Archive for July, 2008

Competing with traditional marketing is just not necessary

Buzz Agency is looking to compare (compete?) WOM with traditional media through a “WOM Impact Guarantee” programme. The challenge requires a 300,000 US dollar investment in both traditional and word-of-mouth media. If WOM doesn’t outbase traditional competitors across four brand metrics–brand awareness, consumer opinion, purchase intent and actual sales, BzzAgent promises to refund the marketer the full cost of the campaign.

Maybe its because we’re Brussels based–and what is the EU if not a conglomerate of co-creation and (sometimes over-extended) collaboration?–but we just don’t know if this kind of competition is necessary. WOM and traditional media complement; they don’t compete. Successful media campaigns look to integrate traditional media and word-of-mouth, not to separate or isolate the results.

We measure mainstream media trends at the same time we meausure social media trends here. Comparisons demonstrate the efficacy of both WOM and traditional campaigns, as well as where the interests of both intersect. Analysis suggests which consumer profiles finds which types of media campaign most appealing.

This is the objective of online co-creation and collaboration. Allowing PR firms to create more effective and integrated campaigns that combine both traditional and WOM. Each industry, brand, product, and service requires campaigns modeled to suit the interests of the clients and the consumers–there is no one size fits all marketing campaign.

The concept of the long tail is that more effective marketing money is spent on more receptive markets. WOM is definitely a strong aspect in this, but WOM itself is multifaceted. What creates buzz and generate conversation is never easy to predict, but with the right tools and a little time, PR Agencies use software to analyse what works for clients or consumer and what doesn’t.

A lasting market is an environment in which consumers and producers look to establish long-term relationships. A market is collaborative. Shouldn’t marketing be too?

Expand your regional reach

I’m a consistent reader of President and CEO Richard Edelman’s blog.

The yearly Edelman Trust Barometer reveals how individuals are increasingly more likely to trust other individuals with whom they share a common interest. This, along with Mr. Edelman’s consistent support of social media, provides a professional underpinning to my interest in the blog.

Outside of this, I like how the blog pulls together a number of my interests, from international relations and business to public policy and politics. The combination of content is important, engaging and prescient. The most recent post describes Edelman’s lunch with Jim Hoge, the editor of Foreign Affairs, the well-known publication that influences the influencers with regard to foreign policy.

Foreign Affairs, in conjunction with other established publications like The Economist, provides the circulatory system to the international body politique. The publication covers the bulk of foreign policy issues, feeding the important points to the four corners of the increasingly interconnected globe. Circulation is fast and multifaceted, both on and offline. And, according to Edelman’s information, it’s about to get better.

If Foreign Affairs makes up the main arteries of influential foreign policy, it is now branching out into the capillaries of foreign influence. Always a global guru, the publication is going regional.

In the tradition of the “Long Tail” and knowing your industrial niches and nuances, Foreign Affairs plans to engage with local publics about international issues. So the publication is upping its interest in social media, with planned policy discussion boards and platforms. At the same time, Foreign Affairs is contemplating versions both on and offline in local dialects. The idea is to engage each and every individual in such as way as to invite feedback and dialogue. The publication knows that general global knowledge is important. But these days, even for James Bond, “the world is not enough”. It’s the regions that matter, and the first to engage the locals will be blessed with the knowledge and the know-how that the individual has to offer to the world, instead of simply offering the world to select individuals.

This trend towards tracking the local communities is growing among global giants. Telecom companies were among the first of the industries to recognise the power of the emerging market, and many are hard at work on methodologies to promote effective local engagement. Telecoms are expanding fast in the developing world, establishing their brands, products and services as connectors within the local community.

Telecoms are also involving themselves in the local linguistic communities here in Europe, promoting their brands and services at the community level and listening to local consumers that, in their initial push towards globalization, may have been left behind in terms of accessibility. Industry leaders in telecom, foreign policy and PR are not limited by local or global initiative; success can best be found through engagement with both.

Buzz Report WOM survey

Our Canuck friends ‘cross the pond are doing a survey on WOM and Buzz. I took it and you can too! Right here.

Complement your consumers

We often see things the way we’ve seen things. And we talk about things the way we’ve talked about things.

Conversations are a reflection of reality. People go online to converse. They reconstruct and share their opinions of real world concepts, products, brands, and services. More and more, the online world is an evolving reflection of the offline world’s perceptions.

Traditional marketing generates surveys and sponsors “opinion polls”. Traditional marketing depends upon samples of consumers willing to dedicate time and thought to questions and ideas carefully presented to them by corporate mouthpieces with an obvious agenda.

This isn’t a bad way to go about collecting opinion, but it is limited. First, marketers must find individuals willing to respond, and then craft polls in such a way as to bypass predictable answers. Ultimately, the marketer risks pursuing topics chosen by the corporation or its representatives and not the consumer.

How to address this limitation? Complement the offline research with online engagement: social media. Online conversations are a marketer’s every desire. Online conversations are real opinions, spontaneous discussions, and individually initiated networks and communities of clients, customers and potential customers. These netizens share information, opinions, and recommendations. And all this is recorded and stored forever on the Internet. The only issue then becomes finding it, measuring it, and monitoring the buzz for trends. Trends online can initiate offline surveys or validate a virtual or real world marketing campaign.

Take, for example, a viral video initiated by Carlsberg beer. A clever “whistle” ad with a universally recognized tune, it’s attracting a lot of views on You Tube. Not only has this ad attracted viewers, its generating copy-cat fan ads that compete for attention online. And below each video are comments that admire critique and encourage a growing fan base for the ad as well as the product.

Carlsberg is already a something of a house name for You Tube ad fanatics. Fans self-select based on favoured ads. Perhaps surprisingly, a football ad by Carlsberg attracted not masculine ballers but a number of feminine trawlers. Girls scanning You Tube in search of the celebrity sports star rather than the beer, left a number of comments about the ad’s…aesthetic qualities. The whistling video earned attention from guys and gals looking for a nice tune and a laugh, and the football ad sported a girl-groupie appeal. Both audiences left their comments and criticisms below the videos and no doubt surfed some additional related videos suggested by the You Tube platform.

Social media is more than a target consumer base. In social media, the consumers target the market and let the marketers hear who they are and what they like. Traditional marketers can use this information in framing their own off and on-line research.

How the West was won: Is search settling down?

Paul Dunay, the Director of the Global Field Marketing for BearingPoint in the United States, interviews Adam Lavelle, Chief Strategy Officer of iCrossing here. They discuss the pre-Search and post-Search society and its current transition. Lavelle and Dunay call traditional search engines “reputation management systems”. Lavelle predicts that methods of search for the average consumer are evolving from open-ended exploration to a more established collaborative sharing.

An online Search used to be the map that a searcher wrote herself. The virtual world was wide and uncharted. A self-motivated Searcher chose her terms and clickedthrough to her consequences. Then adwords rewrote the rules, subtly shifting the unchartered territory in favour of those communities with the best technology and technical know-how.

But Search is no longer a lone spot of civilization on the online map. While we haven’t stopped expanding the virtual world, we’ve civilized the territory, erecting our online databases, networks, and communities. We’ve established highways and byways that constrain but also simplify life for the online traveler.

But signposts have been (and are ever being) erected along the highways and byways of the information superhighways.

These signposts are erected by social media. These signposts are the brands, products, services, and ideas that the original searchers carried with them from the real world to the virtual. These signposts now dot the online landscape. Communities cluster around them, discussing, buzzing and bickering about the brands that delight and bug the people back home.

This is what Lavelle refers to when he stresses the changes wrought by social media in the realm of search. Now communities want networks of shared experience to validate the expertise offered by the trailblazing technology of Search. Social media offers this combination of expertise validated by shared experience, making these conversations, this buzz, both authoritative and influential.

Tracking these communities is essential for any successful brand. Its new territory out there and you need to know where your brand stands (or rather, where it’s been stood).

Advertising in the era of social media

Advertising is changing very rapidly nowadays. To a big extent, this is connected to social media becoming increasingly popular online content. On one hand, consumers have more control over what they want or don’t want to see, not only on TV but especially online – spam filters, pop-up blockers and other tools give internet users the capability to select the content they are watching. On the other hand, the audiences become more and more fragmented due to the variety of media available. Especially for teenagers, internet and social networking sites become more a common entertainment medium than TV.

Because of that, advertising has to become more creative. It needs to offer higher entertainment value and more variations of the same ad, which – to be possible – must go along with lower costs of producing advertising. These points are connected to social media. Social media has already made tools available that allow consumers to create their own content through much cheaper methods than those used by professional agencies (e.g. video making). These users’ and semi professionals’ content is incredibly creative and more and more visible via services like Current TV, which pays users for videos the company decides to air, or Pitch It, which launches campaigns and asks users to create videos about the topic of the campaign.

According to an IBM study, in European countries like the UK or Germany, ca. 35% internet users visit user generated content sites and ca. 10% of these visitors contribute to them. Consumers are not only creating content, they also influence the choices of other consumers regarding which content to view – 32% of YouTube users are watching particular videos because they were recommended to them by their friends.

Marketers have been trying to engage blogs, networks and discussion forums knowing that social media has the biggest power of creating consumer evangelists from all types of media. A recent study compares spending and gain on different types of media collecting these interesting findings:

• The media costs to deliver 500,000 consumers who are informed about a product range from 400K (television) to $200K (print) to $160K (WOM).
• The media costs to deliver 50,000 consumers who indicate purchase intent range from $2M (television) to $300K (print) to $150K (WOM).
• One WOM conversation carries the impact of 200 television ads.

It is of course impressive how much more impact can be achieved at such a lower cost, but the last and most important part of the changing advertising landscape is the possibility to measure the impact of social media campaigns. Using social media monitoring services allows marketers to not only to identify influential bloggers, platforms and the like that should be targeted with the content achieving the most impact but also to measure how responsive they are to the offered advertising content, if they are spreading the ads, and if so, to which audiences.

Social Web Analytics eBook

Philip Sheldrake has written a nice guide around Social media monitoring. There is a good analysis of the industry and he also positions free tools as well as the main players in the market. It seems Attentio’s coverage of European social media is still unique. I’d like to say thanks to him for making a few last minute adjustments after I read the first version!

Nathan Gilliatt and e-consultancy are also coming out with new guides, so it is a space that is getting more attention…