Archive for the ‘R&D’ Category

WOMM. Simplified.

There is a lot of WOM about WOMM these days.

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.

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?

Is negative WOM more meaningful than positive?

As different social media types – blogs, wikis, communities, discussion boards – become more and more popular, marketers want tools that can capture and measure buzz. Buzz numbers are the most popular metric used in that context, followed by –simply defined – influence. Share of voice expressed in the number of social media articles discussing a brand in given period of time is the measure that is used most often. It has certain advantages: it is easy to obtain using different free tools and it is straight forward to understand and cross compare with other brands. Moreover, as proven in several studies, it is highly correlated to sales for certain product categories, especially FMCG but also consumer electronics. Despite that, share of voice has low explanatory power; it delivers only quantitative information and no insights.

To gain more actionable qualitative information all social media articles can be analyzed and classified in topics they discuss regarding the brand in focus, but also in being positive, negative or neutral towards the brand. Sentiments in social media reveal how people feel about the brands and topics. There are almost always more positive than negative posts (although most posts, up to 90%, are neutral as we discovered in our studies around cars or mobile phones), but one positive post is not equal to another. They can discuss brands in general, referring to customers overall positive experience, or they describe particular products. Especially in the consumer electronic industry, general trust towards a brand is often exchanged for experience with one particular product, because users know there are significant quality differences between two diverse models of mobile phone made by the same manufacturer. Information gained from these positive posts helps to understand why a consumer chose one product over the other, even if the products are very similar.

On the other hand, there are always some negative posts. As Alain Samson notices, “even if it were the case that individual purchasing attitudes are affected more strongly by positive word of mouth, negative comments are likely to survive more easily across time and space. Negative information doesn’t only stick, it sticks longer. At the same time, bad buzz will persist longer if it is communicated to more people”. Simply, people are more likely to remember negative rather than positive messages, and they also give more weight to any negative information that they receive.

Insights that are gained from the negative articles in social media can be used for brand protection and brand reputation management. Some brands – Dell Hell being the most known one – actively monitor the blogosphere for possible negative issues and the number of brands doing so is continuously increasing; some brands could also prevent an growing issue in the past by detecting it on time and taking measures.

Positive and negative word of mouth are very important to gain good, qualitative insights regarding customer feelings, but are they equally important? Does one positive post have the same weight as a negative one? Alain Samson claims in his study, that the weight and importance of positive versus negative buzz depends on the industry. To understand which sentiment will have greater importance for a given industry, the industries must be split into high versus low commitment and high versus low choice industries. Many products, among others mobile networks, financial services or cars, are subscription products, of which mostly only one is used by a consumer for given period of time. These products tend to have fewer competitors and therefore consumer choice is limited. Entertainment industry on the other hand is an area where many products – movies, CD’s – can be used at the same time and also easily exchanged as there are many competitive products people can use.

Negative word of mouth should be more important for high commitment, low choice brands like cars. The automotive industry has high number of consumer advocates for two reasons. On one hand, it is a subscription brand, and this is a category where people – having to use one product for longer time – are compelled to be more convinced about and to which consumers are generally more committed. On the other hand, people stuck with expensive subscription products that they don’t like as much as they expected to tend to rationalize their choice anyway. People are also likely to expend more effort to find the right product if it’s a high cost subscription brand. Negative sentiment will have higher damage within these products.

For industries within which high choices exist, positive word of mouth will have more influence on the final selection. For example there are many movies that are played at the cinema and for most viewers it will be difficult to choose from 3 or more potentially good movies unless they receive recommendations about one of them. If they receive negative information about one of the movies and exclude it from their choice, there are still 2 or more options remaining so that exclusion is not the best selection process within industries with many products.

Whatever sentiment is more important, one thing is certain – sentiments in social media are extremely relevant and cannot be neglected. However, given the amount of articles posted by social media users every day, it may be very time consuming to analyze all articles about a given brand. Automatic sentiment detection is already built into Attentio’s Brand Dashboard, analyzing the sentiments in real time for our customers.

Marketing makes sales

The traditional corporate model places a high premium on sales. In fact, industry sectors sometimes complain that salesmen and women push systems and merchandise that haven’t been created yet. The favourite Dilbert commercial shows the hapless IT guy complaining to a sales guy, “you sold a system that won’t be invented for the next two years! What do you think that means?” The sales guy replies, “it means that I’m a fantastic salesman and you are a terrible engineer!”

Where this is the case, the company’s reputation is at risk. As competition heats up and the rush to force early systems adoption slows down, even monoliths like Microsoft begin to emphasise compatibility. This means that the sales guy that promises a product not yet on the market will be known as a hack rather than a hot-shot.

Salespeople (like politicians) are quickly becoming the menace of the marketing world when they promise products that don’t deliver. Online, the social media results of these transactions can unravel expensive and carefully planned marketing campaigns. Consumers go to the web to vet a potential purchase–this goes for individual shoppers as well as corporate customers. Complaints and compliments are out there online. They are accessible, accessed, and more and more used in assessing a potential purchase.

This is where marketers salvage the purchasing power that many over-enthusiastic salespersons spin out of control. Marketers collect the complaints and the compliments, pinpoint the issues, and repackage the relevant information where clients and customers can access it–without suffering the innate suspicion experienced by any person undergoing a sales routine. Marketers online have renewed power, if they have the technology and skill to access it.