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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.
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.
TripIt Travel Management Service is a Winner
For the past couple of months I've been using a travel management service that has some nice features to make life easier for the frequent traveler. It's called TripIt, and if you travel a lot, I recommend you give it a look.
TripIt aggregates all information about your travel in a single place and allows you to share itineraries with anyone you choose. It uses that most prosaic form of communication - e-mail - to update information. When you make a flight, hotel or car rental reservation, you forward the confirmation e-mail to TripIt, which automatically adds the information to your itinerary. The service is very good at parsing e-mail confirmations from most major airlines and hotel chains.
It doesn't get everything right - it couldn't figure out a message from JetBlue in my case - but the service is new and developers are constantly updating it. In nearly every case I encountered, TripIt was able to seamlessly integrate messages from a variety of travel providers into a single itinerary. It's then easy to share that information with anyone via e-mail. You can also integrate your itinerary into popular calendar programs and have updates sent to you via SMS.
TripIt adds information you don't request but which is nevertheless useful. For example, if you're flying into SFO and staying at the Hotel Palomar, it will include Google Maps directions to your destination. It also has nice touches like weather forecasts that are built right into the itinerary.
TripIt is trying to build social networking features into the service, though I'm not sure that's a winning strategy. I don't see much value in sharing my travel plans with people who don't care about them, but if the service can figure out how to integrate recommendations via third-party services like Yelp, it could have a winner. In short, there are a lot of promising directions the company could follow if it builds a critical mass of users. I, for one, am sold. I expect I'll be using TripIt for a long time to come. The service adds real value and efficiency to my busy schedule.
Evan Schuman (TPRWS 39) of StorefrontBacktalk.com has spent a lot of time at trade shows lately and he sent us these four tips for getting the most out of media contacts.
Jennifer Mattern calls herself the “social media Grinch.” But that doesn’t mean she’s down on social media. It’s just that she thinks the focus on social media can distract PR people from their real work, In this interview, she outlines her cautionary advice about social media and stresses the fundamentals that PR people still need to employ.
I’m writing a how-to book about social media marketing and one chapter is devoted to hands-on techniques for finding influencers online. It isn’t as simple as it sounds. In this episode, I talk about what I learned conducting influencer searches on behalf of a mythical Quebec resort. Step one: master advanced search.
Many people’s first reaction to Twitter.com is that they just don’t get it. It looks like barely controlled chaos. But Twitter has inspired a passionate following. Laura Fitton is a poster child for a service that is revolutionizing the way people interact with their social networks. In this interview, she describes what’s unique about Twitter and how it can be useful even to people who don’t use it that often.
Allan Cattier, Director of the Academic Technology Group at Emory University gave a mind-blowing statistic in his presentation to the Communintelligence Executing Social Media conference in Atlanta last month. He said Emory had surveyed its freshman class and found that more than 80% of the students log on to Facebook 18 or more times a day. Imagine how our institutions will be shaped by this trend in coming years. He also showed a compelling video called "A Vision of Students Today" created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University. See below.
Nielsen's top social media list shows social nets up, AOL downNielsen Online has released the list of the top U.S. social networking sites and blogs for October, 2007. MySpace may not have the buzz right now, but it's still #1 by a factor of three. Meanwhile, AOL is off across the board and the classmate sites are struggling.
Top 10 Social Networking Sites for October 2007 (U.S., Home and Work) by name, number of unique monthly visitors and year-over-year growth rate.
Still more AMA Webinar questions answeredHere 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.
More AMA Webinar questions answeredHere 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: Stacie asks, “How will social media play out with healthcare vs. consumer products?”
A: Very differently. People typically want to consult with expert advisers on healthcare decisions and their relationships with those people are important. They’re much less likely to turn to anonymous sources for life-and-death matters. That said, the Internet has played and will continue to play an important role in alternative medicine, wellness and background research. Social media will have an important role in helping people diagnose problems, choose courses of treatment and seek alternatives.
In consumer products, social media is already playing a huge role in evaluation and purchase activity. The CEO of Procter & Gamble told the Association of National Advertisers last year that they have to stop trying to control the message. "Consumers are more participative and selective and the trend from push to pull is accelerating," he said. Those are strong words coming from the world’s largest consumer products company.
Q: Anne asks, ”Doesn't social networking skew younger?And, do these networks apply to B2B marketers?”
A: Yes, the most active users of social networks are unquestionably people under the age of 30. If you’re an entertainment, food or clothing company, you’re probably already using these media because that’s where your audience is.
In some markets, though, social media is making a big impact on older age groups, and particularly in b-to-b markets. The information technology market is one of the most active users of blogs and podcasts, for example, and it’s almost entirely a b-to-b business. The travel and hospitality industry is using interactive marketing to reach business people with specific interests, such as frequent travelers and corporate event planners. Professional associations like the Air Conditioning Contractors of America and the National Association of Manufacturers are blogging to promote their members. There will be more examples of this as the younger population grows up and begins to apply the tools they use at home to their business roles.
Q: Patience asks “So why did you choose to not self-publish?”
A: I believe this question is in response to a comment I made about Lulu.com and similar sites that making self-publishing of books fast and relatively inexpensive. There are advantages to working with a commercial publisher, including an established distribution network, retail store presence and a certain cachet that comes from having a publisher endorse your work. This leads to intangible business opportunities that have nothing to do with royalties. You can definitely make more money self-publishing, though. If you don’t particularly care about building a speaking or consulting business, but just want to get a message out, self-publishing gives you more control and potentially bigger profits.
Q: Brent asks, “Are there similar influencers in Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America?”
A: Yes, although to different degrees. In fact, the number one language in the blogosphere is Japanese, according to Technorati’s State of the Live Web report. Korea and Japan have a much higher penetration of broadband into the home than the U.S. does, and a very active culture of bloggers and social networkers as a result. Korea’s OhMyNews.com is the largest experiment in community journalism on the Internet.
In Europe, the blogosphere is very healthy, although my evidence is purely anecdotal. I run across blogs in Danish, German, French and other languages I don’t even recognize all the time. Two of the most interesting corporate blogs are published by Benetton and Ducati motorcycles, both in Italy.
I can’t speak to Latin-America specifically. The economy is not as strong in many of those countries as in the U.S., Europe and the Pacific Rim, so broadband penetration is lower. The Technorati blog tracks blogs by language and can give you some useful statistics.
Q: Anne asks, “How do apply this to local or regional marketing?Yelp, for instance is very biased, and doesn't feel trustworthy the way that a more neutral, traditional third party does.”
A: I’m not sure I agree with your comments about Yelp. That site is simply a conduit for its members to post reviews of restaurants and entertainment spots. While such a system is always vulnerable to manipulation, the number of reviews that Yelp lists for some properties is remarkable. In general, the more reviews there are, the more reliable the average rating should be.
You should always be leery of peer-review systems in which only a few people have commented. It’s like research: you should probably through out the extremes at both ends of the scale, because those people may have an agenda.
As far as regional marketing goes, I’d just point out that some of the most active social networks are regional. Going.com, Yelp and eCrush are just three of the many networks that target people who are looking for entertainment and companionship. Also, regional interests like sports and politics are magnets for local audiences.
Q: Eric asks, "How can you use social networking for marketing complex technologies like middleware and software tools?"
This is actually one of the busiest areas of social media a right now.Companies like Microsoft and Borland have many of their developers blogging and maintain active communities where customers and third-party developers can exchange tips and solve problems.In addition, sites like TheServerSide.com and Slashdot.org host very active forums and even live events where software professionals can meet.
The reason social media marketing works so well in these fields is precisely what you mention: their complexity.Most problems can't be predicted in advance, so people rely on each other to help figure out solutions.Buying ad space or forming groups within the existing communities is one way to spread your brand.If you have an installed customer base, consider giving them a place to congregate and help each other out.
Your questions answered: AMA webinar follow-upI had the pleasure of being the guest speaker on and American Marketing Association webinar sponsored by Aquent early this week.We had a great audience -- more than 750 people attended -- and there were more than 20 questions that I was unable to answer because of time limitations.I'll answer each of them in a series of blog posts over the next few days.Each of these permalinks will be tagged “AMA” so you can easily group them together.Thanks to everyone for coming and for asking such great questions.
Q: [At one point, I referred to a story told by blogger Robert Scoble about a technology vendor who told him that a single link on his blog drew far more response than an article in a prominent technology magazine.] Jennifer asks, “How did the software company evaluate the influence of Scoble's blog?”
A: Simply by traffic to the page linked to by Scoble.This is one of the great benefits of social media marketing: you can easily track referring links from other sites and quickly figure out who is sending you traffic.This is standard information that all Web analytics software provides.Obviously, the people who are sending you the most traffic are the people who should get more of your attention and outreach.
Q: Lidia asks, “I would like to know your opinion related to the large influence this phenomena is having on small kids that are exposed to these new media sites like clubpenguin, etc. How will these affect their personality, their habits, etc?
A: I'm not a psychologist, and it's impossible to predict the indirect impact of the behaviors that social media sites are creating.I believe that a few changes are inevitable:
Kids will define their relationships very differently, with geography being much less important than in the past.They are already learning to form rich and meaningful relationships with people they have never met, solely through the use of digital technology.They care little about where their friends live as long as they can communicate about topics of mutual interest.If you take this to its logical conclusion, you can see that national boundaries will become less important to relationships in the future.It seems to me that that's a good thing.
Kids will grow up expecting to be constantly connected and to always have information at their fingertips.Call it the Wikipedia generation. This is completely different from the world of previous generations. Today’s kids will expect to be able to access whatever information they want within a few seconds, and will be frustrated and angry when it’s unavailable.This will put pressure on institutions to open up and give people access to whatever information they need to make a decision.Again, this sounds pretty good to me.
There's a possibility the kids will grow up being less worldly and less well-rounded than generations that preceded them because of their ability to filter information they consume.I'm hoping that natural curiosity counteracts this trend, but the declining influence of mainstream media may create a generation that is more insular and less aware of world issues than previous generations.
There's a risk of negative health consequences caused by a more sedentary lifestyle.There's no question in my mind that the current epidemic of childhood obesity is due, at least in part, to the pervasive use of video games and online entertainment instead of physical recreation.It will be up to parents, schools and government to encourage physical activity by kids who don't have as much incentive to get out and play anymore.I don't think we're seeing as much progress in this area as we need to, and it concerns me.
I'm sure there will be many other long-term effects of this new digital lifestyle, some good and some bad.I think the breaking down of cultural and geographic barriers, though, will be a very positive development.
Q: Charlayne asks, “How does a company build "blog" integrity without sounding as if they are their own advertisement?How does a company build positive brand awareness via a blog?”
A: I’ll answer the first part of that question by simply saying don't use your blog to sell.The purpose of a business blog should be to engage with customers and prospects around information that is of mutual interest. Use it to expose smart people in your company, discuss issues in the market, identify customer needs and seek feedback on your products and priorities. Don’t use it to deliver advertisements; if you do, no one will read it and you will quickly lose interest yourself.
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.
Is second life a massive marketing self-deception?Wired has a devastating profile of Second Life today with a title that leaves no question about the magazine’s conclusions: “How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life.”
The gist of the piece is that marketers are marching like lemmings off the Second Life cliff, throwing time and money into building virtual communities that no one visits.The reasons range from the technology limitations of Linden Labs’ servers to a kludgy user interface to the excessive time it takes to find and get to anything in Second Life.
One particularly damning statistic: 85% of people who create avatars have abandoned them, the article says.
I was somewhat relieved to read this piece, because I have been feeling disconnected from the whole Second Life phenomenon.While I created a profile and buzzed around the virtual world for a while, I never got much of a sense that I was part of a bigger group.In fact, I can’t think of a single person who’s told me that he or she spends a significant amount of time in Second Life.If Wired is correct, a lot of people have been engaging in self-deception.
A particularly interesting comment is at the top of the third page of this profile. It proposes that one of the reasons for Second Life's popularity is that it looks so much like the physical world.This gives marketers a sense of comfort that they don't have when experimenting with the more effective but less familiar tactics that really do work online. In other words, if we can just recreate familiar surroundings, we’ll be okay.
In reality, I can't think of a successful virtual reality product that isn't a computer game. People have been experimenting with online analogies to physical experiences since the earliest days of the Internet.One of the first ambitious business-to-business projects I can remember, in fact, was a virtual tradeshow that had visitors wandering around an exhibit hall floor and looking at products and collateral.I don't remember who put on the show, but I do remember that the experience was notable for its lack of participants. It was never repeated.
Perhaps virtual worlds to have a future, but this article may go a long way toward ensuring that Second Life doesn't.
Whole Foods CEO John Mackey was praised for entering the blogosphere two years ago but the buzz turned bad when it was revealed recently that Mackey had written anonymously about his company on Internet stock message boards. PR pros should take note, argue Paul and David. It’s great when the CEO blogs, but the very hint of deception can turn the community against you and end up doing more harm than good.
It turns out both our hosts have been spending time on Facebook lately and they really like it. Paul says Facebook is what LinkedIn should have been: a professional networking site with personality. David likes all the new applications that members can share. But they hesitate to call Facebook the winner in professional social networking. The market is too chaotic right now to predict who will come out on top. That’s no excuse not to dive into a social network and learn the style and lingo, the advise PR pros. Just do it!
In Cheers & Jeers, David roasts Sunrocket, a VOIP provider that went of business but didn’t bother to turn off its website, where you can still sign up for its non-existent service. Paul toasts Harry Potter, whose Internet success may keep the book series alive even after the author has stopped writing.
Facebook is rising, but social network users are fickle
Rich Skrenta comments on the surging popularity of Facebook at the expense of LinkedIn and MySpace and asks Are network effects getting weaker? He has a great point about the fleeting success of early social networks.
A year ago, everyone was talking about MySpace. Now its star seems to be fading, perhaps as a consequence of its early success. My MySpace mailbox is full of come-ons from dating services and very little else. Meanwhile, a lot of my friends and business associates have joined Facebook in recent months and there's a surge or activity there driven by the service's expanding audience and new openness.
But who's to say that will last? As Skrenta notes, the cost of switching services is pretty low and people are inclined to run toward whichever network has shiniest new toy, at least for now. If Facebook doesn't continually out-innovate new competitors, its success could be short-lived.
Google has been remarkable in that respect, for the cost of switching search engines is zero. Yet Google got 65% of US searchs in May.
I'm currently a big fan of Facebook, but I'm not convinced it's the winner in professional social networks. It's way too early.
