Unfortunately we had some issues in the call logistics, which meant that some people were not able to attend – but we also had a number of groups sharing connections to listen. So the final number will be a lot higher I think. Either way, it was a pleasure to present this topic to our customers and business partners.

For those that were not able to attend the call, we will be communicating out the recording so there’s always a chance to watch it.

During the presentation I didn’t focus on what social media is, more on the opportunities that it presents when used creatively within a cross-media campaign. I focussed briefly on why this is such an important topic from the marketer’s perspective, and I referenced in several places an interesting report by Forresters.

In my mind there are three distinct areas in which social media can be used:

• Using social media as a broadcast medium to extend the reach of a cross-media campaign;
• Using social media as a way of actually acquiring new customers directly into a cross-media campaign;
• and integrating social media and cross-media campaigns together so they both add value.

Each level offers different advantages and opportunities for both the providers and the marketers. Each level demands an increase in the skills that you need to build these campaigns. However the higher the level of integration, the higher the rewards and return on marketing investment. Looking around the marketplace already there are companies that are starting to offer this integrated approach to marketing, and the rewards are obvious (well to me!).

Have no fear, social media is not going away, nor is cross media marketing. They will, and should come together to drive results and customer interaction.

Over the coming weeks I am planning on adding some more detail to these levels, and give you some ideas of how they can be used in the real-world. So check back in soon. If you have already been using social media within your cross-media campaigns then please share it with me. I am always after good examples.

I’ve spoken to various creatives, service providers and marketers about this technology over the past few months; admittedly because XMPie now supports the technology directly inside uDirect. Whilst they all seem excited about the prospect of this technology very few that I can see are actually using it creatively or at all. There’s a very useful site at http://2d-code.co.uk which covers alot of the technology, as well as many of the examples of where 2D barcodes have been used.

Now that XMPie supports the use of PDF417, AztecCode, DataMatrix, MaxiCode, MicroPDF and QRCodes directly within the uDirect InDesign CS plugin it is easy to insert personalised data into a 2D barcode and place it on a printed piece. This obviously means that any data (from a datasource) can be used to create a 2D barcode. Want to create a 2D barcode that contains someone’s RURL or personalised URL so you negate the need to have them type it in? What about embedded personalised information about a recipient within a voucher code, presented as a 2D barcode?

It’s not an insignificant fact that XMPie’s approach to QR Code is easy. XMPie’s ADOR technology means that any data and logic contained within the data can be used repeatable and consistently within the campaign and QR Codes.

One of the biggest factors holding back the adoption of this technology is the support for barcode readers already installed on the mobile devices – so the initial campaigns need to provide enough of an incentive to get people to spend the time and install one. However with most smart phones and camera-enabled phones capable of supporting QR-Code capture this is rapidly becoming a non-issue.

Hopefully those creatives that would like to implement some form of support with a DM piece or personalised campaign should be able to do so a lot easier now, as all the various commercial printers and service providers that already have XMPie now have this ability. ” Ta Dah”.  All it needs now is a forward-thinking creative team to come up with some good campaign material.

Any takers?

Initially focusing on the public sector, and in particular the education market, where the response to student enquiries to Colleges and Universities offers an ideal application, Customationhas assembled an experienced team with expertise in marketing communication, creative design, content layout, personalisation, web design and development, and print management.

Initially focusing on the public sector, and in particular the education market, where the response to student enquiries to Colleges and Universities offers an ideal application, Customation has assembled an experienced team with expertise in marketing communication, creative design, content layout, personalisation, web design and development, and print management.

Customation uses XMPie to create the customised content.

All organisations continuously search for improvement in the effectiveness of their marketing communications and the Customation approach offers significant benefits over the traditional bulk printing of generic collateral with the associated storage costs and wastage. Building a positive relationship with your prospects and customers while simultaneously reducing your carbon footprint must be an attractive proposition to everyone.
 

Some have spoken about the fact that actually delivering a cross media campaign is the hardest element; whilst others have struggled in actually selling it to to their customers. The vast majority of commercial printers that now have the capability to deliver these types of highly relevant and interactive cross media campaigns; seem to struggle with actually selling the concept into their customers. Some are happy to continually take large quantities of print volume with the relatively small profit margins that they deliver – whilst ignoring the vast amount of additional opportunity that exists in these accounts. Other commercial printers seem to struggle to engage the right people, bring them to the table and move the conversation from ‘product’ to ‘value’. In today’s marketplace it is all about selling the value, linking all the elements together. In comparison talking to some marketing agencies they struggle with actually delivering the concept in a timely and ‘joined up’ fashion.

So here’s my top 5 observations:

• You need to engage the right people - cross media campaigns do not sit with the print-buyer. Engaging at a senior marketing or brand level is critical. It’s a high level sell, that potentially involves multiple budgets and multiple people. You need to identify these people and get them all around a table and get the buy-in to move forward.
• You need to sell value, not product – a cross media campaign should not be a product sell in the same way print can be. Integrated cross media campaigns tend to be non-linear campaigns that involve different forms of communication, at different times sent on-demand or autonomously. They are not one-time pieces, but a conversation that develops around a contact or a customer. Not understanding this and talking about £/per thousand for print, emails, RURLs is not the answer and a dangerous strategy. The answer is in the value of the campaign itself, not in the individual elements that make it up.
• Understand the value of analysis – today’s cross media tools, such as XMPie contain very powerful tools for tracking and analysing a campaign in real-time. It’s surprising how many people do not understand the value of this single element! The ability to track in real-time, all communication and interaction is huge. Add in the ability that you can give the end-customer access to this information in real-time is even larger! What would be the additional value in being able to provide real-time and interactive analytic information back to a customer? £1,000, £5,000 or even £10,000 on top of a campaign set-up costs? That’s pure profit for a huge value-added ability.
• Get the right people internally – putting together a project team internally to actually deliver these campaigns is again critical, and I have seen customers fall onto their knees because they have not done this. As a service provider you need to make sure that you have both the technical skills to deliver the project as well as the managerial  skills to ensure that the project is delivered on time, within budget and successfully. There is also a huge need to have the the right creative skills. I cannot stress enough that the best cross media campaigns that I have seen delivered were because of the both the creative ideas and the creative implementation. It’s not all about the raw data. It’s absolutely about the right ideas, the right implementation and the right delivery.
• You need to communicate at every stage – in the same way that a successful cross media campaign engages and works because of the conversation, it’s imperative that everyone involved in a campaign needs to communicate and converse themselves. Allowing everyone to take part in the design and implementation of a campaign is critical – from developers to designers to the marketing teams. By not allowing this to happen you run the risk of missing something, or at worst delivering something that just does not work. If you work with external agencies or designers, then allow them to come in and work hand-in-hand with the rest of the team. I still find it amazing how many designers are not aware of simply what can be done now-a-days.

Quite simply, the rules of engagement have changed. Many marketeers are still stuck in the perception that online marketing is better than offline marketing, that it is all about mass email marketing and social media. Many commercial printers are stuck in trying to engage the wrong people about cross media campaigns, selling on product not value. By having the right tools, the right people and the right processes a huge amount of value can be delivered in a very short period of time. Highly targeted, cross media campaigns with email, print, RURLs and SMS can be designed, implemented and delivered in extraordinarily fast times (4 days in some cases) delivering huge value and potentially huge profits.

For the commercial service providers ask yourself the following questions: “Do I have the right people, technology and process to deliver this?” and “Are my sales people engaging the right customers, and are they asking the right questions?”

For the agencies and client focused individuals ask yourself, “From my top 5 customers/prospects, do I understand their objectives well enough, and can I engage them with 3 achievable ideas that will deliver them additional value, with 1 very strong value statement?”

If the answer to any of these questions is “no” then you are behind others in your field, and missing out on potential opportunity and profit.

In my mind, it is not a question of the technology any more. If you can think of the concept then the chances are that it can be delivered. The only thing stopping you is coming up with the ideas, selling the value of them to your customers and making it happen.

Thanks to several people for their input to this; @pvantees , @ScottDubois, @tseha, @jeantinb, @FernandoSteler.

Do you agree? Have you overcome some of these issues? I am always interested in your comments.

From directly inside InDesign CS3 and CS4 XMPie’s uDirect plugin has the ability of generating and placing a barcode within the design. I blogged about this a while ago. However this is limited to using those barcodes within the printed piece. I was thinking about how you could use them online, or in an email communication, or even creating them on-mass to use in another process.

Most people seem to be content in creating single QRCodes that are then used. But what about if you want a QRCode to contain a personalised URL, or a unique piece of information linked to that the recipient?

Well, here’s one idea to create barcodes on mass by using XMPie:

• Fire up InDesign with the XMPie plugin activated. (you can always get the 30-day free trial from www.xmpie.com)
• Create a new document of say 50mm by 50mm
• Connect to your database of recipients, or simple create a Counter and use that
• Create a new image ‘Content Object’, call it QRCode, and set the expression to use the fields of your choosing.
• Place the QRCode content object on the page and change the Dynamic Graphic Properties to ‘Fill proportionally and Centered’
• Save the document
• Select ‘Dynamic Print’ in the XMPie Palette and choose, JPG (or PDF) as the output format.
• Select your output destination and records, and hit ‘OK’
• Job done. You should have individual JPG/PDF files in the output destination folder named {filename}_r{record number}_p001.jpg

The only real drawback here is that the files are not named in a fashion that relates to their contents. It would be great if you could produce them based on an element in the database, like you can with personalised images through uImage. Having said that, you can still work productive in this manner, it just needs more careful thought.

Another reason to use XMPie I think!

uEdit is completely integrated into uStore, XMPie’s solution for rapid deployment of branded, e-commerce enabled,online stores without involving programmers. uEdit extends uStore’s document ordering and customization features by allowing real-time, remote template design editing.

What is also great about uEdit is that is can be used as a standalone tool within a custom developed application. Combined with XMPie’s API and programming tools it becomes easy to create, edit and compose custom-made personalised documents.

This screencast introduces you to a fictional real-estate example. In this example you are able to select a template, upload and manage images that the user wishes to use. Then edit the template by editing the text, images and styles. Once the template is complete yu can upload the recipient data and produce the final PDF for downloading.

For more information take a look at XMPie’s website (www.xmpie.com). Thanks to Tim Perrett for recording the screencast.

Whilst at MediaPro the folks at PrintSpeak did a quick 3 minute interview with me over the topic – as it was creating some ‘buzz’ on the floor’

So I thought that I would share it with you all (and thanks to PrintSpeak for enabled the ability to embed their videos into posts for me!)

The campaign was tightly integrated into what we (XMPie) were doing at a UK trade show (MediaPro Expo 09) and was specifically targeting people to allow them to jump the queues and get a ‘VIP’ badge to attend the demonstration.

This campaign was exclusive to Twitter; which meant that anyone that wanted to experience it had to be a member of Twitter.com and they had to follow the account that we had set up. This again kept the campaign contained to a particular medium. When the campaign was initiated we seeded the viral element on about 5 twitter accounts, and we created a small press-release that went out.

Everyone therefore came into the campaign by responding to a viral message promoting the campaign or came in because of the press-release. There were a few that responded because of word-of-mouth.

Looking at the final results I believe that the viral element to the campaign was ‘potentially’ seen by 20,000 – 30,000 people. I say ‘potentially’ because only a small percentage of people will actually read every ‘tweet’ that they see from someone they are following – so the chances of seeing the viral tweet from the campaign was small. To that effect I cannot really draw any conclusion – except that the potential audience was relatively confined and small (in comparison to what it could have been if we had continually tweeted the viral element).

140 people responded to the call-to-action and followed the Twitter account that we had set up – but only 110 (79%) of those people actually came into their personalised website (RURL), which is interesting. I can assume therefore a good 15-20% of those that followed the account were automated bots or accounts looking to grow there ‘followership’ (by hoping we would follow back). There were a few that simply didn’t realised that we had sent them back a direct message and that they needed to click on the link!

Out of the 110 people that came into their personalised website 90 (81%) of them actually clicked on, and went through the process of authorising via Twitter. By doing this it enabled us to do two things within the campaign. Firstly it enabled us to validate who they were (so that we could collate more, valuable data) and it enabled us to send out the viral ‘tweet’ on their Twitter stream.

So, to that effect we only sent out approximately 85 viral tweets, promoting the campaign (excluding the seed tweets that we started from).

It was hard to gauge at the show itself how many people actually came in and presented their Twitter VIP Badge – primarily because we had such a slick set-up that no-one actually needed to jump the queues! There were certainly a few people waving them about. But, if I am honest that was not the sole intention of the campaign. The proof that this could be done and the buzz that doing it has created was the real goal. MediaPro was a vehicle upon which to base the campaign.

Talking about the buzz, the campaign has created some very interesting conversations – both on Twitter and externally. Whilst the campaign pulled in complimentary comments it also pulled in some negative comments. Primarily people were objecting about the way in which we implemented the viral elements. The most notable of which can be followed on the Print CEO blog, written by Eric Vessels from WhatTheyThink.com.  Reading all the comments from those that objected they did so because of the way in which we virally ‘tweeted’ out, although the campaign asked people to essentially ‘opt-in’ and agree to the viral element. This campaign however did not give them a choice of entering without virally tweeting, or editing the tweet that was in-turn sent.

It is interesting – the majority of those who objected were the long-standing Twitter users (Tweeple) who tended to use Twitter as a medium to enhance their personal branding. In this instance, although the viral tweet was informative and not overly assumptive it was not the words of the those that were apparently sending it.

I personally agree with these comments – tweeting virally on behalf of someone needs to be approached with great caution. I appreciate that their are hundreds of third party sites that actually do the same  on a much larger scale), but people probably either expect it with those services, or they are not as concerned about their personal branding. That said, it’s probably the one area that I would change it I did things again, providing more choice about the viral element.

With all said and done – the campaign was a huge success. We secured new prospects from the back of it (and hopefully future business) and we proved once again that XMPie is pushing forward in this industry forging new ideas and pathways within the Cross Media marketplace. This is the start of Cross Media 2.0 in my opinion. The merging of integrated cross-media and social media.

It is possible to use social media as a out-bound communications channel – however this is not what we did. We used Twitter to create a buzz, and asked anyone that was interested to express that interest by following us. Only then did we start immediately engaging them in conversation and drawing them into the campaign. We did not send out 10,000 emails (spray and pray) to try and gain some interest, we used Twitter in way that said, if you are interested then come and express that interest and then we shall engage you in conversation.

Think about the possibilities:

• A University or college could set up Twitter accounts directed at general admissions (UniOfLifeAdmissions for example) and anyone that followed that account automatically received a personalised website (RURL) that allowed them to ‘formally’ express an interest and receive a personalised prospectus pack – with follow-on communication about open-days and events!
• What about a corporate organisation who sent out personalised website (RURLs) to anyone that followed them effectively creating a personalised website for anyone interested in that company? The website could collect more information, suggest subscriptions to other news sources within the organisation – or even direct people in the right direction to other more relevant areas based on their personal interests.
• What about a book publisher, looking to promote a new book. Anyone that followers the author’s or publisher’s twitter account gets pulled into a campaign to engage them in conversation about the book, collecting data and allowing people to share it amongst others? Maybe even offering a personalised copy of the book as an incentive.

To me Twitter is about following the people that you are interest in, or aspire to become – and about promoting yourself and engaging in conversation. Integrated Cross Media is all about engaging people in conversation across different forms of media. The integration of Twitter and XMPie’s Cross Media enables people and organisations to engage in conversation and then to become more personalised (and relevant) in their engagement.

There is a huge responsibility of on those developing these types of campaigns as well. Doing this particular campaign has raised a lot of questions. The one that I had to keep asking myself was, “I know that we could do this – but should we?“. For example we could have continually tweeted out virally, we could have sent all the followers of our follower direct messages promoting the campaign. We could have sent personalised websites to anyone that mentioned ‘XMPie’ or ‘MediaPro’ in their tweets. We could have done a huge amount. We did however choose to keep this campaign exploratory and specific – and even then we generated some negative buzz!

As Gary Vaynerchuck recently said in a presentation, “Technology has no feelings” – make no mistake this will happen and it will become more commonplace. How this evolves from here is where it gets interesting!