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
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
From my weekly newsletter. Subscribe using the sign-up box to the right.
I just returned from my second trip to Toronto in the last two months and was again impressed with the Web-savviness of the Canadian audience. Did you know, for example,that Canadians are the world's most active users of Facebook? Or that Canadians spend, on average, two morehours per week viewing online video than their counterparts south of the border?
And don't give me that "Of course! It's cold up there!" cliché. Canadian homes are wired and its businesses are doing some very innovative things to reach those web-savvy customers.
Take FutureShop. Canada's largest consumer electronics retailer is using online community not only to learn more about its customers, but to help sell products and support customers. It has built an online advisory and customer support service that is like nothing I've ever seen.
"Ask an Expert" is formulated on a high-touch model in which sales associates are taught to be valued customeradvisers. The company has come up with a strategy to duplicate that real-world experience online. The screen shot shows "Aaron," one of the video avatars who guides customers.
Since mid-2007, visitors to Future Shop's website have been greeted by a video image of a sales associate who offers to help guide their experience. Customers can ask any question of the avatar (he'll even dance for you) and get results from a growing database of advice contributed by sales associates and customers. Future Shop created the video front-end itself and bound it to a community portal from Lithium Technologies.
"We're trying to blur the lines between the offline and online experience," says Robert Pearson, Future Shop's director of e-commerce. "Our goal is to become the largest technology community in Canada."
Future Shop is well on its way to that objective. In less than a year, the site has signed up 50,000 members, which would be equivalent to about 450,000 members in the much larger U.S. market. But the community isn't just a discussion forum. Future Shop co-developed a ranking system with Lithium that lets customers provide feedback on each other and on the quality of information offered up by sales associates. Customer contributors can earn discounts and status in the community. The most helpful sales associates can earn cash.
Next up: Facebook-like functionality that gives contributors their own personal spaces and ties sales associate profiles to store locations. Success is measured by a survey of customer affinity with the brand. It's still too early to draw measurable conclusions, but all the trends are pointing in the right direction. "We're getting about 250,000 visitors a day out of a population of 33 million," Pearson says. "That's many more than come into a store. We actually see people walking in with printouts and asking for specific experts they've met online."
Future Shop isn't using video to be cool. It's using video to reinforce an in-store experience that is essential to its business strategy. It has also bound its customers to the company in a way that is rewarding for both parties. The company is now owned by Best Buy, so I wouldn't be surprised to see a similar capability showing up on a retail website near you.Labels: retail, socialmedia, video
¶ 5:37 AM 1 Comments Links to this post
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
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
“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.
“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
Learn more at TechPRWarStories.com.
Labels: blogswarm, crisis, negativity, PR, socialmedia
¶ 2:42 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
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
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
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
