Tonight I was writing a post for this blog about Spam (that I will release soon) when I have found this Direct Marketing campaign made by Unicef, that actually made me think a lot, and made me think from the first moment that It was really a bad idea of direct marketing, not for the result, but for the direct emotional effects on the people targeted.

The Direct Marketing campaign consist in sending faxes to people at their workplace, with a message like “My mom told me you are my father, please call this number”, but once the number is called Unicef answer. In my opinion this is really a bad Direct marketing campaign, because makes the person uncomfortable on a part of his life that probably he doesn’t want to share.

Why I’m so worried about this campaign?

Where They Send – They send this fax to workplaces, where people actually (and usually) are willing to keep their professional and private life separated. Lot of people that I know they don’t share anything private with coworkers. It’s a professional choice, everyone can choose to do so, to let them know by others as they are willing to. If this fax arrives to the studio of a Doctor (for the doctor) and is an assistant that picks up the message, the scenario is that the assistant can know something dark of the past of the boss, crossing the line between private and professional. Ok it’s an hoax, but it can create some judgments to the assistant, potentially cracking the consistency of the person.

What They Send – They send an emotional message. Stronger is the emotion, stronger the message is delivered and fixed in the mind of the target. In this message the emotion can be GUILT, REGRET, SECRECY (not good emotions). Probably some of the people could have a “dark side” or something can have happened in their past, making an old hurt open. All the package of emotions are not positive ones like LOVE, WILL, CHANGE and so on… they touch the dark side of the emotional spectrum.

Privacy Needed – Thinking about this idea, I have thought about the zones of the personal life that a marketer can touch of the target, when creating a campaign, in a way to deliver the message.

Marketers can touch only the Green Zone, that is what everyone see, meaning that you are conscious of who you are and what your values are, and how you are seen by others. There is nothing to hide, the target is safe and you can use what you know about the target to bring the emotion to the message. The Orange Zone is something that others know but that the target doesn’t, that can be considered in some ways an ok area where to invest, the secret is not to make uncomfortable the target (for example selling soap to a person that stinks but that he doesn’t consider himself owner of bad smell, everyone knows but him). The Red Zone is somewhere that no-one except the target can enter, is something that only he knows and everything that is that zone has to kept secret and not willing to share (or it will be in the Green One). That is something with an hight privacy.

Unicef with this campaign managed to trigger all the things that should never been touched, Bad Emotions, Privacy Violation and Hidden Facts. Probably some that called had some recall in their past about a missing son or else, and probably the hight percentage of donations, comes from the guilt and the will to feel better after that something so bad come out.

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In the last weeks I managed to reconsider some of the potential uses of shortening services, while I was at the university I created a shortening service called 21Url (now closed and offline) that had the idea to generate the creation of analytics for the urls that were shortened by the users.

A service that I personally use (and love) is Bit.Ly, that integrates perfectly with my Twitter Client and manages to give me an accurate feedback on my twitter activity, giving me a feedback on how I’m acting in that environment and more important about the feedback that I get from my followers.

This service can be used also in the opposite side of the analytics, with the data that it gather we can understand also how a specific blog/site/page is performing globally between the twitter users, those data can be considered at the same level of Alexa. Here are some points:

Market Share & Validity of Bit.Ly
First of all we have to understand how valid are the data that this service provide. We have to assume that the data comes from a good source composed by a sufficient number of individuals that uses the service, in this way looking at the traffic generated we can think that it serves a wide range of users, that can give an objectivity of the data. To do that there is the need to compare different services by using a good (and almost reilable) source, Alexa.

As can be seen Bit.Ly is the one that has a bigger reach between similar services, giving us the idea that the data that provides comes from a big variety of people, giving validity to the data provided.

Personal Analysis
Looking at the times that people made a click on the link you shared, you can understand how much your followers cares about what you share with them, creating a big understanding about the very real activity of your network. It’s good to have thousands of followers, but how many of them actually cares about you and what you share, are they looking forward to see what you are reading? Looking at the difference between Followers and Clicks you can start understanding how much you are considered by the community. With a little passion you can also see what categories of links receive more clicks by the community, giving you also a feedback about what the community care, and what they think you are good at. If you receive a lot of click on links about Agriculture and less about Phones, probably your community is made by farmers, or they consider yourself a good source of links about agriculture.

Like Alexa for Twitter
Just by giving a brief look at the total number of clicks received, you can actually see the grade of authority that it owns on Internet. If it received a lot of clicks can mean for example that a lot of people shared it (empowering it with authority), or that some super followed people shared it… but the real information that manages to validate the info is the number of people that actually shared the link on their profile. Looking at the Echo (we can call so the resonance of the link on twitter) that the link owns, we are able to own an objective data about the real traffic and consideration of a web-site.
If a site that talks about Online Branding has a low Echo can mean for example that it is not considered by the community as important, that their efforts haven’t been inside Social Media, or that the community doesn’t use bit.Ly.

New People
There is the possibility to see if someone else decided to share your link the same page via Twitter. This is an opportunity for profiling other users, managing in this way to understand their ideas and what else they share and what they are interested to. Doing that you have the possibility to discover also new source of information, and discover by using them new trends and possibilities.

Demographic
Like every analytics works you can see for example where and when you receive more clicks, giving you an hint about the type of users that are more “attracted” by your sharing stream, and in this way decide where to put more effort and resources.

Those are some of the many possibilities that this service can give us on analytics… and those information combined between them can give to every user insights important to create a better brand and improve the communication.

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The following one is a good example about how a company managed to attract a great number of potential customers by giving their trial product for free and with the application of great values and graphic inside their brand.

Mail Chimp is a company that provides an eMail marketing solution for business of various sizes, and they are doing a great on their marketing and branding environment, some good points are:

1 – Free Trial
They are giving their basic product for free to everyone. The basic account has some limitation in numbers, but is essential for people that owns a small business that is still growing. This free trial is important because the customers get used to it and can understand the possibilities that it can give and all the features available. His means that the customer gets used to the system and when he needs more, he is willing to pay for an upgrade, cause he doesn’t want to change his habits.

2 – Great Graphic and Usability
Every single page of this service inspires happiness. The color used are warm color that inspires freedom and gives a welcome sensation to the user. The system is simple to use and in some steps everything can be changed or modified. This system simply works, meaning also that the user gets a great value for free and this stays in its mind as branding values, and when there will be the need to pay a fee, the customer will know that it’s totally worth. The basic customer gives the customer all the monitoring that he needs for a start (of course more tracking features are always welcome).

3 – Connection with other services
In every venture you do, there is always the need to use more web services in a way to get the best results. Wouldn’t be great to have all of them connected together and sharing data? Mail Chimp does that and make people save a lot of time, time that can be given to something else. (Time saving methods are always welcome and gives a great value).

4 – Happiness
In every part of the product there is this easy going will and mood. This means that there is always the curiosity and by using the product cause it’s not boring.

This is a brief checklist of what this company does as marketing, but when you explore it you will be able to see it more ideas and methods that are using in a way to make their brand image great and valuable.
Probably more analysis will come, but I have to say that what they are doing with the branding is great, cause the expectations and the ideas of the customers are always met and the branding process increased.

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