"India is going through the roof and we're huge in Romania!" our marketing manager informs me. Apparently our funnel conversion rates are up as well, but I'm not entirely sure what this means or what CTR (click through rates), CPM (cost per mille) or any of the other 'buzz words' that frequent our conversations really mean to our ongoing revenue. "Let's talk about who our typical customer is" leaves me contemplating a crime investigation style e-fit face made up of people's faces from across the globe. I want to know what our community is thinking. Do they like our service and how can we improve? How can I help them to help us? My mind wanders to a 1990s advert by the British Chamber of Commerce advising that it’s eight times more expensive to win a new customer than to retain an existing one. It’s all about ongoing relationships. Sound advice.
MOFILM was founded to specialise in great content that works on mobile. Since then we've expanded into online services including running many 'User Generated Content' Competitions for big brands like Vodafone, BestBuy, Unilever and HP and working with major film festivals like Sundance and Shanghai. We've pioneered everything from viral mobile video to our latest campaign 'take on the ad industry: Get Creative - Get Noticed - Get Famous!' We enjoy amazing support from the film making industry including several world famous directors such as Kevin Spacey, Robert Redford and Spike Lee. When you think that there are nearly four billion mobile phones in the world, it’s not such a strange concept any more to market short, bite-sized content to this medium, but two years ago it was revolutionary. More importantly we've learned that there is a huge untapped creative community out there on the web, with no real outlet for their talent. A marriage made in heaven? Well almost.
Our community really is everything. This is not some web 2.0, social media mantra; we genuinely rely on creative people from all over the world, responding to our competitions and requests for specific content. We get asked for all kinds of content, ranging from soccer in Palestine to knife crime in Eastern Europe, and more often than you might think. We are early adopters of new digital marketing techniques, such as dynamically manipulating our Facebook advertising to target specific groups and using Twitter. We measure everything, constantly comparing to how we performed last time, last week or with the last customer. We need to be as good as we can be, because so many major brands rely on us.
We've been working with Fizzback for over a year now, firstly for SMS (text), email and voice feedback for major competitions like the world's biggest mobile film festival (which we run) in Barcelona every year. Fizzback's dashboards help us to understand the context and sentiment of an on-going customer relationship at a glance. We run time-critical campaigns all the time and its crucial to correct things quickly that might be adversely affecting the success of the campaign. With huge amounts of data constantly reshaping the analysis, it’s often difficult to understand which factors are having the biggest impact and what changes need to be made either at a global or local level. More than that, what are people saying about MOFILM or one of our customers on Twitter or the web? Fizzback makes this much easier. Because of the nature of our work, we often get asked about buzz or hype. "How do we create a buzz around this?" and "What do people really want?"
If I had all the answers I wouldn't need to work, but that's also the point. MOFILM works because we listen; and using tools such as Fizzback, we are able to start to understand what people are saying to us. Then the real work begins, re-shaping, answering questions, feeding back and keeping the context of past conversations in place. I often hear that people only provide feedback when they are extremely happy or more likely disappointed or angry about a product or service. Today, people are prepared to share suggestions, recommendations, their intentions and even things they are considering doing – giving MOFILM the opportunity to be part of the discussion, not just on the fringes.
This world is changing. More than ever we’re expressing our thoughts and feelings to our peers, and now with Fizzback, directly to brands. The more engaged we feel with brands, the more loyal we become – we just feel more invested in the relationship. Feeling listened to and seeing a positive change has a huge impact on brand perception. If you don't believe me, I can now show you!