Category Archives: Social Marketing

Can Brands Keep Their Promise in a Digital World?

First published February 26, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

To speculate on the future of brand advertising is certainly beyond the scope of this column, but I got myself into this mess. I opened the can of worms two weeks ago in the Search Insider by warning that we could be running the search funnel dry. Ryan DeShazer, from HSR, called me on it and asked me what will replace traditional brand building in our new digital environment. Last week, I began the journey by talking about two different types of brands: Brand Promises and Brand Religions. Today, I’d like to paint a hypothetical scenario of where awareness marketing might go for those brands  that are implicit promises. Next week I’ll tackle religions.

Timing is everything

One of the challenges of brand advertising has always been the disconnect between the times in our lives when we’re thinking about a product and the opportunity for a brand exposure. How do you deliver a brand message at just the right time?  The goal of situational targeting became advertising’s Holy Grail. A few channels, such as in-store promotions and well-placed coupons, at least got marketers closer to being in the right place at the right time, but did little to build brand at this critical time. A significant discount might prompt a consumer to try an unfamiliar brand, but the new brand was always fighting the well worn groove of consumer habits. Trying a new product once doesn’t guarantee you’ll ever try it again (reading list suggestion: “Habit, the 95% of Behavior that Marketers Ignore.” )

The disconnect between the purchasing situation and the need to establish brands mentally (literally burn them into our brains) meant marketers played both ends against the middle. They used TV and other branding mediums to build awareness. Then they used direct-response tactics to tip the balance toward purchase when the situation was right. But in between was a huge gap that has swallowed billions of advertising dollars. The challenge facing digital marketing is how to bridge the gap.

Don’t Take Our Word for It
The answer to bridging the gap for a brand that promises quality lies in a few converging areas: the online social graph and mobile computing. Both areas are in their infancy, but they hold the promise of solving the Brand Promise marketer’s dilemma.

If a brand is a promise of quality, we want to hear confirmation of that by someone other than the brand. A brand’s advertising might make us willing to consider them, but we want confirmation of the promise of quality from an objective third party. The Web has made it much easier to access the opinions of others. And, through platforms like Facebook and Twitter, we are now able to “crowdsource” — reach out to our trusted circle of family, friends and acquaintances and quickly poll them for their opinions. But this is still a fragmented, multi-step process that requires a lot of time and cognitive effort on our part. What happens when we weave the pieces together into a smooth continuum?

Keeping Marketing in Hand
Mobile has the ability to do that, because it provides us with a constant online connection. Consider the implications. As we store more of our “LifeBits”  (check out Aaron Goldman’s columns  on this fascinating project) online and rely more and more on digital assistance to make our lives easier, the odds of determining our intent by  where we are and what we’re interacting with in our own “Web” improve dramatically. Our online persona becomes an accurate reflection of our mental one.  With mobile devices, our digital and physical locations merge and through technologies like MOBVIS, we can even parse our surrounding visually. All this combines to give the marketer very clear signals of what we might be thinking about at any given time.

Now, advertising can be delivered with pinpoint accuracy: think of it as behavioral targeting on steroids. Not only that, it can be the first step in a continuum: we get a targeted and relevant messaging, with the ability to seamlessly pull back objective reviews and opinions on any given product, location or service. Going one step further with just one click, we can reach out through multiple social networks to see if any of our circle of acquaintances has an opinion on the purchase we’re considering. If brands are a promise, this allows us to vet the promise instantly. If all checks out, we quickly check for best prices and possible alternatives within the geographic (or online) parameters we set.

In this scenario, the nature of brand-building for the brand promise product changes dramatically. We rely less on manufacturer’s messaging and more on how the brand resonates through the digital landscape. Brand preference becomes more of a spur-of-the-moment decision. Of course, the brands will still try to stake the high ground in our mental terrain through traditional awareness-building, but I suspect it will become increasingly more difficult to do so. Ultimately, brands will try to move their position from one of a promise of quality (a promise easily checked online) to a religion, where faith can play the spoiler.

Search Insider Summit: Day One

Good kick off to the Search Insider Summit in Park City, Utah..my killer head cold aside.

We started with a great conversation around the Obama campaign and it’s use of online. We had Ben Seslija from Clickable and Corina Constantin from Didit as informed observers, with Emily Williams, who worked on the campaign as director of online marketing. One of the recurring themes was that the campaign was really a ground swell movement, that was effectively captured because the Obama campaign had the foresight to provide the right tools. The brand that was Obama was not a top down strategy, but rather a cooperative effort that largely played itself out online.

From there, conversations at the summit progressed through analytics and engagement mapping, advanced SEO tactics and best practices at PPC. When I retreated to my room to down a few decongestants and catch up on email, several were already planning on meeting at the bar (Todd Friesen and Rand Fishkin planted a seed that needed little in the way of nurturing) to pick up several discussion threads. Richard Zwicky from Enquisite wrapped up the day with a somewhat radical suggestion that the SEO monetization model was badly broken and promised an answer was coming.

So..the official part of Day One is over. But I’m sure the conversations are still going on.

Democracy Reborn Nov. 4, Thanks to Online Campaign

First published November 6, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Even as a Canadian, I was amazed by what happened the night of Nov. 4. History was made in many, many different ways. And for that reason, I’m interrupting my series on Search and Branding, just for this week.

 

Obviously, every journalist and pundit will be falling over themselves talking about the historic implications of this election. Democrats and Republicans alike were gushing and seemed a little speechless about the implications of Barack Obama in the White House. I have my own feelings but that’s not what this column is about. For me, this election was fundamentally historic for another reason. It changed forever the fabric of democracy in America.

Three years ago, I sat in a hotel conference room somewhere (it might even have been Chicago) and heard Dana Todd, then the President of SEMPO, say that search would be a very important factor in the next election. I smiled to myself, because I had been watching the somewhat ham-fisted use of online tactics in the election that had just ended. I thought to myself, “Why do these candidates fail to understand the fundamental importance of online? Don’t they understand that this provides an amazing new platform for democracy? How could they be so clueless?” The one candidate that did seem to grasp it was Howard Dean, but unfortunately, Dean’s campaign had other challenges that eventually overcame his online momentum.

I mused further: “What would happen if you took the lessons learned from the Dean campaign and fielded a candidate with a campaign that fully ‘got’ the power of virtual connection?” My guess would be that it would be incredibly effective. Yet I had no idea how earthshakingly important online strategies would prove to be.

Unknown to me, two people — Jascha Franklin-Hodge and Joe Rospars, the architects of the Dean online machine and co-founders of Blue State Digital — were already making plans for 2008. The candidate? A junior senator from Illinois who had just rocked the Democratic National Convention with a stirring speech: Barack Obama.

I watched the entire process unfold, and at each step, I was impressed with the grasp of online momentum, its nuances and social connections. With Franklin-Hodge and Rospars as architects, and with the help of a very Net-savvy staff, Obama’s campaign built an online momentum that shocked Clinton’s handlers in the primaries and eventually rolled over McCain as well.

Yes, there were many factors that led to success, not the least of which is the candidate himself, but I can’t help thinking that this campaign managed to crystallize it in a brilliant way online. Obama navigated the currents and eddies of online buzz masterfully, creating mini-campaigns of intense interest and passion, mobilizing votes and raising money — lots and lots and lots of money. He (with his campaign architects) understood the fundamental connection of online: reaching many, hearing from many, one at a time. It was a campaign launched and won by we, the people.

On November 19th, 1863, another politician from Illinois gave what was intended to be a few impromptu remarks at the dedication of the Soldier’s National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pa. Lincoln finished that speech with these words: “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

On Tuesday night, there was a new birth of democracy, the culmination of an election that used a new technology to bridge millions of gaps between Washington and the people, to erase decades of division, estrangement and alienation. Yes, it was a brilliant campaign tactic, but it was more than that. It was an understanding that people needed to reconnect with their President and to have their voices heard. It was true democracy. No matter what your political affiliation and your feelings about Obama the man, you have to feel hopeful that somebody in the White House finally “gets” the Internet and its awesome power to connect and effect change.

Traveling at the Speed of Buzz

First published September 25, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

What makes up buzz? And what determines how fast it travels? Last week, I talked about how important the opinions of others are in shaping our brand beliefs. Today, I want to look at one category of word of mouth, the juicy tidbit, recently christened “buzz,” and see what makes it leap from person to person.

Buzz is Nothing New

For some reason, we think buzz is a new thing that lives online. In fact, it’s as old as human behavior and has its roots in our very social fabric. We need to pass on information. We’re driven to do so. We gossip because it’s inherently satisfying, both to ourselves and to the recipient. But the spread of gossip through a social network is neither uniform nor consistent.  In the ’70s, Mark Granovetter discovered that, like many things, social networks are patchy, made up of tightly linked clusters of people who spend a lot of time together (families, friends, co-workers) which are loosely connected to each other through “weak ties,” more distant social relationships. The survival potential of a viral piece of information (Richard Dawkins first coined the term “meme” as a cultural equivalent of a gene in his book, “The Selfish Gene”) lies in its ability to jump Granovetter’s weak ties.   If the meme doesn’t jump out of a cluster, it ceases to propagate itself and can die an isolated death.

It’s Not Just the Network

In 1993 Jonathon Frenzen and Kent Nakamoto launched an interesting study showing that the ability of a “meme” to spread through a social network depended not only on the structure of the network (the main point of Granovetter’s work) but also on the impact of the meme’s message on the carrier (akin to the idea of a phenotype in genetics) and the value of the meme itself.

Frenzen and Nakamoto worked with three different variables: First of all, they altered the value of the message. In the first variation, it was news of a 20%-off sale, in the other variation; it was the more valuable news of 50% to 70% off. Secondly, they varied the amount of product available at the sale price. In one case, there was unlimited inventory. In another, the supply was very limited. Finally, they varied the structure of the network itself, in one case having a network of strong ties, and in another, strong tie clusters linked by Granovetter’s weak ties.

What they found was that the value of the message (20% off vs. 50% to 70% off) has a significant impact on the rate in which the word spread, as did the availability of items at the sale price. The second factor introduced a moral hazard aspect. It made spreading the news a zero-sum game: if I tell you, I might lose out.

Frenzen and Nakamoto also found that in strong tie clusters, word seemed to spread relatively quickly regardless of the nature of the news. There were variations, but in all cases, the majority of the strongly linked network came to know of the news fairly quickly.

Social Speed Traps

If the discount was fairly low, the news tended to get stuck within clusters and had difficulty jumping the weak ties. If the news was valuable (50% to 70% off) and supply was virtually unlimited, the news was much quicker to jump the weak ties, spreading through the network very quickly. But, if the discount was large and the supplies were limited, suddenly the news tended to get trapped within the strongly tied clusters. People were reluctant to spread the news because the more people that knew, the more it was likely that they and their close family and friends (the people within their strong tie clusters) would lose out on a great deal.

Weak Ties on the Web

In both the online and offline worlds, the speed with which buzz will spread depends on the value of the message (is the gossip juicy? Is the price unbelievable?) and how much we stand to gain or lose (does sharing reduce the chances of me and my close circle getting ahead?). Gossip’s primary purpose is to create social bonds, and the sharing of intensely interesting information is something we’re programmed to do. Similarly, we’re programmed to share opportunity with those closest to us, either through kin selection (we want those with whom we share the most genes to get ahead first – W.D. Hamilton did the foundational work on this) or reciprocal altruism (doing a favor for a friend knowing that at some point, we’ll benefit from the payback — Robert Trivers is the name to search for if you’re interested). In most cases of online buzz, there is no moral hazard. In fact, unless a meme has what it takes to jump the weak ties in a real-world social network, it will never make it onto an online forum. Posting on the Internet is, by its very nature, a weak tie, a reaching out from ourselves to everyone.  We don’t publically post memes if it costs our strong ties the opportunity to capitalize on them. Similarly, we’re less likely to post unremarkable news, although I’m still trying to reconcile Twitter and Facebook status updates with this theory.

So, in the world of social networks, some people have more influence than others, right? Some are mavens, or super connected hubs, or natural salespeople (borrowing from Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point”). Not so fast, says Columbia University’s Duncan Watts.  But more on that next week.

Face to Facebook

The one thing that’s interesting about Facebook is that it’s really a framework in search of a purpose. What’s not interesting about Facebook is that Microsoft just bought a tiny sliver of it for 240 million dollars.

The problem with the world today is that we all try to jump on an online bandwagon without really seeing where it’s going. As the usage numbers stack up, we pile on, determined to hang on for the ride, whereever the destination might be. It remains to be seen if Facebook can avoid the fate of the online community platform. There’s a lot of headstones in this particular cemetary, including Orkut, Friendster and MySpace (sure, MySpace is still breathing, but barely). I’ve been in a few meetings recently where everybody is talking about how to tap into social networking. I think the thing that’s missing is that social networking isn’t a killer app. It’s human behavior, and that comes with some challenges. Humans are unpredictable.

Here’s one way we’re unpredictable. The same group that made Friendster a hot online community, Orkut the next big thing and MySpace the next Google moves from community to community, lighting a fire and then moving on, leaving nothing but a burned out shell. These are the online “nomads” who are always pushing the envelope. Green fields are their motivation, but once main street gets a little civilized (i.e. boring) they pick up stakes and move on. When the dollars chase the next hot online community, this is the gang they’re chasing. Good luck!

Here’s the second way we’re unpredictable. Even if we’re not all online “nomads”, we have a tiny little sliver of us that’s curious. We have to check out the new hot online neighbourhood. Think of it as visiting a show home. We want to look at the furniture, oooh and aaah over the decorating, but we have no intention of actually moving there. The online translation would be registering to become a member, visiting once or twice, and then never visiting again. So here, we have a compounding effect. The nomads visit  and start creating buzz (everyone loves the nomads, because they’re just so leading edge). Then the tire kickers (that’s the rest of us poor schmucks) visit for a look. Suddenly you have a hockey stick registration chart that everyone drools over. You’ve got the traffic, now you just have to monetize it! Investment and acquisition offers pour in. Life is good. Two Porsches in every driveway. But then the nomads move on to the next green field (Rule One of Online Communities, There’s always another Green Field), the tire kickers don’t come back (they’re checking out the show home in the new hot community) and the hockey stick breaks in half.

And here’s the third way we’re unpredictable. We like to pick communities that make sense to us, that do something for us, that make us feel at home. We’ll choose the community, the community won’t choose us. This manifests itself in a number of ways. Every brand is trying to create an online community around their brand. I don’t want to belong to a brand based community. Most people I know don’t. Certainly not if the brand is something like potato chips or underarm deodorant. Maybe some one some where has enough time in their day to squander some of it on www.nevergetcaughtoffguard.com (I kid you not, a viral game put out by the good folks at Right Guard) but it sure the hell ain’t me. Harley riders frequent an online community, but in true Harley fashion, they took over the joint and basically kicked the landlords out. No, we create communities where it makes sense. Netflix is a community. Amazon is a community. TripAdvisor is a community. eBay is a community. They’re communities because they give us a chance to connect with other that share our interests while we’re doing something that’s important to us. The community aspect just evolves out of our desire to see what other people think about the things we’re interested in.

And there lies Facebook’s challenge. Being a cool community isn’t enough. Being a hot community isn’t enough. And communities online are rather amorphous. As I said above, communities can form in the click of a mouse online. We don’t need a lot of infrastructure to start connecting. And we don’t tend to stick in one place long. But..and this is a big one…if Facebook can create an open ecosystem where developers create functionality within the community rather than outside it, it has a chance. It won’t be the fact that it’s a community that keeps Facebook alive. It will be that it attracted enough functional critical mass to one place. It’s heading in the right direction, but we’ll see if it gets there soon enough.

This is Not Your Kid’s Social Network: Leveraging LinkedIn

The worlds of social networking and search are beginning to blur more and more. And the number of influencers that are networking is higher than you might think. It’s not all about MySpace, but in many cases, contact networks like LinkedIn. New research from KnowledgeStorm and Universal McCann shows these seemingly contradictory findings:

“Seventy seven percent of B2B technology buyers have little to no familiarity with social networking online. Of the 24% who are very accustomed to social networks, a large majority of the respondents visit these sites at least once a month.

70% of B2B technology buyers use social networking sites for business networking and/or development, though 59% admit to also using these sites for personal reasons.”

So if 77% don’t know what social networking is, but 70% use them, what’s going on? I think it comes from many people not knowing that having a LinkedIn or Plaxo network actually counts as social networking. They’re participating, but they don’t know it. When they think social networking, they’re thinking about teenagers spending hours on MySpace or Second Life.

And at 70% usage, it’s a channel worth paying some attention to. Luckily, Guy Kawasaki recently engaged Kay Luo and Mike Lin at LinkedIn to brush up his profile. Check out the results of Guy’s Profile “Extreme Makeover”.