LIFT10 – Brands and Online Communities from netinfluenceChannel on Vimeo.

The video was made by netinfluence at Lift 10 where Maria was giving a workshop about the challenges brands face to edge their way into the sacred space of conversation. Download her presentation on Slideshare and retrieve the pictures of her workshop on our Facebook.

A very interesting view from Pete Blackshaw, The Nielsen Company, on what to do and how to prepare for the future of online marketing. Responsiveness is key to success, but also being aware of what you need to respond to and planning for what the consumer might do next. Pete suggests “that there is a new accountability standard that has been put on the table by consumers and that may lead to better advertising” . He also cites the Nielsen research that suggests that “consumers trust each other more than they trust advertisers” , ” if advertisers can figure out a way of co creating with consumers, everybody might win”. Brands should be both reactive and proactive in planning for what consumers might do through better websites and better feedback loops.

As the digital shift continues to move marketing communications to more direct and dialogue driven channels companies should adopt a simple methodology in identifying what will work for them and their consumers.  The dialogue idea is as unifying concept that aligns relationship or socially driven programs with other communications as a part of an integrated marketing approach. As more participatory channels for consumers are developed the need to establish consistent, non-campaign driven dialogue points becomes critical in the marketing mix.  These are not just limited to the direct channels, as we know them; (CRM, DM, email, websites), but really extend across any personal contact that can be associated to the “ brand experience”; customer and consumer services, in store demonstrations, events etc.

A real world experience with a brand is only mirrored in the participatory platforms online and this mirroring reflects the sentiments it arouses in real world conversations.

What ever the relationship or dialogue you want to create with consumers you must have a compelling offer or value exchange. Just as in the real world relationships, digital relationships require dialogue to sustain them.  A good dialogue idea serves as the over arching concept for that exchange.  In helping create a consumer relationship the dialogue idea should answer two simple questions. Why would a consumer want interact with you? And what value are you adding to their life, their interests, or their passions?

The reasons for the consumer / brand relationship need to be unpinned by consumer rational  and emotional needs.  Dialogue can be driven by what really matters or makes a difference to a consumer’s life or facilitate their passions. Whatever the offer,  it has to be tangible, real and add value.

Consumers are pre-disposed to dialoguing about a number of things.

They might want ;
To be a part of the future development of their brands they are passionate about.
To share their experiences.
To give and receive advice and learn from others.
To be the first to know or receive exclusive offers or privileges
To seek more information beyond the brand  (how to use it etc.)
To meet and belong to a community of people with similar interests

Relationships are long term. The success points you should consider in developing a dialogue driven program start with being able to sustain a dialogue across a community or programs for  along time rather than running a campaign and possibly include time driven campaign communications. You should also define the motivational points for a consumer to start a dialogue with your brand and your ideas should differentiate from other brand or companies in a unque way , there’s no point in replicating someone else’s idea or offer.  And,  lastly you should aim at supporting the dialogue across a number of consumer contact points.

One of the more interesting pieces of news I read in the last week was that the Paris-based holding company Publicis Groupe said it has acquired Pour Tout Vous Dire, the French customer relationship management program of a key client, Unilever. While the exact figures have not been disclosed Publicis has obviously seen this as buying a solid media entity that you can build upon. In its original form the CRM program was a direct to consumer magazine that has since morphed into a lifestyle portal online with over 5 million subscribers. This evolution in CRM programs is not an uncommon move in FMGC industry ( but the sale of them to an agency is ) . For instance in France  FMCG CRM programs from Unilever’s direct competitors  like Club Nestle a loyalty club and brand driven magazine, is now an online community and lifestyle portal  Croquons la vie, and Danone et Vous a former magazine is also a  lifestyle and product publishing site.

Publicis obviously values the quality of Pour Tout Vous Dire’s  consumer database who are attracted to a wealth of content and services on the site. Companies like Nestle, P&G , Danone and Unilever are all building and expanding these lifestyle content driven CRM sites. As they boost their direct to consumer communications digitally they behaving like publishers creating specialist lifestyle content with the added benefit of adding product offers and services to consumers. As magazine patronage sinks the value of these specialty content driven sites as credible media entities becomes more real. The value of the audience in these CRM sites is tremendous. Think of  P&G’s  Being Girl sites for the Tampax brand first started in the US is  now rolled out in 29 countries worldwide with a reported 400% more effective reach than traditional media. The consumers on all these sites are demographically qualified and if the CRM databases have stored more behavioral information such as interests, content profiles , propensity to use coupons, etc then you have a predictive goldmine for highly targeted communications as well as good content.

Publicis’ move also underscores the agencies are potentially becoming competitors to the companies they work with. As the media companies are increasing their foothold in digital they are buying up digital properties where there’s good content aggregation and known audiences. The agencies are morphing. Media buyers are becoming the media, investing in online Ad networks and now even as we have seen in this move buying their clients sites. It may not be a big deal for Publicis, however, it sets a new precedent.

Unilever sold its CRM site with a free run advertising and communications deal for five years and may be allowing Publicis to build a bigger media entity then could have built themselves. I have no predictions on whether this will or won’t work. What is clear is that Unilever sold its consumer database as a credible asset. No doubt it had invested hard to build it and its consumer’s loyalty, however, its hard for me to reconcile that sale. I believe that when a consumer gives their personal information to company it is done in a relationship of trust with that company. Yes the company is building an asset and returning a value and service in return, however, I don’t think the consumer information or even their trust and loyalty  should bought, sold, and treated as such.

The behavioral advertising tracking platform Phorm hits the news again last week as the UK ISP Talk Talk followed a move by BT (British Telecom) when they canceled their trial with the company.

It comes as no surprise to me. Phorm has developed technology which collects information on web use in order to serve Internet users with highly targeted adverts and serves ads to people based on their web-browsing behavior. Relying on deep packet inspection, in which every data packet is opened and examined, Phorm builds a profile of consumer’s web-surfing habits. The service surreptitiously tracks and interpolates their behavior without disclosing itself or without asking permission.

BT (British Telecom) had conducted two trials of the Phorm technology, without obtaining the consent of the broadband customers involved, leading to allegations of illegal activity from its customers, peers and privacy campaigners. This led to a lawsuit initiated by the European Commission against the UK government for failing to comply with European data protection laws.  Apparently BT completed a further trial in December 2008 and following further and obvious consumer backlash, it deleted its forums discussing the technology.

Phorm is not a consumer-based service, or entertainment or publishing network that provides an obvious value to the consumer by servicing a need.  Its an online advertising network that centers around gathering intelligence and contextual serving of advertising, Phorm’s mistake is that it doesn’t use the good manners approach of asking the consumers permission (the 1st step in any relationship based marketing is to ask permission) so it is in breach of any trust a consumer might have in the platform.  Here in lies its problem, collecting intelligence on a consumer’s browsing habits or behaviors, without them knowing is an invasion of privacy.  Google, also cited over privacy concerns in recent years, currently collects and stores information from each search query, holding information about the search query itself, the unique IP address and details about how a user makes their searches.  Google is different to Phorm in that it doesn’t intercept and spy on content a person is browsing, but its not benign either. It stores the search behavior and attaches it to an identifiable IP address.

The controversy surrounding Phorm’s technology is probably going to continue but I don’t think that this will stop the adoption of behavior based advertising; Quite the contrary.  What is apparent in Phorms case there is a clear breach of trust with the consumer and technology is viewed as “snooping” or spying technology. The only question that remains, is Phorm considered as a spyware? Uncannily spyware is  where the company has it roots and effected larger commercialization of the technology under going a name change to Phorm. They are not the only company doing this type of tracking. Consider Google’s Adsense, it calls its behavior based tracking  “interest based targeting” or DoubleClick’s DART cookies.  DART cookies are used to serve ads specific to a consumer and their interests (”interest based targeting”).  The ads served to a consumer are targeted based on their previous browsing history. In closed and permission based systems companies are able to apply simple or even complex business intelligence to apply predictive models on consumer behaviors.  This is not new nor is it “snooping”, its consensual. In CRM systems these behaviors are tracked as type of consumption, frequency of consumption, volume of consumption, and the demographics of the persons consuming, whether it’s a product or a service.  Highly targeted advertising will fast become the norm and its already is in deployment in many forms. It will become more intelligent as the web approaches the emergence of the semantic web. The mantra of right message, right time, right place will not only be online but across all digital channels. Consider these notes made in the past two weeks by  UK based Sky TV.  They are continuing to promote high-definition (HD) television—partly because even non-HD television viewing appears to rise in HD households—and because they will develop “addressable ads” for launch within two years.

The reason is purely driven by data points it knows and controls. The consumer accounts, their location, viewing times and programs are all at their finger tips.  Sky can profile the viewing interests and habits of its subscriber households, and will be able to sell ads matching those interests and charge advertisers a premium for more personalized and targeted advertising.
Marketers need to tread very carefully when it comes to personalized or more specifically behavior based advertising—and for good reason. People currently perceive it as an invasion of their privacy in online media. As the world become more connected these concerns may change, but there will be many more privacy battles and barriers to overcome similar to Phorm’s case in the near future.  In the HD TV world it will most likely not be viewed as such. TV is still a passive medium and advertising is still interruption based. In mobile it will be a serious issue, the phone is very personal , users need to control what, who has access to engage with them. In Online people don’t feel comfortable about being tracked its too much like “big brother” behavior, but are okay in disclosing small pieces of information about themselves if there a value proposition attached.
Studies  are showing that a majority of consumer are willing to provide information in exchange for personalized ads. The key will be only if marketers give them something in return. Better offers, value added services that entice a consumer to part with a little bit of information to participate in direct, relationship driven, and possibly socially driven marketing. What’s clear today is that there is a  huge distrusts , consumer and government backlash against companies that use spyware technologies to track behaviors.

Marketers beware! Ask Permission first!

According to the BBC, initial data from Trendrr, a Web service that tracks activity on social media sites, the number of Twitter posts containing “Michael Jackson” totaled more than 100,000 per hour. That put the momentary news of Jackson’s death equal to the peak surrounding the Iran protests ten days before.

Twitter posts on #iranelection reached 100,000 per hour on June 16 and eventually climbed to 220,000 per hour. In response to the Iranian governments shutdown of both local and international from reporting on the events unfolding in Iran, it’s connected populace turned to social media channels, to break the news using mobile phones, through proxy servers setup by freedom of speech advocates in the US and their own blogs and social media outlets. The Twitter channel #iranelection gained so much importance and notoriety in a matter of a few days that the State Department of the US asked Twitter to postpone network maintenance so it could continue monitoring the service. The opening of social media channels spread the defiance against the Iranian government, caused an intense cyberwar (Crisis in Iran Sparks Global Guerrilla Cyberwar) and caught the traditional media outlets by surprise. The effects of the  immediacy of news and the spontaneity of world’s citizens to rebroadcast and support that news was so profound that even CNN’s Christina Amanpour was quoted in the New York Times saying “You can’t keep news down anymore & that’s a huge change…getting the word out is totally democratized.”

Twitter had matured in an instant and its reported plateau on user adoption from the month before was suddenly just another small bump in Twitter’s rocky road to mainstream user adoption.

Twitter’s growing impact on journalism is punctuated by what is  happening in Iran. News services like CNN and BBC renowned for on the spot reporting were caught out, the world was watching the news , but not on their channels. Mainstream media commentators posted a pieces on rules of engagement for journalists following the 1st spike in activity when the true power of the world’s citizens voice was amplified through Twitter.  Coincidentally at the same time as history was being created in Iran, Clay Shirky of TED was delivering the this message on how Social media  helps define history through instant reporting.

Notably on these two defining events the buzz surrounding the Twitter service peaked as a new wave of adopters hit the platform.  Here’s a  look at a what these two events effects on Twitter have been.

User Adoption

How to Use  Twitter – The question on what to do ?

With all this buzz surrounding the Twitter platform and its continued massive adoption, the service has to really work on capturing these waves of people and turning them to loyal users. Its failure to scale an infrastructure quick enough for unexpected demand reminds me of my days at Activision. The combination of deep social media based fan communities and highly precision driven digital campaigns together would on occasion overwhelm our servers. The technical infrastructure guys would cringe saying it wasn’t good, but the marketing teams pointed to it as a success point the “digital marketing efforts” were working extremely well. Needless to say it was seen a good problem to have, it spurned an investment in an web serving environment that could handle the onslaught of big and hugely successful campaigns and opened peoples eyes to the strength and importance of the digital and social media.

What is clear from my experience is you have got to have a brand people love then users will forgive a few hiccups in service or shortcomings. What is obvious is that the people have spoken, Twitter is gaining love.  It has peoples attention and will be forgiven for a few outages. Now it has to capitalize on these peaks and show that its a platform worthy of true love and loyalty.

The word Twitterverse entered the lexicon of social media  in a big way in the past few months.  Its appeared on NPR (National Public Radio ) in the Washington Post, spawned a blog by Emily Chang, of Ideacodes in SF  and  the 1st or beta edition of a  Twitterverse map.

I think the map is the  best and possibly the least abstract representation of  a fast emerging world and was produced by Brian Solis, Principal of FutureWorks, PR and New Media agency in Silicon Valley. He released a beta version of what he calls the Twitterverse v 0.9  last week ( see  Gazing into the Twitterverse). What he and partner Jess3 have produced is a spiral universe that begins to place an order to a complex set of relationships  surrounding Twitter from search, communication, mobile, analytics, relationship management, advertising and events. The spiral representation seems to be like that of solar system revolving around a central star in long tendrils representing  a map of tools and applications  for conversation management and measurement emanating from the vortex of Twitter.

So what does the word Twitterverse mean and where does it originate from?

The Urban Dictionary provides a broad user friendly meaning online. “the cyberspace area of twitter. This naturally extends beyond twitter.com to anywhere you can twitter, which includes cell phones.”  It appears that the cyberspace area is largely undefined or is vague.

Wordspy , a blog on the word lovers guide to new words,  attributes the origins of the word to Twitterverse to Adam Pasick, “SXSW and the Twitterverse,” Monkey Daemon, March 12, 2007

Adam described Twitter as “a sort of minute-by-minute blog that you send and receive from a computer or text message. All too often this takes the form of scintillating entries like “I’m eating breakfast,” and other stuff that you really don’t need to know about other people. But the allure at SXSW is that all the cool kids are doing it. So if you want to find the cool parties, you have to read Twitter. It’s geek clique chic.”

As Brian Solis’ graphic representation illustrates, the Twitterverse has evolved since those early days.  The public, companies, the press, have all run to get on board to explore and exploit the platform as short form news, PR, promotion, and ideas to a range of tools that map the relationships  between information sources, their conversations topics,  circles of influence, and the broad sweep pf readers or “followers”.

To emphasize the size and significance of the microblogging platform Neilsen reports that time spent of time spent on Twitter has grown a phenomenal 3,712% in the past  year. Who ever coined the phrase Twitterverse is watching in awe as this new universe take shape and form day by day.

Top 10 Social Networking and Blog Sites Ranked by Total Minutes for April 2009 and Their Year-over-Year Percent Growth (U.S., Home and Work)

Its good to reflect why this remark maybe relevant. In recent presentation by an Brian Giesen, Ogilvy PR executive in Australia , where Ross Dawson presented the Influencer Landscape framework ( see above ) he attributed  the reasons of the shift in consumer belief to the following researched facts.

• – 75% of people don’t believe that companies tell the truth in advertising.
• - In the US 81% look to word of mouth (be it online or offline ) for decisions.
• - Trust in Media Editorial is is at a low 56%.

No wonder the citizen journalist in us is alive and well, albeit with the aiding and abetting of the new wave of  social communications technologies.

The Driving Forces

The Democratization of Media , Social Media Integration, Social Media Aggregation, The Decline of Advertising  Impact and Peer Trust all play  a role that is aided by influence mechanisms or media channels and touch points, the influence aggregators, and networks. How they all interconnected is pivotal in determining  how people behave.

For brands and companies its the  consumer trust and transparency that  remains as a  paramount concern over and above their advertising. Both managing a reputation and those consumer benefits already ingrained in a product offering become important issues.   Companies and brands that break that consumer trust  run the risk of trying to manage very hard to contain negative consumer sentiments.   Let’s not forget the adage, when a consumer has a bad experience they  tell 8- 10 people and 3-4 people when its a good experience. As we have seen in digital its amplified many times over ,  a single bad comment,  video, picture can ruin a companies or brands reputation overnight as it spreads through a web of influence.

A consumer has an 81% trust in word of mouth. The only clear and trackable way of following sentiments (other than in controlled research,or  focus groups or spying )  is to trawl the digital world where unbiased streams of thoughts and conversations take place. The same conversation can be taking place in many places at the same time , so how do we know which one has more weight than the other? which one has more influence? and which one may potentially be passed on? The landscape of Influence lies not only in immediacy of the contact or proximity to an influential source but also in  the volume of the opinion where the audience is in a dispersed chain of distribution,  or visiting sites where the collective  filtering takes place  e.g. the  most popular  opinion will rise to the top as common consensus. The social media aggregators and the resulting long tail of residual,  searchable and  referential digital footprints creates a potentially long shelf life for an opinion.

In the  Influencer landscape there are domains of influence  both in the networks where audiences gather, meet and talk  and where commentary is redistributed, in the critics circles and social media aggregators. So what are these domains?

The Where :  Domains of influence

• - Blogs, Microblogs
• - Video and photo communities
• – Message boards and forums
• – Social networks

The How : Characteristics of influencers
Its important to define our influencers  by identify certain behavioral characteristics,  as we know these people are really a minority group. A majority of people in social networks or communities are “lurkers” , the observers and readers, only a few people are the real content creators or conversationalists.  In landscape of Influence people are placed in a hierarchy of behavioral importance. Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators and the In-Actives.  There are very few Creators, more Critics, a greater number of Collectors and so on. Identifying your Creators and Critics  leads you to understand the influence they have on the greater number of  Collectors, Joiners and Spectators. Creators are the initiators of influence and they share a few basic identifiable characteristics. They :

• - Engage others in conversations
• – Inspire others to continue the conversation
• - Participate consistently
• - Are seen as credible
• - Compels others to want to hear what they say next
• - Create content that is ‘remarkable’

The What : Engaging

• - Process of Listening (Conversation maps)
• - Planning (Influencer maps)
• - Engaging (Programs)

If brands and companies want to engage in the Landscape of Influence its best to understand the lay of the landscape first. Tapping into and understanding your influencers is a growing approach and  knowing what can be influential or what motivates them as influencers is a priority .  The qualitative understanding what drives conversation and reaction  is of key importance.  Understanding the patterns of distribution  is  more of a  complex matrix, however, its is likely that on any given subject matter there is one or two main sources of primary influence and then there are many interested re distributors  who act as  networked satellites  surrounding the source in close proximity. In mapping this influence it is commonly referred to as hot spots , where a dense grouping of people , ideas and conversations are in close proximity to each other. Knowing , when and where to engage these groups requires a  business intelligence approach, involving key data points for a precision driven programs. The under pinning  of this are the relationships a brand or company will create as these are direct communications programs. Whether its blogger outreach programs, external community engagement, influencer scouring, the development of closed special interest communities there has to be a defined dialogue idea or a  value proposition in the engagement. The other thing to remember is that once you create a relationship , its ongoing and you must nurture and maintain it or lose it.

View the intiating source of the Influencers Landscape at  Ross Dawson’s Trends in Living Networks

P & G hosted an EMEA Digital Night at in Geneva bringing together its marketing , ecommerce , digital communications people and their agencies to participate in a digital and social media experiment on a real live campaign. At its outset it appeared to be a daunting proposal , to spearhead a full blown digital media campaign in two hours with the ultimate goal being to maximize the groups reach , push their influence, and market and sell the idea of donating for a Pampers & UNICEF program to eliminate Tetanus. The aim to raise 100, 000 GBP in 18 hours.

Pampers Save a Baby. One pack , one baby.

“A baby dies every three minutes somewhere in the world from tetanus. It is completely avoidable and Pampers is sponsoring and raising money for a UNICEF vaccination program worldwide.”

The ensuing two hours was bold and adventurous as assigned groups armed with a few basic executional assets and a donation landing page split off to devise and execute a fund raising campaign utilizing only digital channels. There were no set rules in what the approach needed to be other than it needed to be “executed with integrity”.

The groups immediately raced to begin and obvious point to turn to were their friends and associates linked in the various social networks. Facebook groups emerged , links appears, a donate widget application got added to personal pages and the conversation began in earnest. The emergence of strategy then began to permeate the groups as each devised campaign message and a reach strategy in how to maximize audience across a multiple touch points making the approach more sophisticated, pointed and less haphazard.

Blogs , YouTube videos, an influencer campaign on Tweeter and through Facebook , chasing and contacting high value donors , negotiations for impressions across online publishing networks linking multiple contact channels and coming together at a rapid pace. In a jaw dropping moment a little while latter a one million impression banner campaign appeared across one of Germany’s major newspaper sites. The buzz and influencer phenomena then took over with global reach. As the intensity of the push to raise money took hold , groups began to monitor their competitors actions and tactics, calling for quick decisions on how best to out wit the competition and move to next channel almost in a race to be first.

Viral campaigns riding on the back of Selma Hayak’s ambassadorship sprung up. Well designed internal direct email campaigns raced through the P & G network.Tell to friends campaigns in the social sites took hold.

A directed and awe inspiring frenzy of digital buzz. The results .. they are a secret .. but it worked.

Donate to one groups target @ www.justgiving.com.co.uk/pampersnewbaby

Save a Baby Blog link

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brand.intelligence™ is used to help our clients to connect their marketing / communications with their business applications.

A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.” – Jeff Bezos, founder and ceo of Amazon.com.

brand.intelligence™ works like a brain. It has two interconnected hemispheres, one hemisphere is emotional and the other one is rational.

The emotional side is the brand management that is the application of marketing/communications techniques to a specific product, product line, or brand. It seeks to increase the product’s perceived value to the customer and thereby increase brand franchise and brand equity. It is:

1. Creating the promise. Means defining the brand.
2. Making the promise. A large part of marketing, which includes advertising and PR, is about positioning the company and its products in the minds of customers and against your competitors.
3. Keeping the promise. Means managing capability, consistent processes, technologies and systems which are reliable and usable, motivated people who are willing and able to dialogue with all the stakeholders and deliver the goods.

On the rational side, business intelligence drives business decisions. Understanding and forwarding the information to the right people creates a collective intelligence, which can have financial value.

In this new world, information and dialogue are kings. The more good information and the better contact you have with your audience the greater the probability that you will make winning decisions and investments.

What gives value to data is not the data itself but what you do with it. As more people share the same information, they understand each other better, communicate easier and make better decisions.

With the advent of the social media on the internet, brands should accept to loose a part of the control on their image. Brands need to behave differently. They really need to dialogue with their consumers (see article of January 9, 2009)! Marketers on their side need to become more aggregator than broadcaster. They have to help brands to create an open environment for collaboration and knowledge sharing.

brand.intelligence™ could help you to go further in the contact with the audiences through a better knowledge of data associated with a powerful creative proposal.