Digital Influence Mapping Project

How Do Community Managers Report Up?

Bill Johnston over at OnlineCommunityReport recently released the 2007 survey results from those running communities online. Fifty respondendts commented on the average yearly spend, staffing and other statistics. You can get the report here from Bill.

I am particularly interested in measurment and reporting. Here is one key question and answer included in his report about how those running communities (90% were commercial enterprises) justify their activities:

Question 14
From your experience, what are examples of effective strategies and tactics for
making the case to management for investment in online community activities?

Summary:
Key strategies and tactics for making the case to management for community
investment were:

• Report Direct Revenue: Report on direct revenue from Community Members.
• Establish Comparative Costs: Compare cost of the same result or activity in other
  media, like blog post comments vs. the cost of hosting a focus group.
• Communicate Cost Savings: Cost savings by hosting community, including support
  call deflection. Word of mouth vs. traditional marketing vehicles.
• Compare value of Member vs. Non-Member: Track and compare activity of subset of
  community member vs. non-member activity, including activity outside of community.
• Highlight the Direct Connection: Communicate the disintermediation opportunity for
  businesses, especially if your business is not directly selling to customers. Their online
  community creates a connection with the customer during and after the sale being
  handled by channel.
• The 24/7 Focus Group: A subset of your community will be giving real-time feedback
  on initiatives, products and company activities. “Human voice compliments the
  numbers.”
• Evangelist Creation and Mentoring: Communities attract your biggest fans and give
  them a place to connect with others, in the process creating new evangelists.
• Communicate the Cost of Not Being Engaged: Including increased marketing
  spend, and the threat of competitors engaging prospects and taking existing
  customers.
• “Value for all Departments” Communicate the broad value back to the business,
  including:
  • “HR - Recruiting talent through fostering relationships with engineering interns
    and other prospects
  • Customer Service - Tie in to the KnowledgeBase and help users help
    themselves and others
  • Sales - pre/post sales, online
  • EBC (executive briefing center), lead gen
  • Marcom/Marketing - brand awareness and loyalty
  • Engineering - product development/enhancements"

WOM: What will $3.7 billion do to WOMMA?

This year's Word of Mouth Marketing Summit brought together leaders from across the space - brands, agencies, technology companies, individuals - in what will be probably the last intimate WOM lovefest.

The last lovefest?
There was a funny moment onstage during the WOMMIE awards when Peter Waldheim, our acting CEO, was handing out the actual awards and doing the smile-for-photographers thing. First person got a handshake. Second person got an arm clasp. Third one got a big old hug. Someone yelled out "WOM love!" That's one of the things I love about the organization - the same friendliness that we aspire to practice in our best communications and relationship-building with customers permeates the organization.

Why is that over? Simple.

"Marketers are expected to spend more than $1.35 billion this year on word of mouth marketing, making it the fastest growing segment in marketing services, according to a research presentation delivered by Patrick Quinn, President and CEO of PQ Media, at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association's third annual Word of Mouth Marketing Summit today."

and

"...the WOM industry is forecasted experience incredible growth, leading to a spend of more than $3.7 billion in 2011"

The "industry" is still being defined and exists now with some overlapping boundaries into digital marketing, public relations, customer research, community management and, even, advertising. The common factor - what WOM is - WOMMA describes as:

• The act of consumers providing information to other consumers.
• Giving people a reason to talk about your products and services, and making it easier for that conversation to take place.
• It is the art and science of building active, mutually beneficial consumer-to-consumer and consumer-to-marketer communications.

And this industry grew 37.7% in 2007 according to PQ Media's study (read Andrea Weckerle's admirable coverage of what was a "rapid fire presentation.) Which brings us to the demise of the lovefest. This coming year will see major marketers - both on the brand and agency side - flooding into the WOM world. More and more CMOs, Communications Officers and, even, CEOs will see these numbers and the power of word of mouth marketing and adopt programs even as we still work on an industry standard measurment model.

Next year, the Summit will be different since a lot more will be seen as at stake. There will be many more marketers who want to understand WOM quickly and apply it to their marketing an communications plans. There will be more businesses like this year's participants, Cranium and the band Sister Hazel, who bake WOM into their culture and business model. There will be so many more people that the informal lovefest will likely become more formal and business-like. that happens when a lot of people recognize the $$$ in play.

I don't know, maybe we can keep the love alive even with the explosive growth and success of our industry. the Summit was great this year.

Craniacs, Cadoo and the Gran Poohbah

I had the great pleasure of introducing Richard Tait, Gran Poohbah (founder) of Cranium at Wednesday's lunchtime keynote. I am a big fan. We play Cadoo in our household. That's something that keeps our family together - literally. He ran us through a great group game that livened up the crowd (I have to say that this has been a tremendous Summit - lots of energy and smarts)

From 2 guys to being the 3rd largest game company - that's Cranium. The first board game of Cranium was created in PowerPoint (one point for PPoint). They went from concept to shipping in 6 months. (Trivial Pursuit took 4 years). They now sell 22 million games around the globe.

Customers call themselves Craniacs. What does it take for people to self-proclaim themselves as Craniacs?

5 Ideas that drive Cranium' approach:
1. Create a culture not a company
2. Build products that customers love
3. Break through the clutter
4. Change the channel
5. Your customers are your sales force

Build Culture

He's created a methodology for building a culture - one that's playful and collaborative. (He's a fan of Starbucks and Google. He vsited the latter and was struck by their nutritionst and the fact that the food they served was high performance food like what you might serve to athletes - wow)

He mentioned a couple of cases of companies who look at what people are doing and what they need:

• Defribrilators (not sure the company): They studied where people have heart attacks (hint: it happens at home and in airports)
• Picnik.com:studied what people need for photo manipulation and publishing
• Captivate: what do people need to do in an elevator?

This is their iterative, reproduceable approach:

• "Moment" engineering
• Cranium Cuisinart - 3 prototypes
• CHIFF Checklist (Clever, High-quality, Innovative, Friendly,. and Fun)
• Manufacturing Mindmeld
• Operation Big Ears

Other key products and tactics that are very WOM focused:

• Whoonu sold 800K games - and it came from a grandmother.
• He shared a great example of an inflight Cranium experience done with America West
• Sample pullout game with InStyle magazine around the Oscars
• WOW House Parties for the release fo the (did it with company: House Party)
• They do a tremendous amount to nurture their customers as WOM ambassadors:
  Craniac-driven activity, Cranium tours, Cranium proposals, Cranium weddings, Cranium birthdays

Richad's a true inspiration. He clearly loves what he does. The games are great. He is smart and willing to share his experience. I loved the games. Now I'm a fan of richard, as well.

How Band Fans are Innovating WOM: Sister Hazel

Ted Wright - Fizz Corp, our faithless moderator (Great moderator!)
Andy Levine - SixthMan (former manager of the band)
Ken Block - Sister Hazel lead vocalist
Mark Pruitt - Hazelnut (and journalist)

"No fan, no band" is the operational slogan for Sister Hazel. "We wanted to create a community," said Ken Block, the lead singer for the band. They started in college towns and were consciousl of that fact hat many of us form music affinities at that time in our life., For every tape they sold, they gave away another. They would drop in on fraternities at universities to invite people to the show (and do an impromptu achappela gig).

They would order pizzas for the line waiting to get into a show and even do an acoustic set for those standing in the cold.

(Back in the day, they tried to get Universal to fork over $1500 to spruce up their Web site a while back. The response: "The Web is a fad.")

They did Rock Boat: a 4-5 day cruise featuring up to 30 bands. Bands mingle. Eat dinner occaisonally. So there is a lot of contact between fans and the talent. Mark - the Hazelnut fan - was tremendous. He posted a need for a ride between shows on a message board. Andy (tour manager) sought him out at show #1 and offered him a ride on the tour bus! How totally awesome.

Hazelnuts is a fan community but other sub-communities have organically erupted like Nuts in Need.

They wanted to give something back to the fans. That's where the idea of the cruise. 400 people showed up for the cruise. It was a transforming experience for Andy as it cut away all of the worst parts of the music business.

'Hazelnut Hang' is a three day hangout in South Carolina with fans. Soon it became more of a lifestyle as they met in all of these venues with fans with constant two-way conversation.

Their marketing budgets for a Rock Boat event are miniscule (e.g. $5k) and they rely solely on WOM. They offer t-shirts, even robes with names, to alumni of the cruise to help acknoeledge fans and involve them in the experience.

They created a program called 'Hazel Virgin'. They set aside a number of tix at a show. Fans can request these tickets to bring a newbie to a show - and the tix are free! What a great way to reward fans and recruit new ones. 

But they don't like to use the word "fan." They prefer "friend" - kind of says it all.

Dell's Journey in Word of Mouth

Lionel Menchaca who is a Digital Media Manager at Dell (and blogger at Direct2Dell) told a full session at the WOMMA Summit/08 conference about the stumbles Dell had along the way to finding their sea legs in social media. He reviewed the Dell Hell/Jeff Jarvis episode (surprisingly - in a room of 400 people - only 1/3rd said they new of Dell Hell).

"We stopped thinking like a customer." It was the cumulative effect of many behaviors and incidents that revealed how entrenched they were in a status quo set of behaviors.

Michael Dell said 'why aren't we listening to voices in the blogosphere and connecting them with customer service.' They found that half of the commentary via Technorati was negative. They made a plan including the Direct2Dell blog designed to educate and serve (it was launched in July 2006). Those early months (April to July) were critical for Lionel to find his blogger voice. They are now up to 1m page views a week and are in 4 languages. He recieves 100-200 comments per week.

Dell Ideastorm
Their initial experience with the blog led to the launch of the Digg-style idea collection point. Launched in February has led to 8000 ideas to date.

How to avoid credibility deficit:

1. Listen carefully - that's where Dell started. You need to know what you are going to do with the information - listening without action is not enough
2. Social media tools create empowered customers
3. When negative issues arise deal with them head-on and fast. (this corroborates our own experiences in digitakl crisis management this past year for our clients)
4. 'Look but don't touch' is not a successful strategy. (original PR stance on the Dell Hell epsiode was to say bloggers could go to customer service if they needed help vs. reaching out to them)
5. Enter the conversation
6. Never underestimate the value of a sincere 'I'm sorry'.

Is it worth the risk?
The new-ish Jeff Jarvis article in Business Week (redemption story) would only have been possible through real outreach. Lionel invited Jef to a pub in Austin to talk with the Dell Digital Media team.

Everyone Wants a Fan Brand (But Cmon...)

  This week is the Word of Mouth Marketing Summit in Vegas. I have been promoting and talking about this as have others for a while now. One of the discussions that I am looking forward to having is about fan brands. These are those brands with a following. Apple qualifies. So does Flying Dog Brewery. And Moleskine. Very often these are smaller brands with personality, an authentic story, accessible founders and brands that treasure their customers.

Fan Brand Mojo

Fan brands have an easier time of engaging those fans in word of mouth. Probably for some simple reasons:

• They cannot afford more expensive, complex marketing
• These brands are close enough to the customer that they see and feel the value they get from customer interaction
• They can see the impact of positive word of mouth amongst fans on sales or conversion since they don't have a lot of other marketing in the field
• They really like their customer
• They believe in their story

Big, mass brands - some in the consumer products (CPG) category - want that fan brand mojo. Can they get it? Dove seemed to get some with their Campaign for Real Beauty. But they are an exception. It is really hard for a big consumer product brand to trigger the same emotional involvement. It's not just that soap or frozen dinners don't have the same consideration level that a more expensive and complex product like a car might have. After all, many fan brands are foods and beverages and simple products.

No, big, mass brands fail at the fan brand mojo for the exact reasons fan brands succeed. Big, mass brands:

• Can afford big ad campaigns which may be more expensive but is ultimately easier to deploy and seemingly more predictive
• Cannot measure the impact of word of mouth (WOM) in a way that stands up to the scrutiny of the Brand Manager/CMO/CEO foodchain
• Have too much marketing in the field to know what is actually triggering conversions
• Think of their customers as "targets"

Ultimately, I have never met a Brand Manager who didn't believe the brand story. But often this is with a textbook-like commitment rather than the naive zeal of a founder. Ultimately, a big mass brand has to take an action outside their normal 'brand key'. They have to do something that is worthy of that love. Dove embraced a contrary ideal. What are other brands doing and can CPG actually achieve fan brand status?

The WOMMA Summit will feature lots of debate about what it takes to generate, amplify and measure word of mouth. One session is even titled:

"Brand Fans: Your Best Asset or a Train Wreck?"

Join us at WOMMA’s 2007 Summit, November 13-15 in Las Vegas. Get the agenda now>

And jump into the conversation now. You can see what the WOMMA conversation is by using the del.icio.us tag - wommeme.

Marketing to Communities – The Brand “Us”

I am in NYC at Bill Johnston's Community Conference (run by his company Forum One Communications). We are nestled in a great venue - the cozy theater in the Tribeca Grand.

The first session features Marcien Jenkes at AOL and David Dunne, EVP at Edelman. Marcien's key points:

• Communities belong to their participants
• They are a lot of hard work

Here's what AOL focuses on in their community efforts. They steward and strengthen communities through the following:

• Helping community to know their identity - e.g. helping individuals earn "equity" in their community, find people who are important to each other
• Creating a deep social graph (yes, there is one of the new phrases that capture the personal network we all have)
• Creating facilitation platforms - communities are 'exchanges' not dissimilar from the NY Stock Exchange.

Advice for marketers:
Know what you want to achieve in terms of business objectives? (this foreshadows what I will cover in my own session)

• Use community to leverage consumers and their good will ("get over yourselves tap into the rest of the world"). Hard to engage on a transactional basis. You need to invest in the community over the long haul.
• Organize people around causes that you and people care about.
  Examples: BabyCenter & Ford (in relation to Breast Cancer CSR program)
• Leverage the talkers (i.e. influencers) you can use advertising to reach and even activate them.

How do you know when you are being successful in community?

David Dunne/Edelman
Marketers have become avoidable which somehow diminishes the power of traditional awareness-based marketing. David gave a thoughtful preso on changes in relation to distribution choices and content creation.

Marketing & Online Communities 2007 - Thursday in NYC

Thanks to Bill Johnston at the Online Community Report - a blog I subscribe to and feel is very sharp on comunity in service of marketing, I will be part of a great panel at the Marketing & Online Communities conference in NYC this week.

Here's Bill's agenda:

9:30 – 10:30 Session 1: Marketing to Communities – The Brand “Us”
Marcien Jenckes - AOL
David Dunne - Edelman
Description: An overview of opportunities, issues, and best practices when marketers engage with online communities. Followed by discussion.

10:30 – 11:00 Break

11:00 – 12:00 Session 2: Anatomy of an Integrated Campaign
Bree Nguyen – Warner Bros. Records
Jeremy Welt – Warner Bros. Records
John Bell - Ogilvy
Description: Case studies from a leading entertainment brand and best practice from a leading agency on reaching and engaging your community throughout their entire community ecosystem.

12:00 – 1:15 Lunch
1:15 – 1:30 Break-out Session Introductions (Grand Screening Room)

1:30 – 2:30 Session 3: Break-out Sessions - Boomer Networks
Mary Furlong - Mary Furlong & Associates (+panel)
More 50+ adults are coming online (and spending money online) every day. Most want to do more than just see pictures of their grandkids. Learn about their networking needs and the market opportunity.

- Social Media Currency
Michael Leifer – guerilla PR, Inc.
A case study presentation highlighting how leading brands used the right channels to reach the right segments with the right social currency to create a social movement and relationships with consumers.

- Creating Successful Campaigns With Established Communities
Anne Marie Edwards - Yahoo
Experts will provide insight in to how to construct appropriate and effective campaigns to community members of large affinity communities.

2:30 – 3:00 Break

3:00 – 4:00 Session 4: Breakouts #2
- How to Manage Your Brand When Customers Control the Message
Thor Muller - Satisfaction
This session will focus on practical strategies for cultivating brand equity in a world where candid customer feedback and conversations increasingly dominate news and search results around products. Specifically, we'll focus on the surprising ways that innovative companies are "going to the customer" and becoming active participants in the conversation.

- Children & Tween Communities: Engaging the Future
Richard Weil – Cartoon Network
Children and tweens represent the leading edge of consumer behavior. They also require even greater care and respect than the adult Internet population when engaging online.

4:00 – 5:00 Session 5: The Future of Community-based Marketing
Tim Manners, Moderator – David X. Manners Company
Peter Friedman – LiveWorld
Barry Libert – Shared Insights
Charlie Tarzian – CoActive Marketing Group
Panel discussion on the most significant trends in community-based marketing and community business models as we look ahead 24 months.

5:00 – 6:00 Reception in the Sanctum Lounge

Idea Bar #8: Nonprofit Widgets in the age of OpenSocial

With this week's announcement from Google of OpenSocial - essentially creating a uber-platform to eclipse all platforms (i.e. Facebook) - and the news that MySpace has joined, widgets suddenly became a lot more relevant. The promise behind the Open Social move, whose API became available late last week, is that advertisers can now create widgets that hold some, hopefully, useful or delightful code, that can be embedded in user profiles across a range of social networks including MySpace, Bebo, Linkedin and more. More than that, we may achieve that wonderful goal of a single social network profile, "one ring to bind them."

Non-profits must jump on the widget wagon now!

If you go to widgetbox, one of the clearinghouse directories of widgets for different social networks, you will find approximately 29 nonprofit widgets available for your download and installation pleasure. They are a pretty varied and obscure bunch from the Dancing Dolphin to the Wild Apricot. Where is the Peace Corps? Amnesty International? Oxfam? Oceana?

So far, folks are using the widget to pull RSS headlines into a special box. (You can check out my Auctions for Change widget on my MySpace page)

I want to feature the 1-2 organizations that I support on my blog(s) and social netwrk profiles. I want to promote their mission and solicit other supporters ($$$). I need a widget that offers something more than headlines. It should offer something engaging like a dynamic statistic of the number of people going without meals in different parts of the world right now. Here's my RockYou countdown widget reminding me that I am off to Taos in t-minus "x" days and counting. How hard would it be to make that a "stat-widget" driven by real research numbers that tell me how many folks are starving, how much of the ocean is polluted, or the average human carbon footprint?

Then I need a micropayment button that allows visitors to give $1 to $1000 (or whatever) right there in the widget. How many people will click and give based upon widget exposure alone? No idea. But chances are, if it's on my blog, it's a cause I support and I will blog about it. Let me be your champion.

Non-profits need to engage their brand ambassadors now. We need nonprofitwidget.org to emerge not as just another clearinghouse (like widgetbox) but as a toolbox for promotion and measurement for nonprofits who would use this type of resource.

Here's how nonprofitwidget.org can work:

• All nonprofits can publish their widgets in this directory which features all of the requisite download and embed protocols to relieve the necessity of too much technical knowledge.
• A directory of developers with rating systems would help nonprofits connect with folks to build the widgets.
• A promotion toolbox will give the nonprofit staff a set of procedures and tools to help promote their widgets
• A voluntary "membership" link will allow all of the folks who are using the widget to remain connected.
• Each widget "page" would feature and aggregate set of links to the blogs who feature that widget thus sending some link love back to those who publish the widget. 

Unlike advertisers who will wrestle with how to measure the use of widgets in terms they are used to (online advertising - see this WaPo article from Saturday), nonprofits have everything to gain by activating their greatest asset - their supporters and fans. 

As reported in the NTEN, Network for Good has released a new whitepaper on technology and fundraising. In general, the report includes their experience with widgets and here are some key points:

"When Wired Fundraisers Talk, People Listen: The messenger matters even more than the message.

Not Every Wired Fundraiser Is a Champion: The successful Wired Fundraiser has a relatively rare combination of true passion and a means to lend a sense of urgency to their cause.

Technology Makes a Difference: Widgets and social networks make existing personal fundraisers more effective.

Smart Charities Embrace the Wired Fundraiser: And they find their own, “inner” Wired Fundraiser. "

 

OpenSocial and open-mobile: Good or bad?

A couple of days after Google announced its plans to support a cross-social network, open "platform" with Linked-In and Frendster, the WaPo features an update on their mobile progress to champion WiMax and other open standards on mobile. While I am always cautious about collosal growth and expansion of a company ("absolute power corrupts...'), I am secretly wishing Google could give the cable companies a run for their money. That's the closed system that needs some serious "opening".

Open Social

Google launched an inititiative to make it easier for developers to create applications that will work across participating social networks. So far the participants include: Friendster, Hi5, LinkedIn, Ning, Plaxo, Viadeo and Oracle. Oh, forgot to mention, Google's own Orkut which stands to benefit considerably. Here's how Michael Arrington described it:

"It is a set of common APIs that application developers can use to create applications that work on any social networks (called “hosts”) that choose to participate.

What they haven’t done is launch yet another social network platform. As more and more of these platforms launch, developers have difficult choices to make. There are costs associated with writing and maintaining applications for these social networks. Most developers will choose one or two platforms and ignore the rest, based on a simple cost/benefit analysis.

Google wants to create an easy way for developers to create an application that works on all social networks. And if they pull it off, they’ll be in the center, controlling the network....

...OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

Hosts agree to accept the API calls and return appropriate data. Google won’t try to provide universal API coverage for special use cases, instead focusing on the most common uses. Specialized functions/data can be accessed from the hosts directly via their own APIs."

Smart, big move. The two 'marquee' names on the partner list need this. Linkedin is on the run from Facebook. It amazes me how quickly Facebook went from being the place for college students to the place for young people to the place for professionals. It makes perfect sense when you think about the similarities of our affinity for our college tribe and workplace tribe. Friendster just needs to break out of the Phillipines.

I spoke with one established, special-audience social network yesterday and they remain on the fence. I doubt we will see the Gathers, eons, and Bebos jumping on board this initiative until they may be forced to by market pressures.

The common platform thing will be a solid for advertisers. Developers will now be able to create applications (e.g. widgets et al) that reliably work across networks. This will make it easier to leverage several to "reach" audiences.

Open - mobile

Google's talks with Sprint and T-Mobile to outfit handsets with Google software is just the beginning. The Google handset continues to circulate around the rumour mill. But the real opportunity is both WiMax and open platforms for handsets. Kim Hart and Zachary Goldfarb's article in today's Washington Post has a great paragraph (several actually):

"Customizing handsets with a Google-powered operating system would rewrite the traditional wireless business model. Today's wireless carriers and handset manufacturers largely determine which applications consumers can access with their cellphones. Google aims to loosen those restraints by introducing a system that would be compatible with third-party features and services. In other words, software companies could design new features to work with Google's software. ...

...The introduction of Google phones would spur the kinds of mobile innovations seen abroad, in particular in Asia, where people regularly watch television on their cellphones, swipe cell phones at vending machines and take a picture of a special bar code to get a download of more information, said Charles S. Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research. New features might include video chat and GPS that takes advantage of Google Maps software, he said."

Is "open" a trojan horse that will lead to global domination and badness for consumers? Or is it consumers' ticket out of the servitude we find our selves with closed systems? Again, I can't help wondering what it would be like to have an open cable system (I have had some "issues" lately with my MSO).