2009 April 17 | Alec Saunders

Social media gives marketers a lot of tools to add to the kit bag. So how do you know what the right tool is, and can they be used in an integrated fashion?

Easy!

Podcasts are great for creating intimacy, and delivering longer high value messages. That’s because they’re often consumed during commute time, and because podcast consumers tend to be older and upper income.
Blogs are the right tool for engaging an audience, especially with a thought leadership campaign, which might demand repeated and ongoing conversation with your market.
Microblogging tools, like Twitter, are a megaphone for reaching your audience.

Here’s a concrete example of what I mean:

On April 14th, I wrote a piece called The Cloud in Your Hand. It doesn’t matter what it was about. What matters is what happened next.

Whatever is written on this blog is propagated to my RSS feed, which is consumed by TweetFeed (highly recommended service!), whereupon URLs are shortened and tracked via bit.ly (also highly recommended), and then propagated via ping.fm to a variety of social media, including Twitter. It’s highly automated, and I like it that way.

The Cloud in Your Hand was published to this blog, and has been read 1216 times since then in the following ways:

810 readers originated from Twitter.
398 readers viewed it in the RSS Feed and clicked back to the site.
117 readers read it from within a web based RSS feeder.
8 readers found it via a search or some other mechanism.

Your RSS is a respectable and powerful way to reach your hardest core followers. There’s no doubt of that. But Twitter is the amplifier that lets your RSS feed really attract a readership. It’s the megaphone that you can use to engage your audience.

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As a mobile phone user I’m sure I’m a bit of an oddball. I regularly carry two devices – an iPhone and a Nokia N95 – and have a small collection of handsets that I’ve used at one point or another over the years. I carry the iPhone because it’s hands down the best mobile application and internet browsing platform available in the Canadian market, and the N95 because it’s unlocked, it tethers, and takes great photographs. Oh, and they both make phone calls.

Nokia’s announcement yesterday that profits had fallen 90% in the previous quarter should have been no surprise. The writing has been on the wall for some time as RIM and Apple have aggressively taken market share from the dominant mobile phone provider.

The problem is simply this. Markets move in cycles. The amazing Carl Zeiss optics and 5 megapixel resolution of the Nokia N Series are at the peak of a cycle that began a decade ago – the addition of cameras to phones. iPhone is a device optimized for a new cycle – application usage and content consumption on the internet. RIM has created a device optimized for mobile text communications – email in particular.

And what of Nokia?

Nokia has been faithfully sending me its new devices for review for several years now. I’ve variously written about the N90, N70, N73, N95, N93 and others. Currently awaiting review are an N96 (N95 with a big screen), N85 (N95 with a small screen), N79 (N95 without the slider) and XpressMusic 5800 (touchscreen device). While all are beautiful industrial design, they are variations on a theme. Of the four, I carried the XpressMusic 5800 the longest, because it was novel. The N95 is still the device I carry day to day (not a review device, by the way – I fell in love with the review device and shelled out $600 of my own money to own one).

Nokia has two grand problems:

Nokia is now just one of many phone manufacturers that include a camera on their device, but it doesn’t own the position in the customers mind of being the must have camera phone. Moreover, because of advances in camera technology, consumers aren’t buying phones based on the cameras anymore (as they were a scant 5 years ago). They buy based on other criteria. Nokia’s platform hasn’t evolved substantially in some time.
Nokia is not the manufacturer of an iconic device today. The N95 had the potential to be iconic – an early 3G device with some novel applications like QiK and a stupendous camera – but that was over three years ago. They could have ship an N95 “Media”, N95 “Music”, thus reinforcing the iconic design and brand of the N95. The choice to brand NSeries rather than line extensions from a single iconic device was a mistake.

The impact of these mistakes really can’t be underestimated. When Apple ships a new iPod, or RIM a new Blackberry, the world awaits with breathless anticipation. Legions rush out and upgrade (and yes, I’ve bought two iPhones and three Blackberries in the last five years). In contrast, when a new NSeries device comes out, with its muted branding, and incremental improvements, it doesn’t say “upgrade” to the masses. It doesn’t scream “I am the follow on device to your N95, Saunders – buy me!”.

Personally, I will continue to carry around the N95. It’s great technology, I was able to buy it unlocked, which means I can travel with it and avoid the horrendous roaming charges that I’d pay on my iPhone or Blackberry, and it takes photos better than any other phone on the market.

Yesterday’s financial numbers, however, would tend to confirm that people like me are a minority.

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