https://econsultancy.com/marketers-on-the-new-normal-chris-carter-ceo-at-retail-marketing-agency-smp/

Chris Carter is Group CEO of retail marketing agency SMP and Amazon ecommerce specialist Melody.

We asked Carter what his day-to-day now looks like, what trends he is seeing in his sector, and what advice he has for marketers.

Please describe your job: What do you do?

I’m Group CEO of SMP. It consists of SMP, a retail marketing agency focused on the consumer technology sector, and Melody, an ecommerce specialist and part of Amazon’s coveted Solution Provider Network.

Our head office is in London and we also have footprints in Dublin and San Francisco. Since mid-March we’ve expanded significantly, gaining 37 home offices as the team are doing what they do best, but from the comfort of their own homes!

My role is to set the vision and strategy for the agency and to keep us on track to deliver it. I also work very closely with key clients to help them deliver their own strategy. At the moment that means a lot of Zoom calls, particularly with clients keen to migrate sales from their offline channels to ecommerce while we’re all stuck at home.

How has your typical day been impacted in the short term by the pandemic?

Ordinarily, I’d be on a train to Holborn by 7am, in and out of meetings and calls all day before getting home about 7.30pm. But my current day is very different. I am up by 6.30am and after breakfast I make the short commute from the kitchen to my home office, being at my desk by 7am.

The Leadership Team meets at 8am via Zoom to discuss the plan for the day and address any resource challenges. From time to time my daughter joins the calls (yes, Zoom-bombing is a thing) to provide her perspective on how we are performing as a team. At 14 months old she’s one of our youngest team members but already showing a huge amount of promise.

I am a big fan of to-do lists, so I’ll review what’s urgent and important and focus on these first. The days are normally made up of several internal meetings focused on our performance against company metrics, plus a lot of client video calls. We’ve also initiated virtual coffees with individuals to check-in on them whilst they are isolated – it’s really important to maintain day-to-day contact with team members, especially where they live alone.

Late afternoon is when I’ll catch up with our San Francisco team and clients, which always gives us some great insights into how the US approaches retail and ecommerce, especially at this time.

And whilst working from home brings its challenges, there are upsides; I get to see my daughter in the morning for breakfast, take her for a walk at lunchtime and read her a bedtime story at night – all things I rarely have the chance to do when I am working in town.

What are your favourite tools and techniques to help you get your work done at the moment?

Like most people, I use a variety of apps, technologies and platforms to keep connected and working no matter where I am. And as an agency we haven’t needed to invest in any new tools to support the teams working from home.

My go-tos at the moment (besides my iPhone and iPad) are WhatsApp (perfect for quick catch-ups), Evernote (great for meeting notes) and To Do (great for to-do lists, unsurprisingly). I’m also a big fan of how Blinkist condenses business books into bite-sized text and audio, which will one day make that commute bearable again.

And of course, who couldn’t live without Houseparty and Netflix Party during lockdown!

Which companies have impressed you since the outbreak?

Not your traditional brand campaign, but I love how BBC Creative has turned four clips from classic sitcoms into public information videos. The clips from The Thick of It, Miranda, The Mighty Boosh and Alan Partridge encourage UK residents to stay at home.

The first three films end with the on-screen message: “Seriously, stay at home. Please help stop the spread.” The Partridge one, meanwhile, has the text: “Set a routine to get through staying in.”

What changes are you making to help your clients’ brands connect with how people are feeling and experiencing the pandemic?

Even during the weeks leading up to the lockdown we were developing proactive ‘Now > Next > Future’ recommendations for our clients. They’re designed to help brands optimise their Amazon and ecommerce channels in the absence of physical retail. This included helping support smaller brands, significantly impacted by the closure of their physical presence, to set themselves up and start trading on Amazon.

Additionally, we’re analysing how COVID-19 is impacting UK shopping habits today and, whilst it is hard to separate anticipated consumer intent from actual behaviour, what shoppers believe will be the lasting impact of their newly formed shopping habits in the future. We’re sharing these insights with clients to help inform channel strategy development.

And finally, where our clients have products that have become invaluable during the lockdown we’ve worked with them to ensure as many people as possible are able to access them, as quickly as possible.

What trends have you seen in the last few weeks in your sector?

Unsurprisingly, the biggest trend has been the shift of focus from physical retail to ecommerce. Melody, our ecommerce division, has never been busier. On a lighter note, I’ve also been getting a lot of interior design hints and tips from all the Zoom calls I have been on.

What advice would you give a marketer right now?

The advice I’d give right now is the same that I have always given, which has served me well over the years: attention to detail should be your mantra and delighting your clients your speciality.

However, recently we have been discussing the increased importance of context and would recommend two key steps: first, review your current/scheduled campaigns and see what needs to be cancelled, paused, reimagined or reconfigured. Is the message, tone, offer and imagery appropriate for the current crisis?

Second, identify what value your brand can legitimately offer to help get people through the crisis, and communicate it in a positive, informative, sensitive and accessible way.

What does long term planning and strategy look like now at your clients’ brands?

If differs so much by client, but one thing they all have in common is scenario planning. Where there is so much uncertainty, it is critical to model plans against different variables. Brands need to understand the markers that will determine which plan to follow, and when.

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https://www.rohitbhargava.com/2020/04/how-to-present-a-virtual-keynote.html

Six weeks ago every event got cancelled, postponed or moved to virtual. Like many professional speakers, I started delivering my talks virtually. But taking a 45 minute talk and doing it over Zoom doesn’t work. It’s too long, tech gets in the way and it just feels boring.

I knew I had to get better at this.

So I started researching. At first it was YouTube videos. I watched a 34 minute overview on selecting the right cardioid microphone. I took notes from a masterclass from a Hollywood lighting pro on techniques like loop and butterfly lighting. I consumed hours of videos on acting techniques, professional studio setups, and product demos. I also asked for advice from some professionals in the entertainment business from my network and read what my friends and fellow speakers were sharing on social media.

And I started writing a book all about everything I was learning when it came to presenting virtually, working more effectively while remote and building trust with people without being in the same room (or perhaps without ever having met in real life. This week, I’m launching that book as a free download (get it here!) and throughout the process of writing and researching it, I kept presenting and experimenting.

Over the last three weeks I have learned a lot and gotten better. Though I’m continuing to do presentations and getting better at virtual storytelling, I thought I’d share some of the biggest things that I have learned which will help you get better faster, and perhaps skip watching hours of YouTube videos in order to do it.

1. Don’t fear the tech.

I realized over the past month that I have been completely spoiled at events by working with a professional AV crew. At home, it’s just me. And when faced with complex technology, my tendency has too often been to claim ignorance. I was, after all, an English major. But in a professional setting, when you are on your own without an IT department, technical problems just end up making YOU look bad. There’s no one else to blame. So skip the excuses, watch some YouTube videos yourself and conquer your fear of getting technical. This isn’t like programming the Mars rover. You can do this.

2. Get dressed.

It’s a beautiful thing that we can now present in our pajamas. But I don’t. In fact, I usually dress the same way I would if I were presenting from the stage. For me, it helps me to bring more energy in an artificial environment where I don’t get the benefit of audience feedback. So I don’t look the same in every video, I also try to wear something different for each talk.

3. Embrace the unperfection.

Most of us don’t have a professional studio at home. It’s ok. In fact, it might be better. When we see each other’s homes in the background, or some of our personality – we feel more connected. So let it be a little bit unperfect and focus on being authentic instead of perfect.

4. Face the window.

All of the light tutorials I watched on YouTube were great, but complicated. You can buy ring lights or hook up web-enabled dimmers to your phone – but the real secret to how I’m getting pretty good light on all my calls comes down to three words: face a window. When your face is to the window, you avoid backlighting (the biggest lighting problem most people have) and odd shadows too. The picture below is me in my home office with NO additional lighting. I literally just turned around to face the window instead of putting it behind me. Of course, this won’t work if you’re in a room with no windows (or at night) – so if that’s the case, get good lighting from the front (a ring light works for this) and start with that.

5. Invest in sound.

If you are going to spend money on anything to improve your virtual presentation, make it a high quality microphone. Headsets generally are a great way to get good sound and avoid background noise. The problem is you end up looking like a call center operator. The alternative is a good cardioid microphone (a microphone that mainly picks up sound from the front). The microphones to avoid are omnidirectional (they pick up ambient sound from around the room).

6. Play with the tech.

Whenever my boys encounter something new, they want to press all the buttons. As they get older, they still do that. We can use some of that same mentality when it comes to using videoconferencing platforms. Do you know what all the buttons do? Try them out. On a Zoom call, using the space bar is a shortcut to go off mute. Skype has similar keyboard shortcuts. The best way to get better at using the tools is by playing with it … and pressing all the buttons.

7. Skip the apology.

We all know that virtual meetings aren’t seamless. Sometimes people are hard to hear. And your WiFi may be slow. It’s tempting to always be apologizing for this, or even worse, apologizing before anything even goes wrong! Instead, go with the flow and adapt to the difficulties. If they persist, be decisive in what to do about it – whether it’s asking everyone to log out and then back in, or the worst case scenario of rescheduling the meeting. People may not like it, but they will definitely appreciate it more if you didn’t waste 30 minutes trying to get everything working before finally canceling.

8. Speak to the camera.

When you are on a video call where multiple people are sharing screens, you will want to look at them. The problem is, doing this appears as if you’re looking sideways. The only way to offer the appearance of eye contact is to speak to your webcam instead of to the images of the people. This is logical, but very hard to consistently do because it feels unnatural. To be honest, I haven’t found an easy way to do this, apart from asking everyone else to turn off their video screens. So I’ve just been practicing ignoring their videos and speaking to the camera instead.

9. Use props.

One of the nicest things about presenting from my home office is that I can have all the tools I usually use right next to me. So while I used to share a picture of a stack of books that I read from the stage, now I can actually SHOW people the stack. Props are a great way to break up the monotony of a talk and bring your personality too.

10. Update your website/profile.

Everything is changing, but a lot of what we see online seems to have been created before Covid-19. As a speaker, I wanted to be sure to let event planners and potential clients know that I’ve adjusted what I do, so I changed my homepage and my speaking page to focus on virtual events. If you want to show potential customers or even your colleagues that you’re adjusting too, consider updating your site (if you have one) or your professional profiles too.

Want to see all of my best insights as well as learn from the experiences of more than 50 experts who have contributed to share their best tips with you?

Download a free copy of my latest guide and ebook, The Non-Obvious Guide to Virtual Meetings & Remote Work.

Download here >>

https://wordtothewise.com/2020/05/lets-discuss-spamtraps/

Our next Delivery Discussion is May 6 at 5pm Irish time, noon eastern and 9am pacific. We’ll be talking about spamtraps. Drop me an email at laura-ddiscuss@ the obvious domain to get an invite.

Bring your questions, your concerns and, yes, even your gripes to talk with various folks in the industry. We’ll share what we know, what we think and what we feel about spamtraps.

I’ll be pulling together some resources and will share them here after the call.

Can’t wait to speak with you.