Felix Velarde on eCRM

Felix Velarde is Founder and Managing Director of leading eCRM strategy company, Underwired, and he is also the Course Leader for eCRM at the Institute of Digital and Direct Marketing. We caught up with Felix recently after our January Brand Breakfast, at which he was a speaker. Here are the key points:

On eCRM

• Customer engagement is centred on increased understanding of consumers in a way that allows better engagement with them through digital channels.
• Such understanding of people goes beyond behaviour and demographics but the needs, attitudes and motivations of customers.
• Know their motivations, and you know how to create power to build lasting relationships with them.

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Coca Cola: Content Marketing is the Future

Coca-Cola is betting everything on content marketing, which is increasingly becoming a major factor in marketing strategies for companies. And even though it is gaining traction, many companies haven’t yet realized the power of content marketing for their own business. However, with a big name like Coca-Cola starting to shift their marketing strategy toward content, other slow adopters will likely follow.

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Disruption in Marketing – an idio interview with Bob Barker

We had tech-marketer Bob Barker stop by at our idio London offices the other day to talk a little about the power of social media for businesses. Bob has had experience working for Oracle, Alterian, and Occam Ltd., and has a pretty wide understanding of how marketing has evolved over the last 25 years.

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Thoughts on Content Farms

Content farms have their advocates and naysayers, but regardless of which camp you fall in, it’s undeniable that they’ve rooted themselves into the business model of publishers and agencies. Reading Andrew Kaufman’s post on his experience as a former content farmhand, I picked up on a few key points (it’s a pretty long article) worth noting for both camps to think about.

Businesses are becoming increasingly driven to get involved in more large scale content creation, and no wonder. We recently covered the reasons why businesses incorporate content as a new marketing platform. Kaufman highlights how it isn’t easy to identify patterns that drive companies to do this, even less so in understanding why some succeed and some fail in the pursuit of ‘riding a new wave of content to profitability’.

One of the interesting anecdotes Kaufman talks about is his initial post-English degree dream of writing quality articles on various themes and topics, and the gradual realization that it wasn’t quality that boosted them in the internet popularity poll. Of course, now we recognize that this is the world of SEO content-driven traffic, where content farm companies may win, but users definitely lose and have to foot the bill of paying more time and labour in ‘finding quality content that addresses their intent in the quickest way possible’.

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Content must be freed. Not necessarily free.

Two weeks ago, at the Like Minds Conference we listened to Guy Clapperton bemoan free content, and then last week the twitterverse lit up with commentary as The Times announced their first paywall subscribers figures, which could be seen as good/mediocre/terrible (select your bias here). However, I am more interested in a different type of “free”.

It is best put by Razorfish’s white paper titled Nimble (by @rlovinger – a MUST READ), which posits that content should be certainly free as in libre, but not necessarily free as in gratis. This rings particularly true after a few conversations last week with major publishers that have major difficulties in exploiting the value of their huge archives, due to technological constraints.

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