Digital Influence Mapping Project

WeMedia 08/Miami: Digital Health Entertainment

Humana's Grant Harrison is VP of Integrated Consumer Experience. He is doing some really cool things.

They are investing in many initiatives that could be grouped under 'health entertainment'. Think of games that require kids to run around the house to get to the next level. What's really cool is that they are investing in bringing Velib bikes to the US the way that 20K bikes were distributed across Paris.

Very cool idea for a Humana to support. I wonder how much word of mouth that will spark (never mind 'earned media').

WeMedia 08/Miami: Digital Health Empowerment

At WeMedia 08, Scott Mowbray from Health.com is talking with  Kendall Lockhart, Co-Founder, Nenuphar Mobile Media (and yoga practitioner - you had to be there for his intro) about what it means to empower people.

Ways of 'digital health' empowerment
1. Voting
2. Personal empowerment: during a prsonal health episode, it is critical to know what to ask for, what to demand from all of the health providers involved in your care

Social Marketing & Community
Kendall asks 'What if people don't want to change (e.g. lose weight)'
I would throw back - "what about transtheoretical model of social marketing?" that and other models to describe what causes people to change is begging for the suport systems now possible through social networks/communites. In general there is too much emphasis on simple delivery of credible information (vs. building credible community).

Kendall: Is there more 'community' now?
Scott feels that we live in a one-brand (WebMD) world. We are at an early stage of development of alternative sources for credible information.
I would throw back - what about the vast array of LongTail patient affinity groups? Are we really headed towards a model of a handful of WebMD competitors or will it be long tail from here on in with patient affinity groups like those hosted by Inspire.com and PatientsliekMe?

WeMedia 08/Miami: Zogby/WeMedia poll

John Zogby's group did a US based poll for the WeMedia guys and the data is what you would expect and have probably heard.

• 2/3 of Americans think traditional journalism is out of touch
• 70% think it's important to the quality fo life in their communities
• 48% say that the Internet is now the prinicipal source for news and information

WeMedia 08/Miami: Power On!

It always seems prophetic when some big "natural' event happens on the eve of something you care about. In this case, there was a huge power outage in southern Florida affecting up to 4 million people as I flew down for Andrew and Dale's most excellent WeMedia conference in Miami. They are not responsible. Someone somewhere flipped the wrong switch on the old nuclear power plant.

Power failures have way of building community ... before they turn ugly, of course.

All power is restored and we are beginning a great confluence/conflagaration of media, marketing, internet, academics and genrally smart and interesting people at the latest WeMedia conference held at the University of Miami. Sam Grogg is dean and our host. he will be speaking on my panel later on Media Literacy.

Blackout as a WeMedia moment
Great discussion about how the blackout provided a "we media" moment. Folks from Qualcomm, Miami Herald and other places talk about how the traditional media infrastucture was crippled by the loss of power: papers couldn't publish, radio wasn't local enough to cover it, talk radio was gone, Web site access was limited due to the limits on batery life at the head-end and at the user.

A couple of us talked about the power of locally-driven microblogging (e.g. Twitter) posted and delivered via mobile devices (limited by battery life) where people in the community can post to a common account - @blackoutmiami - and aggregate their twits to keep themeslves and their neighbors involved.
Someone else talked about the spanish-language radio station that switched gears to host phone-ins from citizens became a flash cgm experience. The conference is really about redefining media and our expectations for it.

Off to a great start.

It's Time for the Chief MarComCustomer Officer

This week's Business Week focuses on customer service with a cover story on "Customer Vigilantes." That particular story focuses on the horror stories from the likely suspects - telco and cable. We really should make distinctions about how different business types handle customer service. Comcast features highly in the article for pissing off Mona Shaw and Bob Garfield yet they have a very popular ad campaign - "it's Comcastic" - which is, no doubt, partly responsible for drawing in new customers.

How can a business' customer service effort be so out of sync with its marketing effort? In the case of the telcos and the cable businesses, it's easy. They have resigned themselves to measure success via new customer acquisition. Churn takes a back seat. Now in the same issue, they profile Sprint's recent attempt to get beyond that old model into actually valuing customer service (and therefore customers).

What is a Chief MarComCustomer Officer?
The marcom world (marketing and communications; advertising and public relations) continues to remain a siloed one. Once in a while the two disciplines are brought together around a campaign. In some rare cases, the functions are combined under the same reporting structure.

Now every business is a little different. Still, the world has changed enough that it is probably time for most major businesses to consider merging their marketing and communications function under one savvy team - a team that understands the value of each of those two disciplines. As the supremacy of advertising fades a bit and public relations continues to grow something else is happening: complexity. Our experience as consumers is growing increasingly complex - messages coming from everywhere, marketers creating content and conversations with us, our online behavior affecting what marketing content is delivered to us. Communicating and building relationships is not as easy as crafting the best media plan. PR and advertising (not to mention direct, retail marketing, pure digital, etc...) must play off each other to succeed. And they must share a measurement dashboard to guide the CMCCO.

Combining the CMO and CCO (or EVP of Communications or whatever the top PR job is) would help solve another little discrepancy - who owns word of mouth marketing (WOMM). This new discipline jockey's for position within organizations without a clear understanding of how powerful it can be especially when combined with the other disciplines.

Which brings us back to the "Customer" part.

Customers can be a brand's most powerful marketing force. That is the promise behind word of mouth marketing. And many brands have seen this promise come true. Maybe the overall stewardship of the company's marcom efforts should be combined with the customer relations function. That way, companies who believe in their customer - their power and their value to their business - can have a holistic way of reaching out and engaging them.

Elsewhere in the issue, Jeff Jarvis seems to sum it up well:
So when you reach out to that kvetching blogger you found online, you're engaged in customer service as well as PR, market research, marketing, sales, and product development. You are reinventing your company—and, if you get there before your competitors, your industry. That is why you shouldn't relegate this vital task to one department or some interns or consultants. You should reorganize the company around this new relationship with your customer, finally putting that customer at the center of everything you do because—thanks to the Web—you can. If you don't, well, someone will you say you "suck." "

Digizine Redux: Rich Personalized Content

Online magazines are an anachronism. I remember when Launch was a CD-ROM "digizine." In fact, we did one of the first interactive advertisiments for Sony which still seems pretty cool. But the whole digizine concept seemed to me to have nowhere to go in teh age of blogs et al.

  Then came Idio.

Luv it. Typed in the bands I listen to most starting with Nick Cave and Social Distortion. And in a few moments I had a custom, daily digizine with text and motion media "published" and ready for a read. The interface has that chunky Web 2.0 simplicity which I love so well. And if I am not into the whole magazine metaphor, I can subscribe via RSS.

Some of the magic is in the format. Some in the simple promise of content that like my Pandora account will focus on artists I like and those that are related. If they can pay off on the relation- thing like Pandora does, then this will be spectacular. 

Now the challenge is that I have yet to recieve  an update (requested one week updates). I am going to chalk that off to beta-status.

No matter how "elegant" can a content service that must go beyond RSS delivery to pay-off on its value?

Does "Cheap Interaction" Trump Traditional Advertising?

Umair Haque is Director of the Havas Media Lab. Over at Harvard Business, he has posted on The Shrinking Advantage of Brands.

His POV (my interpretation) questions the value of brand stewardship driven by traditional advertising in a world where the #1 brand is Google which doesn't advertise and the cost of each of us delving into the features and benefits of products and services is quite small. He states that branding as articulated via advertising - slogans, "brand positions," catchy creative - served to distinguish products and services in the industrial age when interaction was expensive - when it took a lot for consumers to compare and understand products.

"How is cheap interaction driving the strategy of branding into decay?

Let’s rewind. What is a brand? It’s a promise: information from a firm promising you a set of costs and benefits from the consumption of a good or service. Brands shape your expected value.

Now, for the economics of an industrial era, branding made sense. Interaction was expensive – so information about the expected benefits of consumption had to be squeezed into slogans, characters, and logos, which were then compressed into thirty-second TV ads and radio spots. The complex promise of a Corvette, for example, was compressed into shots of cute girls, open roads, and lots of sunshine.

But cheap interaction turns the tables. The cheaper interaction gets, the more connected consumers can talk to each other – and the less time they have to spend listening to the often empty promises of firms."

Brands Must Do It Differently Today
I would argue that brand is more than this. Yes, it is that "promise" between product and buyer. But that promise goes beyond features, benefits, and "information" into story. The story is at the heart of branding. And it cannot be achieved in the same way via brand advertising as it once did. That's really at the heart of Umair's point. "Cheap Interaction" includes information gathering and conversation with peers. In many cases, consumers (like you and me) are telegraphing that we value our peers say-so than the claims of advertising no matter how cleverly and ubiquitously delivered. That word of mouth becomes, of course, the "story" of a brand. That is not new. The brand story that is crafted behind the scenes by marketing and communications specialists pales in comparison to the version of that story which people share with other people. And now, we have a digital network(s) to amplify that WOM and story.

Brands that look beyond traditional marketing towards engaging customers in two-way conversations will have an advantage going forward. Brands that try to be of-use to their customers even if that means expanding the core products and services they provide (look at Nike) will have the advantage. Brands that think innovation is a new delivery channel for advertising will not gain advantage.

Brands versus Advertising

Like Alex Nesbitt over at Digital Podcast, I believe Umair is really talking about traditional advertising and not the broader concept of "brands." In a world of the ever-growing haystack Web, I am not sure that I agree that the soft cost of interaction is all that low. We must really commit time and energy to understand why certain products suit our needs or not. Comparing computers? That's almost easy. Comparing soap, cereal, blenders, dishwashers, mattresses, banks - you name it. Not so easy. Not so "cheap."

Alex has it right when he says:

"The social web is way more powerful than traditional advertising based brand building efforts.

Communities have always been central to building brands as positive word of mouth has always been much more powerful than advertising in building brand strength and value. When our friends speak, we listen.

Google’s brand has been built without any paid advertising. It has been built by the world’s biggest community - the social web.

We’ve gone from people telling their physical communities about good stuff to global web based communities where strong positive word of mouth spreads virally across the globe at zero cost.

Brands that don’t understand the power of the social web will shrink in advantage, those that do can build even stronger brands and more value."

We Media 08: Using Media to Innovate and Make the World a Little Better

What do you do in a world where "media" is no longer defined by newspapers, magazines, television and other 'traditional,' organizations who still know what the term "4th estate" means?

For Andrew and Dale at ifocos.org (The Insitute For The Connected Society) they collect some of the most interesting people wrestling with the impact of the digital media explosion and all its fallout, bring them together online and in person at We Media 08 in Miami from February 26-28.

They trigger dozens of conversations amongst these unlikely colleagues about what is media today and how we can use it to innovate our respective businesses while at the same time serving the world. Sound familiar? It shouldn't unless you remember the Thomas Carlyle's meaning behind the "fourth estate." Even still, things have changed. The whole fourth estate thing was a nod to the political power of the press. I would argue that WeMedia is less focused on political power or the impact within anyone country of a new, exploded view of media than it is with the global reach of a very public 'media' defined by the BBC, as well as,  a momblogger in New Mexico. This new media has the potential to transcend political and social boundaries. The idea behind the "fourth estate" comment was that the press at that time had a not-so-soft power equal to, or sometimes, surpassing the assigned leaders in power.

If anything has the potential to let global people get to know each other better, reduce our human fear of the unknown and help us connect over new affinities and ideas, it is this new media fueled by the connectivity of the Internet.

I will admit that one of my strongest attractions to Andrew and Dale's vision is how it plays into my hopelessly romantic and, I'm sure, naive belief that a global social network (the meta-network that is the Internet) can help make us global citizens working together to solve problems for other people regardless of political, ethnic and social boundaries.

The WeMedia 08 conference will have sessions like:

• The Power To Change The World
• Political World | Hype vs. Reality in Campaign 08
• Search World | Trust, relevance and rights
• Activist World | Social networks for social good
  and my personal favorite (and the one I am moderating):
• Informed World | The citizen’s guide to media literacy

The event will pull traditional media leaders, social media proponents, academics, tech start-ups, VCs, social activists and much, much more. It's a weird collection of people many of who will come based on a faith that they will discover new affinities and ideas from being social and alert with people unlike themselves in so many ways.

If you can make it - you should come. It may just be the most impactful conference you partiucipate in all year long as it is likely to touch your business side and your personal side.

Andrew and Dale have created an organization that we can all belong to and participate throughout the year. Join us now (and find out more about the group)>

Why Comparing Social Media to Advertising is a Must

Ever have one of those projects where you think you have successfully positioned the value of a social media-based WOM program and then in the 11th hour, someone decides that all they want are click-throughs to the ad campaign microsite?

Okay, that's the same intro to another post. It illustrates a truth. In the case of brand marketers who need to sell product or "convert" in some way (vs. social marketers who are changing behavior or corporate PR folks trying to manage reputation), they need to understand how WOM compares and interacts with other marketing and communications efforts. 

If the best advertising is judged by whether it "sells," so must word of mouth be judged. I attended a very senior cabal today of digital smart thinkers. Someone made the joke about spending 20 years putting definition around all sorts of proxy metrics to avoid reporting against sales. While I know it was meant in jest, there is a truth at its core.

The studies tell us that some people trust word of mouth over and above other communications, media and marketing messages in some cases. I have added the "somes" because the context, the product in question, the degree of familiarity and trust with the source will impact the WOM impact. Lots of annoying variables. Even still, what someone I know tells me about a product or service is much more impactful to me than all the advertising in agency-land.

Time to prove it.

Why Comparing Social Media to Advertising is a Mistake

Ever have one of those projects where you think you have successfully positioned the value of a social media-based WOM program and then in the 11th hour, someone decides that all they want are click-throughs to the ad campaign microsite?

Don't use WOM for awareness alone
Don't get me wrong, the right WOM program can drive traffic. But that should never be the sole KPI. And looking at WOM as a channel is a BIG MISTAKE. WOM's best value is at the lower half of the funnel: engagement - loyalty - advocacy. You can combine that with some solid marketing goals like conversion and, even, raising awareness, but if you do not value the benefits of deeper enagagement for a particular initiative, then you might want to stick to the traditional bludgeons like advertising.

Frequency vs. Attention
Advertising, in general, is measured by GRP or gross rating point. Reach x Frequency = GRP. Pretty simple. That's how it is valuated for 'sale" so-to-speak. Marketers plan against target GRPs based upon the belief that a certain frequency of ad impressions on an individual make an impression on that person. That belief is based upon studies that demontrate that multiple impressions have an effect. That potential effect can be a higher consideration for purchase. Pretty basic stuff.

Alternatively, other studies show higher trust for different types of WOM and a preference for recommendations from other people over one-way marketing in purchase considerations. That would suggest that WOM has the capacity to grab our 'attention' more than ad messages or even multiple ad messages. In a long tail-world where everything is in abundance except our time and capacity for attention, grabbing attention is valuable.

In most WOM campaigns, we cannot report "frequency." We cannot say that some number of people (reach) read 4 blog posts or comments (frequency) about our brand-related topic. Can we say that a single positive WOM mention grabs attention better than an ad message? Yes. Better than 4 ad impressions? Now I am starting to slide down the slippery slope in an effort to compare the impact of advertising and WOM. I suspect that the right answer is that advertising will never garner the same attention that authentic WOM will. (Strangely enough, the advertising industry is trying to co-opt both 'engagement' and 'attention' by applying those same concepts to one-way advertising. See an interesting ARF paper here)

So What?
I feel like my train of thought has been a little academic. I am trying to get somewhere. Simply put, to define how WOM programs are scaleable, we want to say what some unit of WOM is worth. So we pine for our own version of GRPs which would answer the question, "If I throw $100K more WOM into the mix, what do I get?" Problem is a GRP-like model requires a companion assumption that describes the impact of WOM. Just like GRP says that reaching a number of people multiple times produces a impact on attitude and behavior, we need the analog for WOM. Is it that a WOM unit is 4 times, 8 times, 12 times more likely to impact our attitude and behavior than an advertisement? Again, I am back to the slippery slope.

I suspect that we need a few more, very focused studies that will tell us the following:

• Is positive WOM (please define) x times more likely to affect attitude and behavior in relation to product consideration and purchase. We need the "x" even if we have to get multiple "x's" for different product types if they behave differently (is a WOM unit about a high-engagement product like a car more or less impactful than one for, say, soda?).
• Is here a tipping point in "personal share of voice" (what I hear about a movie, car, cause from other people) that drives a person to consideration and finally conversion?
• What is the trust or attention differential between people I "know" and those I do not?

Some of these studies may exist in various forms. I may have even read them. I think some combination may be key to acheiving the "Attention Rating Point" or whatever we use to evaluate WOM for spending purposes.

Warning: I am trying to work out some thinking about social media measurement. I may be onto something useful or I may just have drunk too many cups of coffee. I need your feedback but if you think it's the coffee, just be kind.)