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Ace Buchan rips it up!

It’s not often that surfing is seen as a sport that is at the forefront of cutting-edge technologies and events coverage. Viewers tune in seasonally to high-profile Australian sports such as NRL, Tennis and Cricket on television and are presented with a barrage of new technologies, camera angles, stats analysis and heat mapping, so it’s easy to see why many see these sports as industry leaders in their field. On the contrary however, surfing is often overlooked within this realm, often appearing on channels such as FuelTV which are less accessible to the everyday Australian viewer.

Before the emergence of online as “mainstream”, surfing fans often waited days or weeks to view images and results of recent surfing titles. Surfing, by nature, is not a spectator sport. Events are often held in remote locations,  held offshore and are notorious for sporadic consistency as the date/time of competing is determined by swell, wind, and waves. Print titles such as “Tracks” became the bible for surfing fans who read these magazines religiously for their only fix of their favourite sport.

In recent years, however, Pro Surfing and affiliated sponsors have exploited the online medium with resounding success, creating online communities with a high level of engagement, greater incentives and results for sponsors and marketers, live streaming facilities and a “surfing on demand” culture that is now accessible to a very wide audience.

By using the web to reach their fans, the ASP found that they could use smaller, more compact recording equipment for live event streaming online, that sponsors were willing to utilise their own websites to broadcast events which diversified the channels to content, and that online communities were forming globally where surfers and surfing fans finally had a medium to engage with each other on a mass scale.

With online as their primary broadcasting medium, unlike traditional sporting events coverage, opportunities were unlocked for marketers looking to tap into a previously distant audience.

Sponsors broadcasting events and results on their own websites via live streaming facilities, as recently seen in the Quiksilver Pro, were effectively creating website retention whereby viewers of the event were simultaneously exposed to their brand, their products and call to action, all without the use of expensive commercials and marketing collateral associated with traditional broadcasting. Users could easily navigate to the online shop and buy a pair of boardshorts or a surfboard while waiting for the next surfer to hit the waves, all without leaving their laptops, let alone the sponsor’s website.

The websites for these brands suddenly became useful, as users would flock back event after event to watch their favourite sports stars (and maybe purchase some surfing gear while they happened to be there). When events aren’t on, users can still pop back to the websites to see the latest stats and rankings on their favourite surfers, or blog posts from their surfers on tour. The ASP and associated sponsors suddenly made a previously inaccessible sport with limited marketing opportunities into a marketing empire by following online trends and showing innovation in terms of online branding, a hurdle that most modern sports are yet to achieve.

With the rise of social media, pro surfing has now extended to broad online communities which facilitate engagement with their fans. Facebook has been widely utilised to reach these audiences with great success, and all under the umbrella of corporate organisations. Unheard of right? While many users of facebook are reluctant to support corporations online, surfing has managed to cut through the stereotype of companies moving into the online space trying to “sell” by becoming a resource to fans of surfing and facilitating conversations between like-minded people. Following this year’s Quiksilver Pro, Quiksilver’s facebook page now has 280,000 followers and counting, not to mention a corresponding Twitter account with 10,365 followers. Brands such as Oakley have now been utilising iPhone applications to continue to tap into this emerging market. The possibilities are now endless.

While many sports are still at the forefront of traditional broadcasting, it’s interesting to analyse whether this is the best approach to “innovative” sports coverage. Looking at Pro Surfing as a case study, it’s important to see the value they have created utilising the online/mobile medium in attracting and retaining sponsorship and funding from almost nothing. Their willingness to use the web as their primary engagement point has had amazing success, and should be seen as a benchmark for sporting coverage and engagement going forward.

Beats having a rotating banner at the side of the football field, don’tcha think?

Successful online businesses and organisations all have one thing in common: they are useful for their users.

Whether a user returns to your website to buy, learn, share, converse, donate, research or be entertained is purely determined by the purpose of your website. Whatever the angle of your online presence, a common need is visible: retention.

For organisations to remain relevant within the online space, they will need to adapt to both emerging technologies and shifting consumer behaviour. Those who will succeed need to focus on the premise of immediate access to content, cultural relevance, personalisation and interactivity.

The future of the web and associated technologies lies in the notion of immediate access to content. Within the online sphere, accessibility and the “what you want, when you want it” motto are at the forefront of best practice and imply openness, transparency and relevancy.

Diversifying channels to content to provide a richer user experience and facilitate an interactive relationship with the user is recommended. This includes the provision of videos, visual messaging of content, podcasting, vodcasting, virtual tours, downloadable resources, user-generated content, the ability to share content, pushing content to social media and the creation of personalisation and community through the tailored presentation of content to the user. The provision of multilingual content is also a key driver to accessibility and implied openness.

Our recommended approach is that our clients work alongside Gruden in establishing a digital roadmap for the future of their website.

By doing so, we identify how the website and other digital channels should fit into our client’s overall strategic direction, how these channels can be moulded to be more relevant to users, and set them on a clear path for online-driven growth over an extended period of time. It provides us with a benchmark by which strategic goals and online activities can be set, tracked and monitored, in a continual process of improvement based on the underlying principle of strategy: Where are we now? Where do we want to be? How do we get there? Are we there yet?

This process ensures that the website remains alive and relevant, a centralised hub of dynamic content, growing organically with the needs of the client and their users: their URL is no longer a website, it’s a resource.

Interactivity is a key driver in maintaining relevancy to your audience. Several years ago, a website known as the Big Red Button demonstrated the power of interactivity to retain visitors to a website. The button asked visitors not to push; visitors felt compelled to push; and each successive push rewarded the visitor with entertaining responses. It successfully invited interaction and helped give rise to viral marketing.

Additionally, user-generated content is a growing phenomenon online. In the words of Mark Pollard, the basic premise that content=conversation=content: don’t use social media, let social media use you, rings true in today’s online environment. Our user-generated content campaigns for Disney Channel Australia such as  Hannah Montana are proven examples of the success of this medium.

The White House run an online blog which encourages the sharing of content, as well as links to their various online social media channels.

Gruden have developed customised social media channels for many of our clients, with the premise of opening up multiple channels to content and allowing people to access content specific to their interests via social media hub’s of their choice. Such an example can be seen at: www.youtube.com/skillsdmc. Additionally, the Sydney Opera House has implemented this with great success: www.youtube.com/sydneyoperahouse.

The key to creating and sustaining an online brand is in building experiences and creating a link between the physical and digital world. An experience which is both personal and interactive will engage the end user and transform your online presence from a website into a resource. However, it is important to understand that the underlying foundation of defining which experiences will be successful is strategy, and this must be clearly defined through a digital roadmap before any key recommendations can be made as to how to achieve your online goals.

Additionally, it’s important to recognise that a website is a living thing. It is vital that you constantly measure your online goals via analytics and review the initial KPI’s established at the project’s onset. By doing so, you can identify areas of the site that aren’t quite hitting the mark and capitalise on those areas that are deemed successful.  It’s important to validate the project’s success by measuring it against your initial objectives, and ensuring that content is constantly refreshed and revisited.

The success of Apple’s iPhone app store has led to a stampede of brands creating games, services, and other applications as marketing tools. It’s an entirely new platform for most, and it is quickly becoming a powerful way to influence consumers. More and more, our clients are asking our advice on the value of  iPhone apps. How do you decide if having one is a good idea for your organisation?

I came across a great article on BNET highlighting the five key strategies for making a smart application. The full article is distilled from a Forrester Research report on the topic, and is a useful starting point for any marketer looking to engage a digital agency such as Gruden to build an application for their business.

In brief, their key recommendations are to:

1. Make it Useful
2. Make it Interactive
3. Make it Entertaining
4. Make it a Mixture (Combining Utility and Intractivity)
5. Make it Free

However, before even embarking on the iPhone application discussion, it’s important to set out your key marketing goals to see if an iPhone application would assist with the realisation of these goals. It’s not very useful long-term to take up the “I’ll have what she’s having” approach if it’s not engaging your consumers.

The key question to ask yourself is what you are trying to accomplish.  Are you trying to build brand affinity? Engage customers? Drive people to a physical location? A web site perhaps? There are many options, and many different ways to address these goals using various digital channels.

Additionally, look at the break down of your market segment and see what percentage of your audience are utilising iPhones. You may be surprised to find that many of them use other brands of smart phones, such as the Blackberry. In this instance, you’d be looking to build a completely different type of application. A majority of your audience may not even be using smart phones at all.

The Forrester Report, ‘Matching iPhone Capabilities to Customer Goals’, comments:

Simply building these richer experiences doesn’t ensure success. Companies looking to harness the power of these devices must design experiences that match appropriate device capabilities with user goals. To design successful mobile data experiences, companies must understand how people want to use mobile data channels, fit those data channels into multi-channel scenarios, and focus on their strongest capability — timeliness.

Don’t get me wrong, iPhone applications have been used by hundreds of companies in recent months to achieve outstanding marketing and branding results, and there’s nothing that turns a Gruden developer on more than getting the chance to show off the rich user experience they can create for mobile users.

Kraft’s iFood assistant, for example, combines both utility and interactivity. The application suggests recipes, lets users upload their own and share them, and assists users in creating shopping lists. Other apps by brands such as Target allow users to find bargains and locate their nearest shop.

At the end of the day, focus on strategy.

With the array of new, innovative technologies and marketing channels which have opened up within the last few years, it’s easy to get carried away in an attempt to stay ahead of the game. It’s important to set your key marketing objectives first and then match the appropriate medium by which you engage with your consumers, rather than the other way around.

It still amazes me today how fast this shift has changed the way we communicate. This is a fascinating look into the changes within the digital sphere in the last 12 months alone, and a fantastic summary of the magnitude of the social media revolution. If you have 5 minutes, I highly recommend taking the time to watch the video below.