say that the media needs to shift out of its old paradigm if it is to survive; the old paradigm being the practice of shoving ads down customers’ throats. In an age where consumers don’t have to watch ads anymore, using widgets as ads just doesn’t fly. Tomorrow’s ads need to give value to consumers, tomorrow’s communication needs to improve or enhance the customer’s skills, not dull them with ’stupid passive zombified entertainment’. That’s a shift indeed, but I do have (perhaps naive) faith. I’m just not sure how long it will take for media to catch on to the idea.

There are some great widgets out there – for example, the last.fm / Google Maps mashup that shows where the bands you listen to on last.fm are playing live. But widgets like this are usually created by the developer community, not the big media companies. And with services like Widgetbox allowing people to create widgets without the need for a developer or any understanding of code, the ratio of rubbish to brilliant widgets is only set to get greater.

What media owners need to do is take a leaf out of the book of Creative Commons and the blogging community, where people regularly give things away for the sheer joy of giving or being helpful to another human being. Take for example, the coolest thing since free wifi itself: Londonist’s free wifi map of London. It’s been created and made public for free, is constantly updated by the steady stream of reader comments in the original post, and is the sheer essence of sharing something useful: ‘giving back‘ without needing to be ‘given to’ first.

Whether or not this concept will fly with the business and revenue models of most media companies, is yet to be seen. I guess that’s what Umair Haque meant when he called for a paradigm shift. I only hope that it happens before the days when today’s young people, who have grown up living their lives online, take over. Because I will probably be too old by then to even remember what the hell a widget was in the first place.

Part 2 in the ad:tech London Follow-up posts

The most common and simplest way to market on Bebo is to create a profile page for your product or brand. Hundreds of these pages exist, but I wonder what percentage of them are ever actively in use. One of the biggest mistakes companies make is to hurriedly stick something up and then realise that they don’t have the resources to actually do anything with the page, explore Bebo and identify potential ‘friends’, or worse of all – respond to requests. Creating a page on Bebo is the easy part; managing the replies, requests, enquiries – and let’s face it – spam, is quite another. But by far, the most successful profile pages on Bebo actually offer something back to the community. Freebies, contests, fun games or useful widgets are sure to win you more brownie points than simply shoving a marketing message up on a profile page and expecting Bebo-ers to engage with it. No one wants to engage with an ad.

The Bebo guy* speaking at ad:tech  mentioned a good example of how to do it right: Fanta ran a contest on their profile page, in which every Friday at 5pm, they would choose someone from their community of ‘friends’ and get their profile pic on the main Bebo homepage for 15 minutes. Their profile pic would also appear on the big ‘neon’ at Picadilly Circus for 15 minutes at the same time. Naturally, the winners were more than thrilled to tell their friends to check out Bebo’s homepage or the lights at Picadilly Circus. The Bebo member gets to have their 15 minutes of fame, Fanta gets some free viral promotion, Bebo gets more clicks on their homepage (and thus more ad views): everyone’s a winner.

Another way to tap into social networks is to harness the energy of your existing fanatical fans. There are hundreds of unofficial fan pages on Bebo and other social networks, set up by regular people who just like whatever it is. It all started when Bebo added a module that allowed members to create fan pages for their favourite bands, but this soon evolved into fan pages for just about every product, service or brand out there. Can you believe that the unoffical Tesco fan club page on Bebo has over 62,000 members, and more than 10,000 members subscribe to the blog updates? Believe it or not, it’s true. And that’s just one of the dozens of unofficial Tesco fan clubs – on just one social network. And it’s not a conventionally exciting brand, either.

When Top Gear decided they wanted to get into Bebo, they noticed that they already had more than 90,000 fans on several Top Gear fan club pages. So rather than compete with these, they decided to involve the 3 guys from Wales who set up the first and largest Top Gear Appreciation Society on Bebo. They decided to give these guys all the photos, videos etc and just let them get on with it. To me, that’s the best way of marketing on Bebo: to let it stay in the community, and be run by the community. These 3 guys would have kept doing what they were doing anyway, so why not let them feel closer to the brand in this way. Furthermore, the folks over at Top Gear only need to be marginally involved rather than running the whole thing and moderating the page, so it’s a no-brainer, really.

Marketing on Bebo or any other social network isn’t for every company, and success rates will vary wildly. But there are definitely opportunities to be had, and I think it’s a much smarter move to tap into existing social networks than to try to build your own. People are far more likely to engage with your company or organisation from within a familiar framework than to sign up for yet another username & password on a community website based around a brand. Would YOU read and post on a toothpaste website’s forum? Don’t expect your customers to, either.

This post is Part I of Thoughts from this year’s ad:tech London conference. More to come as soon as I can type ‘em.

* Possibly Mark Charkin? Ordinarily I would have gladly referenced his name, but he was a replacement for the published speaker, and he’s not listed on the ad:tech site. Let me know if you know who this was.

Large enterprises are slow-moving beasts, and they usually have existing systems that they’ve spent hundreds of thousands of pounds building, configuring and implementing. Any new software project will usually need to integrate or otherwise link up with these legacy systems, and that’s something that not many social tools on the market today can do easily. Furthermore, the business will have spent a lot of time developing relationships with the suppliers of these legacy systems, and it can often be easier (or seemingly more cost-effective) to go back to an existing supplier when faced with a need for new functionality. In many cases, businesses will take whatever’s presented to them by these trusted suppliers rather than waste time exploring whether or not the offered solution is the best tool for the users.

Even more challenging is the circumstance when social software is supposed to replace existing system(s). The business has invested so much in these systems, that it can be very tricky to disentangle the legacy tool, and incredibly complex to figure out how exactly to migrate across to the new one. Plus there’s the burden of training & support. And funnily enough, there’s also the cost factor. Ironically, most social software costs a fraction of what large enterprises pay for enterprise tools, and it’s exactly this that is so off-putting to budget-holders. Most of them have been spending 6 figures on things for so long that they think anything with such a low price tag must be gimmicky, dubious or unfit for purpose.

In a large enterprise, it’s the IT Manager/Director’s job to support the infrastructure, keep the data safe, and ensure technology in the business is robust and reliable. These guys aren’t supposed to take big risks, and that’s just what many of them see when presented with most social web tools. It’s much safer for them to stick with the Microsofts of the world than to embrace some new kid on the block whose reputation is only a few years old at best. The world of “permanent beta” just doesn’t fly when it comes to large corporates; these guys need solid, tested, guaranteed secure, guaranteed working tools. Because if it all goes wrong, it’s their ass on the line.

The formal style of management is also a factor in large enterprises. There tend to be several layers of management in these organisations,  and each of these will have their own KPIs and goals. It can be hard to sell in the value of seemingly “fluffy” benefits like having a more connected workplace or better collaboration and knowledge-sharing. Unless it’s something that can be easily measured with cold hard facts or slots nicely into the SMART system of performance management, it’s difficult to get buy in from all the necessary stakeholders. And without their support, you can rarely introduce new tools into the environment – or see them succeed if you do manage to get in there. When a worker’s manager thinks “all this social web stuff is a waste of time”, she’s much less likely to spend time filling out her profile page, commenting on internal blogs or tagging documents.

I’m not saying that social software doesn’t belong in large enterprise; in fact I strongly believe the opposite. But all of the above means that social software rarely stands a chance of getting through the door in the first place. And getting through the door is just one hurdle: the biggest one is often the corporate culture itself. Social software has the potential to be revolutionary, and can change the very fabric of the underlying corporate culture, moving some businesses from a ’silo-ed’, one-way, up-the-chain communication style, to an open, networked, free-flowing one. This cannot happen overnight, and it cannot happen without active engagement from people up and down the chain. And it’s the scale that’s problematic: it’s a lot harder to turn an aircraft carrier than it is to turn a rowboat, especially when you’re dealing with an intangible thing like attitudes and internal culture.

I’m optimistic that we are at the start of a sea-change in large enterprise, as the Baseline article indicates – but it’s going to take a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get us there.

Our Intranet is a structured (hybrid) wiki powered by ThoughtFarmer… We’ve also been using CommunityServer to drive our internal blogs & discussion boards… We use Central Desktop for a number of things: my own team uses it as a collaborative workspace for all work, from steady-state ‘rolling’ work, to discrete projects… We’re using del.icio.us to do some pretty cool things aside from the usual social bookmarking. For example, our Innovation Digest email newsletter is created from a del.icio.us feed, as is the online version… we’re using Yahoo Pipes to meld 2 feeds from our Typepad blogs to fill the ‘blogs’ slot on our website homepage… We’ve introduced Netvibes to various staff members… We’ve used WebEx to enable our UK Partnerships team to collaborate across distances, often as an alternative to flying…

More info can be found in the full post on the NESTA blog >>

I think the structured wiki approach is a great way of introducing organisations to the concepts of the social web – in theory, providing the best of both worlds: the empowerment and collaborative elements of wikis, with the order and familiarity of traditional content-managed systems. In my mind, this caters for both types of users: the freeform searchers & the more traditional navigators. It reduces the fear of chaos, while still providing a great deal of the flexibility and tools common in other ’social web’ environments…

Read the full post & comment here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >>

… there was one big takeaway for me: Steven Buckley’s intro with the water buffalo story. Check the NMK blog for details, or watch the video yourself…

I love stories like the water buffalo story. It’s things like this and the Free Hugs movie that make all this social web stuff worthwhile.

Read the full post & comment here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >>

Today French politics joined the USA in adopting ’social web’ media as a platform for running political campaigns & debates – only the French are using Second Life instead of YouTube. And here on these shores, David Miliband has once again posted video onto YouTube about climate change, his third such video.

Is all of this a sign of the times, a clear indicator of the burgeoning role the social web will play in our lives?

Read the full post & comment here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >>

Andrew [Orlowski from The Register] stated that the big returns on investment would come from ’solving the big problems of the world’, and that Web 2.0 was never going to do that. I take his point, but who ever said that Web 2.0 was meant to be about solving major problems? In my mind, most of the ‘web as platform’ side of Web 2.0 is about solving small problems…

… So much of what we think of as innovation is about simply tackling an old problem in a new way; the Dyson, long touted as a leading example of innovation, is a pretty straightforward exemplification of ‘building a better mousetrap’. That’s what I think Web 2.0 does.

Read the full post & comment here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >>