Lessons From the Campaign Trail

From my weekly newsletter. Subscribe using the sign-up box to the right.

Businessweek’s Catherine Holahan writes this week about the big lead Barack Obama has built against John McCain in online visibility. While I’m not going to declare a preference for either candidate, I do think it’s worth noting the lessons marketers can learn from the Obama campaign’s success.

Political campaigns have long been about the 30-second television spot. Candidates staked their reputations and their success on a series of carefully crafted (and very expensive) image ads that ran in key markets. The high cost of this approach forced campaigns to bet everything on strategic media buys.

The Obama campaign has challenged this conventional wisdom. While the 30-second spot still has its place, it isn't with the emerging population of young voters. When young people do watch TV, it's rarely in prime time and they are usually fast-forwarding through the commercials. Perhaps one reason this group has become so politically disenfranchised in recent elections is that no one is reaching them on their terms.

The Obama campaign, however, has figured it out. Its innovation has been in understanding that mainstream media is no longer the bottleneck of communication. When candidates -- or marketers -- use all the media channels available, they can create significant impact without relying on traditional media or advertising at all.

The numbers cited by BusinessWeek are impressive. The Obama campaign decided at the outset to leverage every possible channel to reach its audience and to take every possible opportunity to drive home its message. The candidate is essentially broadcasting every waking minute. When Obama gives a speech, a staffer videotapes it and uploads it to YouTube. When the candidate is in the car, aides are delivering messages on Twitter. Between campaign stops, the candidate conducts chats on MySpace or distributes position papers on his own social network.

The cost of these activities is next to nothing and the young audience they reach has been almost completely ignored by other campaigns. Perhaps more importantly, the Obama strategy has centered on frequent repetition, which is a classic marketing best practice. Instead of waiting for the media gods to bestow attention upon the candidate, the candidate chooses to become the media.

What can marketers learn from this? For one thing, you are no longer a prisoner of the media. You can become the media. Secondly, if you choose a strategic combination of channels and then deliver messages consistently and frequently, you can get better results than by renting a half minute on TV once a week.

Finally, the Obama campaign has demonstrated the beauty of small markets. When you aggregate the candidate’s 43,000 Twitter followers, 60,000 YouTube subscribers, 1.1 million Facebook friends, 21,000 MySpace friends and 850,000 members of MyBarackObama.com, you're quickly over 2 million followers, each of whom has volunteered for that status. If you can convince each one of those people to spread the word to three others, well, you do the math.

Four years ago, the Howard Dean campaign tried to leverage the Internet to run a grass-roots campaign and fell short. There were several reasons for that, but lack of tools was one of them. Today, the problem is how to choose from the bounty of tools that are available. The Obama campaign demonstrates that word-of-mouth campaigns can open a whole new world of possibilities.

Labels: barackobama, marketing, politics, socialmedia, socialnetworks

  ¶ 7:57 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Lessons From the Campaign Trail

From my weekly newsletter. Subscribe using the sign-up box to the right.

Businessweek’s Catherine Holahan writes this week about the big lead Barack Obama has built against John McCain in online visibility. While I’m not going to declare a preference for either candidate, I do think it’s worth noting the lessons marketers can learn from the Obama campaign’s success.

Political campaigns have long been about the 30-second television spot. Candidates staked their reputations and their success on a series of carefully crafted (and very expensive) image ads that ran in key markets. The high cost of this approach forced campaigns to bet everything on strategic media buys.

The Obama campaign has challenged this conventional wisdom. While the 30-second spot still has its place, it isn't with the emerging population of young voters. When young people do watch TV, it's rarely in prime time and they are usually fast-forwarding through the commercials. Perhaps one reason this group has become so politically disenfranchised in recent elections is that no one is reaching them on their terms.

The Obama campaign, however, has figured it out. Its innovation has been in understanding that mainstream media is no longer the bottleneck of communication. When candidates -- or marketers -- use all the media channels available, they can create significant impact without relying on traditional media or advertising at all.

The numbers cited by BusinessWeek are impressive. The Obama campaign decided at the outset to leverage every possible channel to reach its audience and to take every possible opportunity to drive home its message. The candidate is essentially broadcasting every waking minute. When Obama gives a speech, a staffer videotapes it and uploads it to YouTube. When the candidate is in the car, aides are delivering messages on Twitter. Between campaign stops, the candidate conducts chats on MySpace or distributes position papers on his own social network.

The cost of these activities is next to nothing and the young audience they reach has been almost completely ignored by other campaigns. Perhaps more importantly, the Obama strategy has centered on frequent repetition, which is a classic marketing best practice. Instead of waiting for the media gods to bestow attention upon the candidate, the candidate chooses to become the media.

What can marketers learn from this? For one thing, you are no longer a prisoner of the media. You can become the media. Secondly, if you choose a strategic combination of channels and then deliver messages consistently and frequently, you can get better results than by renting a half minute on TV once a week.

Finally, the Obama campaign has demonstrated the beauty of small markets. When you aggregate the candidate’s 43,000 Twitter followers, 60,000 YouTube subscribers, 1.1 million Facebook friends, 21,000 MySpace friends and 850,000 members of MyBarackObama.com, you're quickly over 2 million followers, each of whom has volunteered for that status. If you can convince each one of those people to spread the word to three others, well, you do the math.

Four years ago, the Howard Dean campaign tried to leverage the Internet to run a grass-roots campaign and fell short. There were several reasons for that, but lack of tools was one of them. Today, the problem is how to choose from the bounty of tools that are available. The Obama campaign demonstrates that word-of-mouth campaigns can open a whole new world of possibilities.

Labels: marketing, socialmedia

  ¶ 10:26 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Not Optimizing For Search? Shame On You! From my weekly newsletter. Subscribe using the sign-up box to the right.

I meet with corporate marketers and their agencies these days, I'm frequently surprised to learn how little they think about search engine optimization. This is despite the fact that Google alone processes an estimated 750 million queries daily, and that IT professionals are some of the most active and advanced users of search engines.

One reason for this, I suspect, is that marketers are trained to be good at "push" marketing. Their craft has traditionally involved intercepting customers with messages that grab their attention and inspire action. Customers, however, are becoming more resistant to these tactics. Increasingly, they engage with companies and products on their terms when they're ready to make a buying decision. That's a much better time to reach them. The trick is to show up on their radar when they're in this "pull" mode.

Google is now the universal homepage. Look at your traffic logs and you'll probably see that search engines vastly outperform any other referral source. Yet many marketers devote lots of time and money to creating beautiful homepage designs that are rich in animation and graphics. Not only are these pages rarely seen by today's web site visitors, but images and Flash animations are almost useless at attracting search engine traffic.

Successful IT marketers are learning to reverse the push model. They know that buyers start the research process in a search query box and that the sites that make the first page of results get 10 times the click-throughs of anything else.

The Great Equalizer
You might think search engines favor the big brands, but that's not the case. Try this: Type "router" into Google and look at the results. Note that only four of the top 25 results are vendor sites. Now type "PC." Note that the only vendor in the top 10 results -- Apple -- doesn't even market its products as PCs! In fact, neither of the top two PC makers in the US market even makes the top 100 results on Google.

Now look at what dominates search results for both terms: sites that provide definitions and helpful how-to advice. This should tell you something. Your search engine performance will be greatest when you deliver content that helps customers make good decisions through practical, impartial guidance from knowledgeable sources.

Search is the great equalizer. The leading engines' proprietary algorithms are designed to screen out material that their developers consider uninteresting. Your challenge is to match your content to their preferences.

Start by choosing the search terms that really matter. Be specific. Get general agreement that these are the terms you want to dominate in search performance. Marshall all of your internal web site contributors to reinforce those terms every time they write.

Discard terms like "industry-leading" and "innovative." No one searches for those words. Start a blog or discussion forum. Both are search engine magnets. Pick up a copy of Search Engine Marketing, Inc. by Mike Moran and Bill Hunt. It'll tell you a lot of the ins and outs. Make SEO a basic consideration in every marketing campaign. Then let those buyers reel you in.

This article originally appeared in Network World's ITiki newsletter.

Labels: marketing, PR, search

  ¶ 11:50 PM 2 Comments Links to this post

  Draft Chapters of My Next Book Available For Review If I've been kind of quiet on this blog lately, it's because I've been devoting most of my writing time to Secrets of Social Media Marketing, a new book to be published by Quill Driver Books this fall. At roughly 73,000 words, my work is nearly complete now and I'd like your opinion.

I've posted chapters 1-8 on a wiki at www.ssmmbook.com. Another four chapters and a few sidebars have yet to be posted. You're welcome to make any changes you wish and I'll consider them all. Please sign up for a WetPaint account and log in before editing. It's a lot easier to contact you if I know who you are!

You can also download the entire manuscript to date. Here's a version in Word format.

I welcome all comments and suggestions. It was comments from people who read the draft chapters of The New Influencers that convinced me to completely reorganize the front of that book. I'm hoping to tap the wisdom of crowds again.

Labels: book, draft, marketing, socialmedia

  ¶ 7:07 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Bloggers Get Social April 4-6 Now here's a classic Web 2.0-style event! Come and meet other marketing bloggers in NYC for a weekend of fun and socializing April 4-6. In the organizers' words: "Neither summit nor seminar, Blogger Social is "a first-ever, one-of-a-kind event held by the online marketing community for the marketing community, completely funded and coordinated by community members. Neither summit nor seminar, nowhere near a trade show or conference, the intent is a social event...[It's] founded upon the idea of time together to better get to know one another." And no blogging all weekend, they say. You do enough of that, for goodness sake!

It's co-organized by Christina Kerley, an early social media marketing adopter who gets it as well as any marketer I've met. I have to be on the west coast at that time and can't attend, but for $350 (this is New York City, remember!) it looks well worth the cost.

Labels: bloggersocial, blogging, marketing

  ¶ 7:09 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  'Infuencer Marketing' challenges assumptions When my copy of Duncan Brown's and Nick Hayes’ Influencer Marketing arrived in the mail, I looked at it a little bit like a trip to the dentist. I knew it was going to be good for me, but I didn't expect to enjoy it.

What a pleasure, then, to find that this engaging and provocative book not only challenged many of my assumptions about markets and influence, but did so in a readable and persuasive manner.

The authors are co-managers of Influencer50, a consulting firm that specializes in helping companies identify the key influencers in their markets. Like many authors of their kind, they think a lot of marketing today is badly broken. Unlike many authors, though, they have concrete advice on how to fix it.

The central premise of this book is that the people who influence markets are largely unknown to most marketers. In fact, the authors’ firm offer clients a 50% discount if they can name even 20 of the top 50 influencers in their sphere. They've never had to pay up. Most marketers, they assert, consider influencers to be mainly press and analysts. In fact, they suggest that the list is far larger and more diverse than that, encompassing more than 20 categories ranging from channel players to venture capitalist to government agencies and systems integrators. They argue that many of these influencers are far more important than the media because they speak directly to a company's customers. They pay particular attention, for example to second-tier consultancies, systems integrators and buyers groups. These people are whispering in the year of customers every day, yet most marketers aren't even aware that they're talking, the authors assert.

This book defends its case pretty well, using logic and ample case studies. It's also written in a disarmingly down-to-earth and at times tongue-in-cheek style. Hayes and Brown aren’t stingy with their opinions. Bloggers, for example, get far more attention than they deserve, they suggest, and many bloggers are simply people who are awkward in social situations. Referencing Twitter, they say simply, “How anyone can maintain a proper job and use Twitter is beyond us." You may not agree with their opinions, but you have to respect them for the directness with which they are stated.

They hate awards programs, believing them to be valuable only to the organizations bestowing the awards. Partnerships are meaningless in most cases because companies have far too many partners to manage effectively. They believe that brand equity is overstated and that celebrity endorsers play mostly to the egos of the marketers who recruit them. That's just a sampling of the often counterintuitive assertions in his book.

I did have some nits to pick with Influencer Marketing. The case studies lack much in the way of hard ROI and are limited mostly to Influencer50 clients. I thought the rather critical chapter on bloggers underestimated the influence that those influencers have on mainstream media. The authors are also big fans of using consultants to identify influencers, a position that obviously favors their company.

Nevertheless, if the greatest value of a business book is to challenge assumptions, as I believe it is, then Influencer Marketing succeeds admirably. It's one of the best marketing books I've read in a long time. For a commitment of five or six hours, it is well worth the time spent reading it.

Labels: bookreview, influence, influencermarketing, marketing

  ¶ 7:45 PM 1 Comments Links to this post

  Marketing in the sky: Another reason I hate US Airways So there I am, squashed into the middle seat of a packed US Airways flight from San Francisco to Charlotte. I wasn't supposed to be on that flight, but my scheduled flight had been delayed past my connection time, so that's that.

I hate long flights and I hate middle seats even more, so I try to tune out and focus on my laptop, book or Sudoku puzzle, whatever suits the moment. I'm in my "zone" when the plane's PA system springs to life with...an advertisement!

That's right, US Airways, of which I am a customer paying good cash money, has decided that it will take advantage of my captivity to sell me on the merits of the US Airways Mastercard. I have no choice in the matter. The ad isn't broadcast over the in-flight movie system, where I can choose not to listen, but over the PA system. The same one that' s used to tell us that our seats can be used as a flotation device. There is no getting away from it. For two minutes, I listen to the flight attendant read ad copy in a monotone while another smiling crew member walks down the aisle, waving brochures.

The US airline industry has quite possibly the worst customer relations of any major business category and US Airways is at the bottom of the barrel, for my money. I didn't think it could get any worse until it came up with this stunt. Sure, it was only two minutes of my time, but it's the principle that bothers me.

Airlines are one of the few businesses that have a legal right to physically confine their customers. To take advantage of that confinement for the purpose of delivering an advertisement is just wrong. US Airways, you suck.

Labels: ads, marketing, USAirways

  ¶ 8:45 AM 1 Comments Links to this post

  Nothing ivy-covered about these students This morning, I had the chance to speak to a group of students in Susan Dobscha’s class at Bentley College. All I can say is: marketers, you’d better get ready for some big changes.

These students don't have to be taught concepts like conversation marketing, customer engagement and the value of social media. They live it every day. They throw around words like "transparency" as easily as their predecessors used “CPM.” They understand intuitively that marketing is about relationships and what they termed "deep branding." That means embedding a brand on a customer's mind through a long-term series of interactions that stress value for both parties.

The topic turned to Facebook for a while, and it's clear that the students regard it as a tool to facilitate relationships. They maintain very large networks of casual acquaintances -- one student described them as the people you say “hi” to in the hallway but don't stop to talk to -- and social networks are a means to accomplish this. I asked a class of about 25 students if any of them had formed meaningful relationships online and only one hand went up. Despite what the older generation may think, these kids value personal relationships as much as anybody else, it's just that they expect to maintain friends networks that are five or six times as large as those of their parents. Imagine how business will be done differently when millions of these people hit the workforce.

One innovative project that this class is pursuing is maintaining a blog. Each student is required to follow a single blogger and to comment upon his or her writings during the course of the semester. These real-time observations are incorporated into the curriculum, making the classroom conversation about as current as any I have ever seen. The instructor told me that this is Bentley's first social media marketing course and that enrollment filled up in 20 minutes. You can see why: these kids understand where the future lies and they're not weighted down by assumptions about how marketing should be done. Beginning next year, some of them will be working for you. I would advise you to listen carefully to what they have to say. And Bentley should take those enrollment numbers as a message.

I had lunch with a small group of Bentley marketing faculty, several of whom specialize in marketing analytics. One professor asked me, somewhat ruefully, if marketers have wasted the last 20 years perfecting their analytical skills. I'm afraid I only gave half an answer. I said that the focus on analytics was a function of the limitations of media at the time. In other words, it was impossible to have meaningful conversations with customers until a few years ago, so marketers focused on measuring the limited contact they had.

What I should have said was that analytics will be even more important in the coming era. The Internet is the most measurable medium ever invented, and the challenge for marketers will be to develop useful metrics from a vast menu of options. The marketing analytics discipline should only grow in importance as people sort through all the choices. While it's true that relationship marketing demands different skills that analytical marketing, that doesn’t make analytical skills any less important. Quite the contrary.

Labels: analytics, Bentley, education, influence, marketing, social_networks, socialmedia, transparency

  ¶ 8:00 PM 2 Comments Links to this post

  A manifesto for the new PR The Arthur W. Page Society has just released a manifesto for the new world of corporate communications, and I’d recommend that anyone who works in PR or marketing download it. The Society is an exclusive group of senior execs from big companies, so their opinions carry some weight. While the report is short on quantitative research (though there is a survey of 31 CEOs discussed at the end), it’s hard to argue with its overarching conclusions: businesses no longer control their messages; constituencies are expanding and diversifying; and corporations must be more transparent and open about nearly everything they do.

“The 64-page report is called The Authentic Enterprise: Relationships, Values and The Evolution of Corporate Communications. Below are some excerpts that I snipped from the PDF. They’ll give you a flavor of the recommendations, but it’s worthwhile to read the whole document.

Thanks to George Faulkner at IBM for tipping me off to this new research.

Quoting:

“For those corporations that remain public and that aspire to build trusted brands, sustainable marketplace success and community reputation, the imperative of authenticity will inevitably grow in importance.

“We are no longer in control of our traditional spheres of professional activity. Indeed, all business functions are at the dawn of an era of radical de-professionalization.

“…New priorities and skills for which the Chief Communications Officer must now assume a leadership role: 1. Leadership in defining and instilling company values; 2. Leadership in building and managing multistakeholder relationships; 3. Leadership in enabling the enterprise with “new media” skills and tools…

“For business, globalization has long been transforming markets for capital and labor. Now it is reshaping the footprint – and even the idea – of the corporation. This institution is shifting from a hierarchical, monolithic, multinational model to one that is horizontal, networked and globally integrated.

“The chief communications executive and the communications function of a 21st century corporation will increasingly be responsible not only for the reputation of their single company, but also for understanding, communicating and even helping to shape the reputations of its ecosystem partners – such as clients, partners, government agencies, nongovernmental organizations and other influencers.

“More than 300 million camera phones were shipped in 2005. They are now the most widespread image-capture devices in the world. At current growth rates, there could be one billion camera phones in use worldwide by 2008. That means nearly one person in six is a potential photojournalist – or, with the spread of video capabilities, documentary filmmaker.

“Teens in the U.S. – the consumers of today and the employees, shareholders, voters and leaders of tomorrow – spend 60 percent less time watching TV than their parents, and 600 percent more time online, interacting with, influencing and being influenced not by institutions, marketers or professional communicators, but by their peers.

“Procter & Gamble...“imports” 50 percent of its new ideas from outsiders. And Eli Lilly has created an open R&D marketplace called Innocentive to match problems needing solutions with independent researchers who can solve them.

“All of this makes the 21st century enterprise vulnerable at a wholly new level to unexpected developments that can damage the brand, negatively affect employee commitment, undercut outside relationships and destabilize management, including the CEO and other corporate officers and Board members. This, in turn, means that the stakes are much higher for what corporate communicators do.

“We used to segment communications carefully to targeted audiences. In an open information commons, everyone can see (and, increasingly, modify) any public communication, no matter to whom it is targeted.

“Message 'segmentation' is no longer practical or desirable. Despite the proliferation of diverse stakeholders, all are now on a level playing field.

“Values are the fundamental basis for enterprise communications. “To be an effective communications function in the authentic enterprise:

• “We must not only position our companies, but also help define them. While expertise and authenticity are essential, communicators’ counsel to the corporation must now encompass its fundamental business model, brand, culture, policies and, most importantly, values.
• “We must not only develop channels for messaging but also networks of relationships. In a business ecosystem of proliferating constituencies, communicators must lead the development of social networks and the tools and skills of relationship building and collaborative influence – both to seize new opportunities and to respond to new threats.
  
• “We must shift from changing perceptions to changing realities. In a world of radical transparency, 21st century communications functions must lead in shaping behavior – inside and out – to make the company’s values a reality.

“Conduct public relations as if the whole company depends on it. Corporate relations is a management function. No corporate strategy should be implemented without considering its impact on the public. The public relations professional is a policymaker capable of handling a wide range of corporate communications activities.

“Realize a company’s true character is expressed by its people. The strongest opinions – good or bad – about a company are shaped by the words and deeds of its employees. As a result, every employee – active or retired – is involved with public relations. It is the responsibility of corporate communications to support each employee’s capability and desire to be an honest, knowledgeable ambassador to customers, friends, shareowners and public officials.

“[CEOs] say that the emphasis of communications work must shift significantly toward internal communications, as they seek to transform their organizations’ culture and workforce skills – not just to make them more efficient and productive, but to embed the kind of pervasive transparency, personal responsibility and values-based decision making that enterprise-scale authenticity requires.

“The greatest danger corporate communications faces, ironically, may lie in our very success over the past two decades, if that success blinds us to the new demands that lie ahead."

Labels: marketing, PR, socialmedia, transparency

  ¶ 12:49 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Corporate Blog Council should swallow hard and learn from critics

The newly formed Corporate Blog Council is getting slammed in the blogosphere this week. The council is a self-described “professional community of top global brands dedicated to promoting best practices in corporate blogging.” It includes some very large companies, although overall membership is small and skewed toward tech and media firms.

The blogosphere has been fairly merciless. Dave Taylor remarks, “My translation: ‘we're all clueless, but don't want anyone to realize just how unplugged our organizations have become from the world of ‘marketing 2.0’, so we created a club so our ignorance can be shielded from public eyes.’"

Scoble is skeptical, too: “I’ve done enough speaking to enough corporations now that if they don’t get why they should be talking with their customers already I don’t get how hanging out at yet another boring industry conference is going to help them to get it,” he says, pointedly.

Brian Solis says the focus on blogs shows that corporations still don’t get the concept of conversation. He asks if we’re also going to have a Viral Media Council, and a Conversation Council.

Marketing Pilgrim counts comments and finds that blogs run by the council members perform pretty dismally. She and several others point out that comments are disabled on the Blog Council’s site and that the council used a conventional press release to announce its existence.

Commenters are piling on, mostly trashing the whole Blog Council idea.

I hope the people that put their companies’ names on this initiative won’t be scared off by the thrashing they’re getting in the blogosphere. To veterans of the polite and deferential world of traditional corporate communications, this trash talk sounds juvenile and hateful, but it is really just the way people express their opinions in this medium. Conversations here are raw, blunt and sometimes offensive, but they are always genuine. You need a thick skin to play, but if you don’t take it personally, you can learn a lot.

Having worked with major corporations for many years, I’m inclined to be more generous to the Blog Council. Yes, everything the bloggers cited above have said is true, but the fact that these companies are taking action of any kind (and scheduling an event for next month, apparently) is significant. It probably took months just to get to the announcement phase.

Critics will say that that’s the problem: corporations have to water down and approve everything and that’s why they don’t get social media. That’s also true, but these companies have worked this way for a very long time. The fact that the world has changed around them in the last four years doesn’t mean they can respond in that timeframe. There are plenty of people within these companies advocating conversation marketing and meaningful change. They are being heard, but it takes a long time for voices to work their way up the hierarchy at big companies. And the people who head those companies are the least likely to understand what’s going on out there.

If the Blog Council is smart, it’ll ignore the tone and listen to the message. The blogosphere is delivering some important early feedback on the whole idea of the Blog Council. The members should listen, adjust and move incrementally forward. Bloggers can be quite blunt, but they can also be very forgiving. If the council demonstrates that it’s really serious about this venture, then the tone will turn supportive with remarkable speed.

Labels: blogging, corporate, marketing

  ¶ 8:21 AM 4 Comments Links to this post

  Daily reading 11/10/2007

Managing a Corporate Blog, Like HP's - MetzMash

Wal-Mart's Biggest Marketing Tool? Its Web Site - MediaPost, Nov. 8, 2007

Top 10 Marketing Blogs – 2007/2008

ClickZ: Defining Social Media

Labels: blogging, marketing, social_media

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Marketing segmentation through social media Howard Kaushansky of Umbria gave an enlightening talk about audience segmentation of social media influencers at Blogworld Expo this morning. He talked about two examples of what his company has done for different clients in the consumer products field.

For an apparel maker, Umbria analyzed postings to blogs and social networks to identify the following segments:

Fit Finders (39% of the population), Self Expressives (19%), Bargain Seekers (17%), Label Whores (11%) , Style Gurus (8%) and Dissenters (6%).

Here’s an example of segment characteristics: Fit Finders are Generation Xers looking for appropriate jeans for their changing physiques. . Low-waisted jeans aren't working for them any more, but “old person jeans” aren't appealing either. Plus-sized Fit Finders are looking for fashion-forward styles rather than shapeless designs.

Self Expressives want control. They want to distress their own jeans, design clothing reconstructed from jeans and add personal style to jeans through patches and embroiders.

Style Gurus are looking to be unique. They're looking for authenticity and real inspiration. "Some men are actually starting to become interested in wearing women's jeans because they view them as more stylish," he said. These insights emerged from online conversations.

Umbria’s analysis is entirely text-based. “We're listening in on this world, not asking them to fill out surveys or segment themselves,” he said. It’s not just what people say but the words they use. Fifteen-year-old girls speak differently than 54-year-old men.”

For another client that makes packaged food, the company analyzed women’s blogs to identify four core segments: Me Time, Weight Management, Balance and Wellness and Beauty from Within (percentages weren’t given).

They then analyzed women’s needs and interests by time of day. The company also identified common moods at each time of the day and mapped foods, packaging and promotions to these moods and activities.

For example, afternoon is "Connect Time" when women share stories and experiences to gain support, external perspective, humor and advice. During Connect Time, activities include emailing, blogging, phone calls, sharing a meal, getting beauty treatments, going out, and spending time with family.

These segments were mapped to moods and foods. For example, "Me Time" is early morning, often before families are awake. At that time, women are looking to empower themselves. "Me O'Clock" yielded these strategic insights:

• Women embrace this time as an opportunity to regain control
• Don't tell them what's right; enable them to make better decisions and express themselves
• The emotional benefit of this time is personal empowerment

Ideas for productions and promotions:

• Personalized snacks
• Calendars with times blocked out for “Me Time.”
• Market teas and other products with a stimulative effect specific to early morning personal time.

With blog monitoring, "You can listen to these people and understand what are the drivers and unmet needs."

Labels: blogging, BlogWorldExpo, marketing, segmentation, social_media

  ¶ 2:45 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Last group of AMA Webinar questions answered Here is the final set of responses to questions that time didn't permit me to answer during the AMA Marketing Seminar on Oct. 15. Each of these permalinks is tagged “AMA” so you can easily group them together. Thanks again to everyone for coming and for asking such great questions.

Q: Chris asks, “Do you think this will impact corporate cultures? And how?”

That's a big question, but I'll try to summarize. One enormous impact of new media will be to force companies to be more open and transparent about their activities, motivations and mistakes. Once customers began talking to each other and sharing their experiences with your company, you have very little control over those conversations. It's going to be a lot harder to hide your blemishes and to keep secrets.

Already, many marketers are finding that their carefully managed product rollout plans are sabotaged by bloggers who get their hands on secret information. I believe that businesses, particularly large ones, are going to have to learn to live in a world where information can't be covered up very well. This will force them to be more transparent with their constituents about their plans. That won't be easy for everybody.

Internally, I expect social media to flatten corporate cultures. Communication within most companies has traditionally been controlled from the top down. But once individuals have the ability to speak freely with each other, those lines become much fuzzier. In most companies, this will be a good thing. However, a company that values a strict hierarchy will be challenged by this. They can refuse to give their employees blogs, but they can't prohibit their employees from communicating off-hours via blogs or social networks. Again, this won't be easy for everybody

Q: Viktor asks, “Will passionate social media users get paid at some point in time?

A: Many of them are getting paid now. For example, I spoke in my presentation about Adrants, which is a one-person operation that is generating good cash flow from advertising. Many models are being developed to reward bloggers for their hard work, although in reality very few people can make a living in this way. I expect that a small minority of people will be able to make decent income as new influencers, but only a very tiny number will become wealthy from it. These are niche markets, after all.

Q: S Law asks, “How do organizations and businesses engage bloggers to get that positive word of mouth?”

A: Much of my book is about this, so I'll refer you to that, or to other books I referenced earlier, including Naked Conversations by Scoble and Israel; Marketing to the Social Web by Weber; What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting by Demopoulos, The Corporate Blogging Book by Weil; and The New Rules of Marketing and PR by Scott.

To summarize, though, you need to take the following steps:

• Get to know which influencers matter in your market;
• Read or listen or watch what they've been publishing and learn what their passions and biases are;
• Engage in conversations about topics of mutual interest. Don't try to sell to them, though;
• Provide interesting and valuable information that they can use to further their interest and create new content for their sites;
• Invite them to become involved with your company as an adviser, reviewer and/or media representative;
• Show your gratitude. In most cases, this doesn't mean paying them so much as treating them as insiders and respected advisers. Although t-shirts are always welcome!

Q: Erika asks, “Have you looked at social influencers in the healthcare provider community? What is the prevalence there?”

A: It's very difficult to estimate numbers for any topic because of the large number of spam blogs. All the services try to filter out spam, but none succeeds very well.

Technorati lists nearly 5,000 blogs as being about medicine in some capacity and 2,000 as being about healthcare, although in reality the numbers are much smaller than that. There does appear to be quite a bit of healthcare information out there. For example, a Google blog search on “diabetes” turns up several thousand posts in the last day, and the top few hundred look legitimate.

In general, people use social media for topics that matter deeply to them, and there's no question that medicine is one of those areas. If you try searching the two sources I mentioned above, you'll pretty quickly get a picture of what's being said out there.

Q: Scott asks, “How do you weed out fake comments, possibly from the company or someone that is one-sided?”

A: Most blogging services offer the option to screen comments. This requires a little extra effort on your part, because you must go in and look at each comment individually before approving it, but this is necessary in some cases because comment spammers tend to send a lot of their trash to certain blogs.

There is no way to verify a person's identity when they post a comment, other than to verify e-mail addresses or search for their name. In general, you need to use common sense and make sure that comments don't betray a bias that could be driven by competitive issues.

I should stress, however, that you don't want to suppress legitimate comments just because they're negative. People expect to participate in the discussion, and as long as their words are reasonable and not profane, they should be allowed to do that. If you start censoring visitors, you will quickly hear from people about it, and often in public places. Don't get into blogging if you're not able to stand a little heat.

Labels: AMA, blogging, healthcare, marketing, PR, socialmedia, spam

  ¶ 4:24 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Still more AMA Webinar questions answered Here are more responses to questions that time didn't permit me to answer during the AMA Marketing Seminar on Oct. 15. Each of these permalinks is tagged “AMA” so you can easily group them together. Thanks to everyone for coming and for asking such great questions. More to come!

Q: Jodine asks “Another great example of this marketing approach is in the new music industry. Independent distributed musicians that gain their fans from MySpace and other social networks. Is this marketing approach what they call grassroots and/or organic marketing?”

A: That's certainly an appropriate term for it. MySpace, for example, has been a gold mine for independent music groups who don't have the marketing dollars to put into advertising. The idea is to create networks of friends who self-define their interests and share favorite bands among themselves. Also, people who produce podcasts and blogs devoted to music often make it a point to promote lesser-known groups. While these tactics so far haven't duplicated the throw weight of mainstream media campaigns, their popularity testifies to their effectiveness.

Q: Sanjay asks, “Are there any potential problems for a regional retailer with just a few locations?”

A: Not that I can think of. In fact, that person is a natural candidate for social media. Facebook, for example, is a great place to find people nearby who are interested in the products that the retailer sells. If I was a camera store owner in Chicago, for example, I might set up a Facebook group for photography enthusiasts to discuss their favorite Chicagoland sites to photograph. You can use that as a jumping off point to create events and even more targeted groups.

A blog is also a terrific way to showcase expertise, and if you're careful to label the blog and its posts with regional tags, you'll do better on search engines. For small businesses on a budget, social media is a godsend.

Q: Kristin asks, “How will the change in social media affect crisis communications?”

A: I can think of a couple of major ways. For better or worse, people are increasingly taking their gripes and frustrations to their blogs instead of going through customer service channels. This makes the blogosphere an excellent early warning system. You should have Google Alerts set up for every product and brand you own, and you should also create RSS feeds from sites like Technorati, BlogPulse and IceRocket that can alert you immediately to new topics of blog chatter.

In terms of responding to a crisis, a blog is perhaps the fastest way to get information online. This bypasses the media gatekeepers and insurers that the message is coming directly from you. If you link aggressively to the blog from your website and from blogs maintained by your employees and outside constituents, you can build visibility very quickly. Sites like Twitter are also increasingly being used by marketers to get messages out to the public instantly.

Q: Viktor asks “What's your opinion on intellectual property rights
with blogging?”

A: There effectively are none, and this is a huge hairball for new media. The reality is that many people who are now publishing online could care less about intellectual property or copyright. I have had entire articles lifted verbatim from my blog and even mainstream media sites and republished without any attribution whatsoever. It's not worth going after people legally in most cases, and that tactic can actually create unwanted publicity.

The entertainment companies have led the charge in trying to bring some order to this intellectual-property chaos, but they have encountered a lot of resistance and their tactics have not always been diplomatic. They have done themselves few favors. I'm afraid that these issues will take years to hammer out, and that our notions of copyright may look very different a few years from now. I wish I could be more encouraging, but a lot of people are wrestling with this problem.

Labels: AMA, blogging, crisiscommunications, facebook, marketing, myspace, PR, socialmedia, socialnetworks, twitter

  ¶ 12:50 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Cool stuff for marketers Several services of interest to marketers are debuting here at Demo in San Diego.

The MuseStorm Content Engagement Platform is a service that simplifies the creation of widgets, those ubiquitous branded medallions that show up on blogs and social networking sites and deliver video, images and text streams. The founders claim that businesses typically spend $30,000 to create a widget (not an unrealistic figure, from what I’ve seen) and that they can reduce that process to a few minutes.

Drag and drop the content container and the relevant content into a workspace, add logos and messages/instructions and generate the final product without coding. MuseStorm provides components to e-mail a friend, download a brochure, request a follow-up, vote, comment, etc. and delivers final code that can be dropped into any html page. More importantly for marketers, the company has back-end tracking and reporting to tell marketers what’s resonating with the audience and what’s falling flat. Pricing is correlated to traffic.

UK-based Real Time Content Ltd. has one of those “why didn’t I think of that?” services. Adaptive Media Version 1.0 delivers targeted video to visitors based upon interests they specify. It’s a simple concept that must be devilishly difficult to implement.

Consider the range of videos that a car company might want to show a visitor. A 25-year-old single male might want to see the fastest sports car while a 35-year-old mom could prefer a demonstration of safety features. On most websites today, every viewer gets the same video, no matter what their interest.

Real Time Content stores a menu of videos, text messages, images and calls-to-action that can be dynamically assembled and delivered to visitors depending on information they provide. So that 35-year-old mom gets a video and text overlay talking about safety features along with an invitation to request a brochure while the single young male might get an invitation to sign up for a test drive. The company has reporting and analytics to show marketers what’s working.

Shoutlet is a tool for monitoring Web 2.0 campaigns. The service includes a platform for distributing content like video and RSS feeds to dozens of sites, a widget-building function, RSS feed creator and e-mail campaign manager. The reporting is supposed to be where to Shoutlet shines. The developer, Sway, is a marketing services agency specializing in social and viral media. It should know what kind of reports marketers want.

Sway intends to price under $10,000 a month, which would make it cheaper than the influence-tracking services offered by most of its competitors.

Labels: demo07, marketing, measurement, social_media

  ¶ 4:07 PM 1 Comments Links to this post

  Facebook deserves marketers' attention

We’re still in the first inning of the social media game, yet the urge to pick winners is strong. Anyone who’s trying to make sense of all the activity right now is being whipsawed. A year ago, MySpace was all the rage, then YouTube took center stage last fall. Early this year, everyone was atwitter about Twitter and now Facebook is growing like kudzu to the applause of investors and the press.

While there will no doubt be other market darlings, I think Facebook is the first of these nascent communities to deserve serious attention from b-to-b marketers. If you haven't been paying much attention, you might still think of Facebook as the social network for college students. In fact, as recently as last fall, a personal still needed a “.edu” e-mail address to join.

All that changed last late year when Facebook made two critical decisions: it opened membership to anybody who wanted to join and it permitted third-party software developers to build applications specific to the Facebook platform.

The results have been astonishing. Membership has doubled since the first of the year, eclipsing 30 million in early July. What's more interesting to marketers is that the demographics of this member base are intriguing. As Rodney Rumford points out in this analysis, members over 25 years of age now account for half of Facebook traffic. That's remarkable when you consider that most of those members couldn't even get to the site 10 months ago.

An even more telling statistic is audience engagement. According to Comscore, 93% of Facebook members log on at least once a month and 60% use the site daily. Those are impressive figures for even a small community site; for one with 30 million members, they’re mind-blowing.

If you register on both MySpace and Facebook, the differences will whack you in the face. MySpace's heritage as a music site makes it feel at times like a giant virtual nosh pit. Member pages are festooned with graphics and music plays helter-skelter. In the year I've been a MySpace member, I don't think I've received a single message from someone I knew.

In contrast, when I registered for Facebook, I was flooded by invitations to become friends (social network lingo for establishing a connection) with dozens of current and past colleagues. Facebook allows you to monitor some of the activities of your friends, and it's an impressive display to watch. People I know are busily exchanging software applications to recommend books, movies, travel destination and professional web sites. The Society for New Communications Research, of which I am a member, chose Facebook as the community of choice for its professional members. And I continue to get “friends” request from actual friends almost daily.

If it keeps up this momentum, Facebook has the chance to succeed where earlier professional networks like LinkedIn didn't. While LinkedIn has some valuable professional networking features, it has the feeling of a software application more than a community. Facebook's approach to the market is proving to be more effective: it started as a community site and then added networking features. Its roots as a gathering place for college students has helped it to continue to attract the kind of members that marketers want to reach. If it continues to grow at its current rate for another year, it will reach the status among adult professionals that MySpace enjoys among teenagers: you simply have to be there.

This is not to say that Facebook is perfect. Its closed e-mail application doesn't sit well with people like me, who live in their inboxes. Some of its distinctive metaphors -- like writing graffiti on someone's wall -- can be confusing to new members. The process of creating a new group can also be somewhat cumbersome and confusing. And while its applications are impressive, Google still delivers better quality and features overall.

Nevertheless, business marketers should become familiar with Facebook. It has a chance to become the gold standard for professional networks. Even if it fumbles the opportunity, the dynamics of what's going on there are important to understand.

Update: Maggie Fox just passed along this press release from Comscore, showing Facebook traffic up 270% year-over-year, compared to MySpace's 72%. Of course, MySpace started from a much higher base and is still the leader overall by a wide margin, but Facebook is closing the gap.

Labels: marketing, social_media, socialnetworks

  ¶ 1:06 PM 4 Comments Links to this post

  The Wall Street Journal reviews New Influencers Much to my delight, The Wall Street Journal this morning carried a 900-word review of my book, calling it "a persuasive case for companies' reaching out to bloggers," and recounting many of the stories and examples I used to argue for greater marketer attention to social media.

Unfortunately, you have to be a paid subscriber to read the article. We'll see what we can do about that :-)

Having tried (unsuccessfully) for years to get published in the Journal, this was an unexpected endorsement and a very gratifying one. It's good to see marketers coming around the perspective that social media can be a meaningful channel for customer connection.

Labels: marketing, NewInfluencers, social_media

  ¶ 2:11 PM 1 Comments Links to this post

  Our podcast interview with David Meerman Scott This week in Tech PR War Stories, David Strom and I chat with David Meerman Scott, author of the forthcoming book The New Rules of Marketing and PR, which is due out any day now. David talks about the ideas that got him elected to Marketing Sherpa's Viral Marketing Hall of Fame two years running, as well as his call for PR people to get a clue about search and start writing press releases using terms buyers care about rather than words they think the media wants to hear.

This will be a two-part interview, with the second running next week. And we barely scratched the surface of what's in David's book. Download the podcast. It's free!

Labels: marketing, podcast, PR

  ¶ 6:12 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Recommended reading If you visit the Amazon page for The New Influencers, you'll probably find that the Amazon recommendation engine pairs the book with the latest from David Meerman Scott: The New Rules of Marketing and PR. I've just finished David's book (his third) and highly recommend it.

David's premise is that marketing and PR have been forever changed by the Internet and that marketers who continue to mine traditional channels of influence are missing the boat. He argues persuasively that the new opportunity is to speak directly to customers - without going through intermediaries - and to engage them in mutually satisfying conversations that lead to long-term relationships.

This is the same basic premise of my book, only I focused exclusively on social media tools. David takes more of a macro approach, incorporating press releases, websites and fundamentals of good marketing. The last third of the book is full of useful how-to information, ranging from basics of tagging and podcasting to some excellent advice on how to write for your customers.

The new world of marketing is scary to a lot of people, but that's because change is scary. In The New Rules, David Meerman Scott outlines an exciting and opportunity-filled landscape that should energize every marketer. You need to read this book.

Labels: blogging, marketing, social_media, viral_marketing

  ¶ 6:29 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Excited to be going to Nantucket Conference I'm delighted to have the opportunity to speak at Nantucket Conference, a highly regarded - and very intimate - annual event for top technology executives in New England. I'll be on an afternoon panel next Thursday, May 3, talking about how social media is changing the practice of marketing. Then I plan to hang out and just listen to the wisdom of some of the smartest tech entrepreneurs in the country.

This is a special conference because the size of the audience is limited and the population of lawyers, accountants and consultants is kept to a minimum. It's basically an event for business owners, investors and technology wizards. It takes place this year during a mini-boom in venture capital investing. Good timing and always a great program.

BTW, I think they're accepting applications to attend for a couple of more days. You have to request and invitation on the website.

Labels: events, marketing, social_media

  ¶ 6:58 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Why most tech conferences suck

For a glimpse at what’s wrong with most technology conferences – and why IT managers don’t attend them – you have only to listen to this podcast of a session called The Future of Search from the Supernova 2006 conference.

I don’t mean to pick on this session or this event. I have great respect for Chris Shipley and several of the panelists. It just happens to be one good example of a sin I’ve seen committed repeatedly at scores of conferences over the years.

Here you’ve got a great topic and people who are well-qualified to discuss it. But they ruin the opportunity BECAUSE THEY CAN’T STOP SELLING. In one five-minute segment I chose at random, I counted 26 references to “we,” “our,” the product name or an insult aimed at a competitor. In fact, Technorati’s David Sifry was the only panelist who talked about the future of search outside of the context of his or her product.

It’s ridiculous. Presented with the opportunity to discuss a weighty, important issue and to look smart, informed and visionary in front of an influential group, the panelists do little more that deliver advertisements. They look foolish.

Perhaps this plays well to the audience of investors and journalists who hang out at this type of event, but it’s an example of the reason you never see CIOs in the audience. They know that a panel stocked with vendors is going to be one long sales pitch, and they have entirely too much of that in their lives already.

Marketers, please don’t do this. Don’t force your executives to be “on message” all the time. Give them a chance to show what they know and to enlighten their audience. Let them admit that their competitors have good ideas and build on those ideas. Let the audience trust them. There’s nothing that undermines a speaker’s credibility faster than engaging in the kind of embarrassing behavior that you see in this all-too-typical session.

Labels: marketing, transparency

  ¶ 6:11 AM 0 Comments Links to this post