Digital Influence Mapping Project

WOMMA Summit 2007 Line-up Announced!

We have come up with some terrific sessions for the next WOMMA Summit. The energy in the organization is tremendous and was well documented by Pete Blackshaw here.

So here's the skinny:
The Word of Mouth Marketing Association will hold its 3rd Summit as the discipline continues to explode into marketing and communication plans across all types of brands and organizations.

WOMMA 2007 Summit: Social Media Heats Up the New WOM, November 13-15 in Las Vegas.

If you have never been to the Summit, it is wall-to-wall cases and real-world experience split equally between brands and agencies.

This year, the fuel is social media and we will highlight hot issues and great debates:

• Social Networks: Do consumers want to be your friends?
• The Influencer or Network?: What Matters More? 
• Who Owns Word of Mouth in the Marcom Mix? Who Should?
• What’s the ROI on Word of Mouth?

This year we will feature the great stories behind word-of-mouth:

• Hear from Microsoft about the record-breaking launch of the Xbox’s Halo 3
• Get inspired by the Gran Pooh Bah of Cranium Games
• Cheer on Habbo Hotel vs. Eons.com vs. Gather in the social network smackdown

WOMMA Summits are for serious marketers who are putting WOM to work today. Come and share your experience and learn from the biggest brands and agencies practicing WOM today.

Get the agenda now>

Ragan Conference: The Social Media (R)evolution

I am listening to Shel Holtz speak at Ragan's Corporate Communications and the Social Media Revolution. I am up next. The room is full - 250 people? I had a great conversation with  an attendee who hopes to bring back learnings to her otherwise conservative leadership.

Shel's a seasoned communications pro and knows how to speak to a roomful of corporate communictors (PR people). He has a sober point of view about the fundamental shifts and the practical applications. Overall, his emphasis is on what we should include in our communications effort - the right social media tactics - versus the overthrow of the PR process as we know it today. His appoach makes him much more accessible to communication pros then the usual "everything you know is wrong" -type of social media speaker.

The role of the communicator:
Old: produce stuff
New: orchestrate

He mentioned a few best practices (along with the dreaded Dell/Jarvis story):

Forbes.com Widget
Shark Week widget

Southwest Airlnes - I wannagetaway.com
Deloitte's employee videos

The Presidential candidate's use of Twitter

Dell's Ideastorm and their use of Twitter for special deals (Dell Outlet)
Coke's Virtual Thirst program in Second Life (create a virtual vending machine) & their response to criticism - great YouTube video from Coke project manager

GM FYI Blog and the run in with the New York Times (when they published their response - and the back and forth with the editors - on the blog when they couldn't get a letter published in the Times)

Jonathan's Blog/Sun's CEO's blog post regarding employees leaking information

Community at Intel including Intelpedia (knowledge management)

Users joing a Facebook group to brink back Cadbury's WispaBite

Orbitz' usage of a Twitter-like comm tool for customers to update each other

Cogenz: the private tagging service via ASP model

Small issue: I disagree with his contention that the Web will all be "3D" in five to ten years. Having developed next generation interfaces for interactive TV in the nineties and throughout Web1.0, I lived through the 3D craze then. While I do think they will get more sophisticated and accessible. But there are terrific interfaces for computing experiences that do not need a "real-world" metaphor to work well. The restrictions of 3D space do not always make for the most engaging or useable experiences. 

Shel's a great speaker and hit upon the fundamentals of the change via storytelling. See him when you can. Read his blog. 

Idea Bar#8:Health Literacy

There's a lot going on in healthcare for the consumer. This past week, I attended and spoke at Consumer HealthWorld in Chicago. Innovation is happening everywhere in healthcare.

• Plodding along behind the scenes are many efforts - some of them contentious - to create a common and accessible platform for our health records.
• Consumer-driven healthcare continues to gain momentum with more and more ways to place me and you in charge of our healthcare management decisions.
• Social media impacts the broad industry on so many levels from offering patients peer-reviews of doctors and hospitals to condition-specific communities to grow and serve their common interests.

And business innovation. Two of the most interesting people I met were Janice Jackson, who heads up the Healthcare Innovations Center at AstraZeneca and Margaret Moore who runs Wellcoaches. Both represent a focus on business innovation. She is exploring different business innovations that could change how healthcare is delivered and how revenue is made. Janice participated in a panel that spent a fair amount of time debating the pros and cons of retail health clinics (e.g.  "Minute Cinics").

Margaret runs Wellcoaches which is a type of association for physical trainers and wellness coaches. She is part of an increasing focus on wellness and prevention versus treatment.

The Idea Already:

Health Literacy Programs for Consumers

With all this great change happening and new information and decision opportunities for the consumer - should I pay $40 co-pay with my doctor for a routine exam or stop in the minute clinic in Target - there is a terrific opportunity to provide health literacy programs to help all consumers get smarter about the healthcare options available to them.

Pharmaceutical Leadership Opportunity

This new health literacy program is the perfect initiative for a brand-conscious, consumer-committed pharmaceutical company. Each of the pharmas struggle between ambitions to make their corporate brand meaningful to consumers and their need to build product brands and sales. I am clearly talking about the former but firmly believe that any additional trust pharmaceutical giants can build with patients and physicians will utlimately (and quickly) strengthen their bottom line.

Right now, healthcare literacy is provided by that giant firehose of information called the Internet. Either you are getting expert information on heart disease from WebMD or hearing from a peer about their Lasik surgery on RevolutionHealth. You may belong to a patient community through Inspire (formerly ClinicaHealth) and may even get some "stay healthy' coaching through your HMO online. You are perfectly aware that there are agendas or at least POVs in collision out there: does your HMO just want to keep your benefits down? do the pharmas want to sell more pills at any cost? is your doctor struggling to achieve maximum throughput of patients just to maintain an entrenched business model?

We need an initiative akin to the media literacy efforts of the 60's and 70's that sorts out all of these new options and unpacks their meaning, bias and significance for people. Remember Paper Tiger Television - that was a grassroots organization that helped consumers understand the bias of media to better "read" what was delivered to them. The cable television industry created an initiative that continues today with Cable in the Classroom.

We need a health literacy initiative. In the age of consumer driven healthcare, we need to do better than just give people more control via new choices, we need to give them information that leads to decision-making tools and strategies. We need to help consumers understand and make these new choices.

The U.S. Government has an initiative afoot under HHS's Health Resources and Services Administration. They will have an event at the end of October which is apprently Health Literacy Month. NIH has it's own effort, as well. We should not leave this up to the government. A smart pharma could make this their signature CSR (corporate social responsibility) effort. It is an issue they could authentically get behind and rally their employees to be involved with. (The best CSR programs involve and inspire employees)

What would be the components of the program?

1. OurHealthLiteracy.com: Yes, I know that "literacy" is a mouthful for most consumers, but this is all about getting smart to be even more empowered and that is what literacy leads to. We are all illiterate in this byzantine, chaotic new world of healthcare change. There's power in knowing that fact and wanting to dig out.
2. Start with simple, DIY-style articles from different experts on the fundamental issues and choices out there. This would be a great way to solicit content froma variety of academic, commercial and consumer-created sources and build an overall "linkyness" to the site.
3. Build a mobile-accessible Health Answers FAQ - an ever growing database that reaches into a community for new answers much like Yahoo Answers. Each "answer-er" would need to identify their bias and enough about themselves that the person seeking their answer could judge the bias of the answer (all information has a bias)
4. Health: How it Works Video series: Video episodes that explain the fundamentals including the pros and cons. Imagine an episode on retail health clinics: what are they good for, what to watch out for, when to consider using them. Each video could allow for user comments to add to or debate some of the conclusions.
5. Syndicate content via widgets: create the Health Answers widget and give it away to everyone to embed in their sites and blogs.
6. Events during Health Literacy Month (October) that pull consumers, consumer advocates and helathcare professionals together to frame up additional curriculum for conusmers - what do we need to know now. these can feature blogging summits leading up to the event and live blogging/vlogging at the event to carry the proceedings farther while walking-the-walk of openness and participation.

Can a pharma really pull this off with credibility? They need a partner. But they can own it with that partner. Look at what WalMart is doing with their green efforts by linking up with key environmental organizations. Who would have thought?

This is the time. Consumers need this. Consumer driven healthcare needs this. I doubt HMO's ability to provide this but I do think the right pharma could.

We'll see.

The image? It is a concept-piece by Kristina Lee that "enables users to track their health through nutrition and fitness." A wild and woolly idea for the future that depends on health literacy today. See more about the phone here >.

Consumer HealthWorld: We Need To Get Pharma Talking to Grow

Big conferences aren't as much fun as small ones. Consumer Healthworld tries to pull off a big conference and has a very traditional executive conference feel. The funny thing is that they couldn't pull it off and that worked. Our social media sessions were intimate, vibrant discussions.

But it remains clear that pharamceutical companies are moving even more cautiously down this path than I had thought. Enough has been said about the reasonable ways pharma can manage adverse events reporting. We had a whole session that talked about little else. Consultants offer "rallying cries" and other dramatic deliveries of what pharma "should do."  Now it's time for pharma to start talking about its little experiments in social media. Now it's time for a pharma to openly discuss how it is actually listening to patients and/or healthcare providers. Some are listening. Some have pro-active AER procedures in place. I am sure some think that if their monitoring partner doesn't report any specifics they are spared the intent of the rule. (This is a risk I would not recommend) Many overestimate what they must do in regards to MedWatch. But there I go - another consultant telling the industry which way the wind blows. Change must come from a few brave souls inside the industry.

We all know a handful of stories from Communispace communities, to conversation monitoring to that dang Alliconnect blog.  Time for pharma to start talking about their experience. That's what will push the indutry forward into embracing customers in a new way and learning how to use digital and word of mouth marketing techniques to bolster the waning effectiveness of DTC.

We'll see if that happens at the Exl Pharma: Digital Pharma conference in Philly in October.

Healthcare and Social Media: Are we getting somewhere?

Event: The HealthCare Blogging Summit /Consumer Health World
When: September 17 - 19
Where : Chicago

I will be speaking on a panel at Dmitiry's latest healthcare and social media conference. These are all held within the Consumer Healthcare conference which draws quite a crowd from across the healthcare spectrum - pharma to mds to hospital CEOs. I spoke at one a year ago in DC.

The question is: what has changed?

1. There are a lot more healthcare Web2.0 companies up and acquiring users. In fact there is another conference on the West Coast called Health2.0 which will collect the best of those including Sermo, Healthline and others. This most interesting innovation happens here as entrepreneurs and venture capitalists try to create business in a new type of healthcare.

2. Some Pharmaceutical companies are deploying initial programs to get experience in and around social media. The best known right now include J&J's jnjbtw.com blog and the Alliconnect blog, message board plus product site.

Some pharmas are exploring with communties for patients like the kind created by Communispace. I thought this would all happen much faster. a year ago, I would have guessed a brave few pharmas would have tested the waters with more social media experiments. I was sure someone would challenge the prevailing fear that the FDA is waiting to react to a case of non-compliance with adverse events reporting.  Pharmaceutical companies are still held back by their individual approaches to adverse events. Basically, it's the legal department within a regulated industry. A recent white paper from Cymfony and Fard Johnmar pretty much coroborates this.

"The thesis of this paper is that, based on existing principles and precedents in the
regulation of direct-to-consumer advertising, marketing, legal and regulatory
compliance professionals can have a productive collaboration in helping their
companies incorporate emerging social media forms into their promotional mix."

Their message is directed to the legal department. The goal is to smooth talk them out of the bunker. The authors go on to summarize the type of issues the FDA has points of view on abd the principles at stake. It's a great article for pharma brand managers but I am not sure pharma lawyers will learn anything new. They go on to include a rating system like our national defense color-coding system for different social media tactics. This is broadly helpful but so much is determined by context that I would hope brand managers would only use this as a guide not a rule.

Other things impede including a marketing culture that is heavily weighted towards their brand of traditional marketing.   

3. Communities are springing up in patient groups like the ones maintained by ClinicaHealth, the Nordstrom's of health plays: Revolution Health and inside broad interest social networks like Eons.com.

4. More Americans use the Internet to access health information every year.

5. With the growth of "customer" reviews and the overall growth of the segment of the public creating content, new consumer generated media - like doctor and hospital reviews - will force change upon an old-fashioned industry.

6. HMO's aren't innovating their online customer experience fast enough. They have the most at stake in the principles of consumer-driven-healthcare, yet their own online offerings lag. see this Forrester report.

Two events that are coming and worth checking out:

Event: Health 2.0
When: September 20
Where : SF

Event: Exl Pharma: Digital Pharma
When: October 22-24

Where : Philadelphia

Our team is at Verge: London

Ogilvy has a conference series they run called Verge. It happens in different parts of the world. generally it represents an advertising POV but is now getting more engaged with the principles of participation, engagement and earned media (think of earned media in a new way - very broad and based upon doing something of value which authentically motivates people to discuss or tell stories...)

The London Verge just happened yesterday/today (time shift, right). Rohit was there and has neat interview with Bill Kircos from Intel (disclosure: client) There is another funny one with Bob Garfield who delivers his usual (and smart) death of advertising POV.

Check it out>

How many social networks should you belong to?

This was the year of the social network (okay, it was also the year of Facebook, specifically, widgets and Twitter). The explosive growth of Facebook to challenge My Space here min the U.S.  and the growth of social networks throughoout the world are all part of the story. So is the thr growth of specialty social networks.

How many can one person practically belong to?

Today in the NYTimes, Matt Richtel ran a story on social networks for geezers. (There are some who think I fall into that category which gives me permission to use that term). There are networks for parents, for Web 2.0 geeks (again, some call me geek, so, I get to use the word), for disease sufferers. You name it, there's a social network. Many have a similar structure - usually some sort of personal profile with some type of posting, peer communication or publishing. And many have pined for "one-ring-to-rule-them-all" - some meta-SNS where my content is pushed out to all of my networks.

Until that meta-social network really exists (not just a list of links like My Mashable), I doubt the growth potential of some of the specialty networks. If I join eons.com (not yet, please), I will expect to share information about health conditions in that network. I doubt I would join PatientsLikeMe unless I suffered some significant and life-altering condition. Currently that site demonstrates itself around MS, ALS and Parkinson's - all are serious conditions requiring some significant coping to live life fully. ClinicaHealth runs white-label social networks for patient advocacy groups like the ALS Association. Similar issue - these are terrific ways to connect a group who has a significant affinity over something.

But what if I have a chronic health condition not so immersive  (I do)? And what if I have a half dozen or an even dozen other strong passions where I would love to participate with a focused community of like-minded individuals on those specific topics? Now I am not talking about my favorite author or musician. that is pretty well covered in the major, general social networks. What if I own a Ford Mustang and want to consistently share about Mustangs and want to share my short fiction with people who dig short fiction and want to explore social media with digital geeks... Anyhow, you get the picture. I am pining away for the common profile, the meta-social network aggregator.

I experiment a little. Here is what I belong to that I still remember the logins for:

MySpace | John Bell

MyRagan | John Bell

Amazon Lists | John Bell

John Bell | Gather

Facebook | John Bell

MyMASHABLE

My Bebo Page

JohnBell’s Other Blog

It wouldn't take much to figure out that I am not "working" each of these communities. I am only human and could not participate on a meaningful level. I am still exploring each and have high hopes to do more in many of them. But this list doesn't tell the whole story. I also belong to RevolutionHealth, del.icio.us, Flickr and a host of other Web 2.0 offerings that each have community aspects to them.

So, how many social networks can you belong to in a meaningful way? And what are the hurdles to reach that super-network that allows for the individual communities (and business models that support them) to flourish?

The Power of an Idea?

It says "FREE HUGS."

She said she was "aware" of the YouTube video (18m have seen it). She was not vlogging the experience. She had no one with her that I could tell. When I asked her if she was here because of the YouTube meet-up (DCTube) on Saturday she said "no."

She just wanted to do it. Now I could have really grilled her - sorority? religion? drugs? But instead, I got my hug and went to work.

The power of the idea.

Our NEW Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics

We just published our new Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics on the 360° Digital Influence Blog. Why do we need another code? We still like WOMMA's code and our own 7 Tips. But we see an alarming trend - clumsy, thoughtless outreach to bloggers by alleged marketing professionals.

Kaitlyn Wilkins put this together and I include it here in it's entirety. I strongly recommend that you check out the original thread as it is gathering some terrific comments. Two in particular:

Toby from Diva Marketing Blog pointed out that "relationship" matters. She knows Qui on our team who had sent her the 'code' and that influenced her willingness to read and consider.

Geoff from LivingstonBuzz emphasized providing value. That is my mantra. If we cannot offer something of value (and I am not talking about 'gifts') - information, an experience, something particularly relevant to the blogger and their reader/community - then we shouldn't do it.

The Problem

Smack-dab in the the middle (okay, it's more towards the top) of the code is the problem - marketers are using blogger relations as the solution for all of their outreach goals all the time. Come on people - get creative. There is so much more to do in social media than pester some blogger about why your beverage is just so yummy good.

The Solution (at least it's a start)

Ogilvy PR’s Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics

• We reach out to bloggers because we respect your influence and feel that we might have something that is “remarkable” which could be of interest to you and/or your audience.

• We will only propose blogger outreach as a tactic if it complements our overall strategy. We will not recommend it as a panacea for every social media campaign.

• We will always be transparent and clearly disclose who we are and who we work for in our outreach email.

• Before we email you, we will check out your blog’s About, Contact and Advertising page in an effort to see if you have blatantly said you would not like to be contacted by PR/Marketing companies. If so, we’ll leave you alone.

• If you tell us there is a specific way you want to be reached, we’ll adhere to those guidelines.

• We won’t pretend to have read your blog if we haven’t.

• In our email we will convey why we think you, in particular, might be interested in our client’s product, issue, event or message.

• We won’t leave you hanging. If your contact at Ogilvy PR is going out of town or will be unreachable, we will provide you with an alternate point of contact.

• We encourage you to disclose our relationship with you to your readers, and will never ask you to do otherwise.

• You are entitled to blog on information or products we give you in any way you see fit. (Yes, you can even say you hate it.)

• If you don’t want to hear from us again, we will place you on our Do Not Contact list – which we will share with the rest of the Ogilvy PR agency.

• If you are initially interested in the campaign, but don’t respond to one of our emails, we will follow up with you no more than once. If you don’t respond to us at all, we’ll leave you alone.

• Our initial outreach email will always include a link to Ogilvy PR’s Blog Outreach Code of Ethics.

Influence vs. Authority vs. Engagement vs. Impact

I started this blog as a way to explore, share and discuss how each of us is influenced differently today. Ultimately, I put that understanding into practice everyday at Ogilvy. One of the truths today is that word of mouth is more important to marketers now than it was 5 years ago. That doesn't mean that WOM is new - that is a ridiculous idea. WOM is more important because:

• We can amplify it and sometime catalyse it (never really controlling it, though) based largely on digitas strategies and
• We can measure it. (we can not only measure online using the tools and methods we use at Ogilvy but we can also measure offline WOM (the majority) via indices like Ed Keller's TalkTrack)

Vocabulary

Which brings us to the meaning of words. We need them to measure. All new disciplines need to start by agreeing on a core language to talk about things. The Word of Mouth Marketing Association started by establishing recommended words and phrases to mean certain things. They remain the best rallying force in the 'industry'. (My all time favorite of theirs is "WOM unit." )

We are still debating the meaning and significance of words and the ideas beneath them. Which is a good thing. Yet to get to what will really move the discipline of word of mouth marketing and what we consider 'digital influence' forward - namely measurement - we need a stable set of criteria (meaning the words and their definitions).

The big 4 worth addressing quickly include Influence, Authority, Engagement and Impact.

Influence vs. Authority

Matthew Hurst of Data Mining (and Microsoft) has an interesting post on influence, which he considers 'popularity' and authority which he uses to describe that deeper level of expertise and knowledge some of us have on some topics. I don't think that equating influence with popularity is such a good idea. There are plenty of unpopular people, places and things that exert influence. Influence informs attitudes, decisions and actions. You can get a bald-faced view of how "influence" has historically been used by marketers in Robert Cialdini's book Influence: Science and Practice. 

As an experiemental social psychologist, Cialdini actually immersed himself in the world of "compliance profssionals" (marketers) to learn how they do the voodoo they do-do. He found that there are six principles evidenced in marketers' work:

• Reciprocation
• Consistency
• Social proof
• Liking
• Authority
• Scarcity

Does this view on 'compliance professionals' (what a scary term) take into account the influence my friend Robbie has on me about art? Conceptually, I think you can find peer-to-peer recommendations in his rubric. 

But Matthew Hurst is less focused on offering definitions of "influence" than he is making a solid point: people who know more about a topic and demonstrate that through the quality and depth of their writing (or "content") have more authority. Look into Caldini's view on Authority and you will see something similar. He concludes that far too many people respond to symbols of authority. In his case it's titles, clothing and automobiles. But it could be blog badges and, even, inbound links. Our defence against this automatic attribution of authority is to ask two questions:

• "Is this authority truly an expert? and
• How truthful can we expect the expert to be?"

Both Hurst and Caldini are getting to the same point: we have to move beyond the symbols of authority and judge the source and the work, itself.

Are Inbound Links (over the past 6 months) "authority?" Technorati says yes and also says that the crowd's behavior - linking - is the most democratic way of defining authority. That's a mistake. And somewhat repeating the flaw of relying on the symbols of authority. We have to examine the source and substance to judge authority. Inbound links are not a good enough nor reliable proxy. 

Engagement & Impact

Engagement will be the new metric. It will be indicative of brand loyalty and advocacy and predictive of conversion. Even now, we measure and report out on engagement. It becomes a measure of time spent and interactions. We see more and more emphasis on this concept in measurement circles. And we see different definitions coming from the advertising POV and from the PR and social media POV. More to come on this.

Which leads us to Impact. I just spent the day with Dr. Jennifer Scott, our managing Director of All Things Measureable. She simplifies the PR lens on measurement into three big buckets: Output (how many mentions); Impact (attitude or behavior shift); and Outcome (e.g. sales). We need to measure everything - all three categories. My only point here today is that the discussion of "influence" and "authority" better be couched in terms of the resulting impact or we are just haveing an academic discussion.

We need words - solid, stable, shared definitions - to measure.