• Topping the list at no. 3 is Facebook login
• No. 4 is Tuenti, a Madrid-based “invitation only” social networking site,
• no. 7 is Nasza Klasa, a Polish “find old classmates” site initially frequented by older Polish persons, but attracting more and more youthful members
• no. 8 is Wer Kennt Wen, a German “invitation only” social networking site that looks for “who knows who?”

Seems social networking has blossomed just as we have.

Our international team is pleased to see that we cover all the necessary languages-with native speakers. Time to set up a nice project to track what the forum and blog buzz is about these networks. We should probably do some back-in-time tracking. Do you think that three months back in time is enough?

A study published by JupiterResearch suggests that advertisers under-spend on social media marketing. BuzzAgent has been stung by some bloggers for its recent campaigns to “prove” how WOMM works in social media. Advertisers complain that there are too many possible social media and other types of online outlets and no proof that any of these are especially effective.

Social media marketing, online WOMM, etc. is much like any marketing concept. It is an extension, not an alternative, to traditional advertising, market research, and PR. Successful communication with clients and stakeholders, along with customer engagement is as limited in methods of communication as are its customers.

Customers, clients, and stakeholders are online, generating social media as well as other forms of online content, so advertisers and marketers are too. And determining how to listen to and engage with different groups online is as multifaceted as it is offline. Online content and strategic involvement runs the market research and advertising gamut, from online focus groups to online billboards. Social media, however, is something different.

For example:

Synthetron, a neighbour or ours, identifies stakeholders and uses online formats to create targeted stakeholder conversations around an important issue. How? Synthetron first selects stakeholders for a study. Stakeholders must have an interest and a desire to impact a certain conversation. Invitation-only online discussions are then used to create an open forum for stakeholders to dialogue. Individual stakeholders included in a study remain anonymous; their ideas and concerns do not. This sort of online stakeholder forum aggregates and evaluates relevant stakeholder WOM, rather than target individual complaints and concerns. To me, it sounds like an online focus group, one in which stakeholders are invited rather than solicited. It permits incentivized stakeholders to be heard as a group without being hurt as an individual.

BuzzAgent is criticized for soliciting content in the manner of a traditional marketing focus group. As with any solicitation, the individuals solicited do not offer their information for free. They are not concerned stakeholders but paid informants–the information that they offer is rarely given for free. These individual informants want something for their time–free samples, extra influence, or face time with an influencer. This is not a new way of collecting ideas, and it can be quite useful in understanding why people are or are not discussing a particular brand or product. Focus groups can help stimulate conversation and generate new ideas. Holding a focus group online or offline involves parallel benefits and risks. Individuals can fib in person as well as in email.

And then there’s social media. Conversation. Buzz.

Creating a WOMM campaign online is not all that different from creating a WOMM campaign offline. But the means of measuring WOM online are more exact. That’s what the Attentio software targets.

Attentio does not solicit online content. Attentio measures and monitors spontaneous buzz as it emerges online. The tools size a social media conversation and measure it in comparison with other conversations. What generates more buzz, pharmaceuticals or automotives? In which online media are cars more popular, blogs or forums? Within the automotive conversation, do people talk more about Opel or Toyota? Do they discuss car design or price more? Attentio monitors the conversation around certain topics as new government regulations are implemented or tax systems are changed or general social opinion turns from red to blue. These trends show up online in numbers that can be quantified and, with a little analysis, qualified. Unsolicited, self-identified stakeholder/client/consumer/producer conversation filed and displayed for anyone interested in a particular market.

Knowing buzz numbers help a marketer—traditional, innovative, online, offline—plan an effective and efficient campaign. Knowing the buzz from social media lets a marketer know if a focus group might be useful, or a stakeholder discussion necessary, or an offline sale worthwhile. It is not a means of marketing; it’s a means of measuring the market and determining how to best engage.

Rather, both factors require an accurate Q2 (quantified and qualified) assessment of said market. To address both factors, one needs a Q2 evaluation of the social media surrounding the target market.

Content is three dimensional. It should be visual, viral, and current.

Good content is visually appealing to one’s clients or consumers. The content must be viral in that the information is info that the consumers wish to share–it must infect the individual’s network and not just the individual. Current content is essential. Studies emphasise that WOM (word of mouth) in the chaotic market that is online social media has a “sensitive dependence on initial conditions“. That is, change one letter in the address bar and one’s entire audience is new.  Current content combines the past and the present.  Current content knows the real time concerns and considerations as well as the history of the immediate trends. Current content connects the initial “sensitive dependencies” to the modern market. It is that connection and timely awareness, cleverly and creatively communicated, that makes worthy content viral.  And zing, you’ve just infected a network of interested individuals, aka customers, clients, your market.

But wait.

Content requires effective distribution. Despite the chaos of the online market, or perhaps due to this chaos, esoteric communities and networks specialising in equally valid content remain entirely sealed off from one another. In quantum physics, this phenomenom of multiple realities is called the multiverse. In business, it’s called redundant.

Successful distribution online is also three dimensional.  Successful distribution needs to be authoritative, influential, and proactive. The distributor should have intimate knowledge of her market.  Her authority should be obvious in her engagement with the online community. Distribution needs to be influential. The method of distribution must be broad, connecting several different networks and always searching for additional networks to add to the growing spiderweb of interconnectivity.  This is why all distribution must be proactive, soliciting potential clients to access the content that will influence and create new markets.

A blogger (Dan Calladine) has illustrated the story using Attentio’s Trendpedia blog search engine to show that DHL’s buzz is going “viral” all over the world right now. The blog posting is a nice example of how social media monitoring can be used by consumers as well as businesses to track buzz around certain events. Read Dan’s blog posting to get the rest of the story. This blog post illustrates the artist’s DHL viral stunt using Trendpedia. It includes the artist’s original YouTube video. Here is DHL’s buzz around the story as reported on Trendpedia. See the full drawing on Wired.

CNN reports that if a Democratic candidate discusses a penalising tax for SUV drivers on a morning TV show in Ohio, GeoVoter technology can identify all the SUV drivers in the area of the show’s broadcast. Within hours of the show’s production, a Republican campaign can send each of these drivers an email designed to pique the interest (and, it is assumed, the anxiety) of these potential voters.

The Internet is an amazingly well-informed “invisible hand” that marketeers and their companies (or candidates) are increasingly adept at manipulating. But does this really mean that they manipulate the market? I would argue that we haven’t quite come to that, and perhaps never will.

Internet use is increasing apace, and studies demonstrate that more and more people spend time surfing the web. (This is probably a byproduct of the fact that few jobs allow employees to leave their computer space during the course of the work day. Even the guy who runs my gym spends 60 percent of his work time at his desk. And I suspect he is not looking at the spreadsheets covering the expense of the gym equipment–at least not the whole time.)

Further studies (and there are always further studies) determine that most surfers are looking at content, not receiving or sending information. Being an avoider of email myself, I can identify with this. People are not paying a lot of attention to the arrows that the advertisers send to their inboxes. For most of us, it’s all we can do to peruse the email from the people we care about, much less the people that care about us (or our money/vote, etc.).

What’s a poor marketeer to do?

Target the content, not the consumer. Consumers look at content, consumers love content. They seek it out. They do not seek out emails, or sms, or targeted advertising. Quite the opposite in fact.

Know your consumer, your voter, okay. Know what they like to read, watch, and listen to online. Then put the add or the information there. Let people discover what they want to care about rather than tell them what their consumer/voter profile tells them they should care about. Anybody in the virtual world or the real world can report that profiling is far from popular these days, most especially by those that are profiled.

This is still targeted advertising. But it targets content, a far less threatening concept to most consumers. No one wants to be a target, especially for technologically guided SPAM designed to conform to your profile.

Consumers personally engage with content, they duck impersonal bullet points. The most effective marketeer is the one that engages in return.

Just recently, this was brought home to me. When reading Tom Raftery’s two months ago I saw that Shel Israel (co-author of Naked Conversations) and Rick Segal (Canadian investor/blogger) were coming to Europe. I saw that Ireland and other European cities were on their schedule but not Belgium. I thought I should ask why they were not coming here to Brussels, given an emerging interest here in start ups, collaborative software and of course our central position in European affairs :)

Shel responded and asked “Why Brussels?”. A fair enough question, so I gave him the selling pitch (I think I included great beer and chocolate). He said he would talk about it to Rick and come back to me. It turns out that Kris Hoet from Microsoft had also been in contact with them for the same reason and in the end they are coming over on the 21st of October and we will get together a group of bloggers, entrepreneurs and eMarketers for a round table and dinner. (Hopefully we can experience some Brussels night life as well…)

In conclusion, the blogosphere is a great way to make contacts and most of all it’s fun. Their agenda is below

Oct. 14. London– dinner with small group of entrepreneurs.
Oct. 15-16–Scotland. Learning about social media in public education system
Oct. 17–Cork. Meetings with entrepreneurs/blogger dinner
Oct. 18–19 Dublin. Blogger dinner; participate in SaaS conference Trinity College
Oct. 20–Brighton, England, meet entrepreneurs
Oct. 21,2–Brussels, meet with entrepreneurs
Oct. 22-24–Estonia, meet leaders of online community, private dinner.
Oct. 25–Berlin, meeting with entrepreneurs as well as companies in Jenna.
Oct. 25-30. Rome, Guest of American Embassy. speaking meeting with Italian entrepreneurs. 

1. Search engine relevance: If you search about an issue, a product, or company it is likely a blog will figure highly in the results i.e. in page 1 or 2. This means the content of a blog will have a large audience of search users. My mother reads about a Gucci handbag in a blog, a patient reads about a new drug in a blog, a person looking to buy a new computer reads about Dell customer service issue in Jeff Jarvis’s blog etc.

2. Connectedness: Bloggers link to other bloggers. Tools like track-back add to this connectedness and often it is possible to follow where an issue was first discussed and how it spread through this network.

3. Content and set up: Blogs are easy to set up and have no editor. There is nothing to stop anyone creating a blog and writing about widely discussed issue or niche topics that interest them. In a sense they can take advantage of the “Long tail” with micro-communities of interested people or post about more mainstream topics.

4. Predictability: If an increasing number of bloggers are talking about a specific product and the sentiment is positive, this can translate into more sales or at least more enquiries. This is product and influence dependent, but there are plenty of case examples. The corollary of negative sentiment also applies.

Attentio can help give perspective on what the buzz around blogs means; to do this we use technology, methodology and standard reporting. A good way to start seeing if this is relevant for your company is by checking Technorati or Google blog search and see how frequently people post on a specific area of interest. Then check out Google Groups and do the same for discussion forums. If the numbers are large, then it might be worth paying professionals to do the analytics work…

For more information on this topic there is a great article from Business Week on the impact of blogs, also a post on this blog from November has a good number of sites to go to.

This article identifies in great length the impact of blogs, the incredible growth of the phenomenon and some tips for companies to understand how to work with this media. I still believe that blogging is in some sense hyped, what is really interesting is that so many people can get online, post their thoughts and get involved in online communities. Blogging is one way of doing this but new ways will arise, which is cool so long as people just keep writing…

s.

First published on www.simonmcdermott.com