Digital Influence Mapping Project

Word of Mouth Measurement: Critical in a Recession

There are several models for measuring the effectiveness of word of mouth marketing online. Now that the economy has tanked and only the most efficient marketing means will survive, we need a model that stands up to the criteria that Mark Weiner from Delahaye puts forth in his book, Unleashing the Power of PR and in his article at the Institute for PR.

I can explain the perfomance model of our WOM programs in about 15 minutes. I want to be able to do it in 4 minutes. That is the simplicity that I crave and most brand marketers need. Not everyone is looking to innovate (even though the writing is on the wall for traditional marketing) and therefore may not stand still to hear that 15 minute explanation of how word of mouth can sell their product better than a straight diet of advertising and media relations. .

Mark offers 4 "Tips" for PR that I would argue go for Word of Mouth marketing as well:

"Stop pretending. The business people who fund PR programs recognize that PR multipliers are baseless; they can see that PR performance and advertising equivalencies are apples-and-oranges; they know that clip volume isn't the primary goal...and so on. The dirty little secret is that most PR people know it, too. These fake measures may work up to a point, but eventually somebody figures it out and when they do, things can become very unpleasant very quickly.

Instead, work with your PR team and your clients (internal or external) to establish a measurement system that accurately reflects PR's unique value and return-on-investment. Use common language so that everyone benefits during the objectives-setting, strategy development and evaluation stages.

Be brave. One agency executive told me that he was being forced to use circulation/audience multipliers because the client's last agency used them and, as the new agency, clear levels of improvement had to be shown.

If PR is going to evolve as we all agree that it should, we must educate our clients to the advantages of verifiable measurement. We must show courage by putting a moratorium on the use of bad measurement. Eventually, clarity will emerge and become the norm.

Lead by example. Agency and department executives who willfully choose to use irrelevant or improper measurement are only perpetuating the problem.....

....Make it easy. Each year, Delahaye surveys thousands of executives to help define the value system by which they appraise public relations performance. What we've learned is that their expectations lean toward a measurement system that is meaningful, reasonable and measurable. Clip volume is measurable but it means little; driving sales is important but it's impractical. Instead, executives believe that "delivering key messages to target media," "beating the competition" and "meeting or beating objectives" cover the most important bases. "

Word of Mouth Marketing Measurement

We need to use Mr. Weiner's  4 tips in our own efforts to create valuable measurement models for WOM. He points us to many PR industry resources to help in that discipline. In word of mouth marketing, we need only look to WOMMA for some terrific resources. (I am a member and a board member) Like PR, there is no satisfying standard that marketers and communications specialists can agree on. At Ogilvy, we have our own model that inventories KPI (key performance indicators) in several categories including one labeled "engagement." Working with a major brand this past week, I saw a unique formula for reporting out "engagement" online. They remain unsettled on this approach but the trend is clear - we need a simple model that accounts for the deeper level of engagement and trust that people have with word of mouth.

Measuring and reporting on "engagement" may be its own trap. While no one would ever say that engagement is bad - that's like being against 'mom' - what it exactly means and how we should value it remains unclear.

Measuring "Preference"

We are shifting gears from measuring KPIs that indicate deeper engagement to using these metrics and proven research to articulate preference for a brand or support for an issue. When we can track all the way to "sales,"  we will. But as Mark Weiner points out, it is not always practical for any discipline, even advertising, to do so. We are moving to a measure that remains a little higher in the sales funnel and is indicative of the extra power that word of mouth can have.

Ad equivalency is not the way to go as that is it's own trap. I applaud BzzAgent's attempt to apply high cpms to WOM and suspect that is their way of adressing the concerns of the media clients they serve who need to evaluate WOM as a channel. The problem is that I don't think their hypothetical $300 cpm is near enough to valuing word of mouth.    

I love Dr. Walter Carl's method which is a rigorous tracking system with actual match backs. You need to hear him describe it to be completly persuaded. For me, it doesn't yet live up to the 'simple' requirement.

Coming Soon

We will be releasing more detail about our approach within the next few weeks. Most of the new and refined word of mouth marketing measurement models will be released at this year's WOMMA Research Symposium and Summit on November 12-14 in Las Vegas.

Word of Mouth Marketing is being held to a higher standard than other disciplines in terms of measuring effectiveness. The entire reach and frequency model is completely suspect in thsi day and age of marketing chaos. Still, I think we live up to that higher standard.   

Working With WOM Influencers

Last month, WOMMA quietly released their Influencer Handbook which offers guidelines on best practices and ethics for engaging influencers - online and offline - in WOM programs. A council of members put the handbook together. This is one of several useful initiatives that WOMMA members are spearheading right now.

Bloggers vs. Influencers

The Handbook starts at one level higher and more abstract than most approaches who focus in on the subset of influencers who are bloggers. Our own Blogger Outreach Guidelines and even WOMMA's Ethical Blogger Contact Guidlines start a little further down the chain. The Influencer Handbook frames out an approach appropriate for all types of influencers. They even inventory influencers in the following grid:

Category	Who they are	Channels of Influence	What they are called (Partial list)
Formal position of authority	Political/government leaders/staff Business leaders	Laws & regulations Decision & spending authority Top-down directives	Opinion Leaders Decision makers C-suite
Institutional/recognized subject matter experts & advocates	Academics/scientists Industry analysts NGO leaders Consumer activists	Academic journals Traditional media New media Social media	Experts Mavens Analysts Critics
Media elite	Journalists Commentators Talk show hosts	Traditional media New media Social media	Talking heads Columnists Politicos
Cultural elite	Celebrities Designers Artists Musicians	Traditional media New media New styles/products Social media	Trendsetters Fashionistas Taste makers Creators Starters
Socially connected	Neighborhood leaders Members of community groups Online networkers Business networkers	Personal relationships Email lists Social gatherings Social networking websites Social media	Mavens Starters Connectors Soccer moms Spreaders Hubs Alphas

The Handbook offers safe guidelines for marketers who want to engage Influencers and need to make sure they do so ethically and without putting their brand at risk. Everyday, I hear about marketers not in WOMMA who are new to word of mouth and stumble around the grey areas of ethics that, quite frankly, just aren't that grey. I serve on the WOMMA board and am passionate about the mission of the organization. I hate seeing good brands being led into risky territory by naive marketers who don't see the problems in pretending to be someone they are not online, or going overboard to push an influencer to write a blog post, or who just don't respect the new influencers online (remember the David Ogilvy dictum: "The consumer is not a moron; she is your wife")

Protect Your Brand

The new Influencer Handbook is useful to all marketers. Many who have been around WOMMA may find it almost common sense - that's a good thing and speaks to our collective efforts over the past few years. It is full of useful guidance like this:

"• Consider engagement as a balance sheet. The relative benefits to you, the brand, and the influencers needs to be in balance with one another. If the balance is too much in your favor, your influencers will feel used and you’ll ultimately alienate passionate users. If the balance is too much in the favor of your influencers, you’ll lose interest over time, and your program will be a campaign instead of a multi-year, long-term commitment.

• Influencer programs are, by definition, long-term, multi-year commitments designed to build a relationship; they are not marketing campaigns. Campaigns can augment influencer efforts to help find, activate, or engage influencers in particular activities (like a product launch), but influencer programs need to level out the roller coaster of connections provided by campaigns."

Protect your brand. Practice great word of mouth. Get this useful guide from those who are actually practicing great word fo mouth marketing everday.

(Oh, and come to the WOMMA Summit on November 12-14 to get more practical tools and apporaches for impactful womm including the latest on measuring and reporting ROI - handy in a "challenged" economy) 

Brilliant Online Show: EpicFU

I had a chance to talk with Zadi Diaz and Steve Woolf from EpicFU. I have long been a fan. They are two of the smartest people creating online shows out there. I love their show. They know what it means to create a social experience around their content not just create great video. With their use of a NING social network, they now know about their participants (can't just call them an 'audience' as they are too engaged). that has always been the pitfall of many an online show for marketers who want to know who they are reaching.

Marketers should jump on board their embedded sponsorships. Check out the recent show aith Arianna Huffington (nice house!)

Social Media Measurement: Down with CPMs

Dave McClure has a great post challenging our reliance on the measurement standrads that I believe are built on sand (Thanks Mashable). His focus is on teh abusrdity fo the cpm model that demonstrates success in the fraction of the percentage point (1 - .5% clickthroughs). He makes a case for widgets overall as follows:

"it's about engaging users via application workflow, and discovering intent.  then you don't have to advertise anymore, you just serve up the stuff that users find interesting.  gee, doesn't that sound similar to what Google did via Search & Adwords & Adsense?  and what Facebook is doing via Social Networking & Facebook Apps.  and what MySpace / LinkedIn wish they hadn't stepped on / ignored respectively (they'll get there, but they're late)."

I totally agree with Dave that display advertising  - as it is currently envisioned - is a broken model. Properly imagined Widgets - thinks that are of-use or deeply interesting or delightful - are where advertising needs to head. I would argue that that same principle - be of-use or interesting to people within the context of their online lives could be applied to the display ad serving slots throughout the web. Who says you have to run traditional display advertising through those positions? Why not deliver widget inspired function and content. Why not pull a conversation into that space?

Of course, you would have to measure differently than cpm which seems to be Dave's major point.

Must-Attend Events #2: WOMMA Summit & Research Symposium

aka The Official Event of the Word of Mouth Marketing Industry

November 12-14 in LasVegas at the Rio

This year's event will bring together some of the biggest brands practicing Word of Mouth marketing today including Dell, Kraft, Hershey's, HP, and more. I am personally involved so I am biased but the reason that I am so involved is that I believe so strongly in the discipline and in a broad-based group like WOMMA to push it forward.

One of the most important outputs of the November SUMMIT will be the latest on measurement and ROI. Nothing could be more important as the economy tightens and marketers must demand more efficient (i.e. "provable") programs. If you have an approach or need a measurement model to support you programs - come to learn and share!

Even our event must be essential to make it worth all of our time, and this year's program is just that...essential:

"Reaching the Word of Mouth Tipping Point

Word of Mouth Marketing has grown up. Major brands and organizations integrate WOMM into global marketing and communications programs every day. Have we reached the tipping point yet where WOMM programs flood the landscape? What will it take to get there?

Hear from the most important brands using WOMM today – how they measure, deploy best-practice programs, and how they sell-in programs.

Each year, the WOMM industry convenes to take a comprehensive look at the changes that have taken place in the fast-changing, ever-beta, word of mouth marketing world, and to look forward at what’s on the horizon, including tactical trends, best practices, game-changing ideas, and more.

Whether you live and breathe word of mouth or have seen firsthand the impact of WOMM and want to learn more, WOMMA’s annual Word of Mouth Marketing Summit is the place to be.

On the dockets for Summit 2008:

• Keynotes and case studies from the top brands in the WOMM world:
  • Hear from Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos about their explosive business
  • Cases from HP, Yahoo, Pepsi, Hershey, Cadbury Schweppes, Intercontinental Hotels and more
• All of the WOMM industry leaders in one place
• Networking opportunities with people who live in the WOMM trenches
• WOMM as a recession marketing tactic
• Aligning your online and offline efforts
• Introducing WOM in your integrated campaign

Details:

November 12-14 in LasVegas at the Rio

500 Marketers from major brands, agencies and WOM specialists

WeMedia 08 Sound Bites: Real Voices & Social Networks

Young Bloggers & Social Media at last week's WeMedia Buenos Aires event

Four "youths" were on stage at WeMedia 08 which has been dominated by media, business and marketing leaders (adults). It's refreshing to hear from those who are not caught up in the professions. Each is deeply engaged with social media. Some are even celebrities. When Cumbio entered the auditorium, the Twitter stream exclaimed "Cumbio is in the house!"

They are here to share their digital lives. Cumbio sounds like a regular teen.I love that she leads real-world meet-ups at the mall. Milton runs a popular blog. Pablo brought his own PowerPoint presentatuion of teens and social media.

Myths and Reality

• Each has a perfectly normal sounding life with lots of digital sprinkled in throughout the day. They are not on the computer all day. That is clearly a myth for these people. They weave it in with tremendous facility. Cumbio can post a half dozen images on her photo log in less than an hour (and recieves 100,000 visits (a day?).  I am certian that I am online far more hours than any of them (and have no more to show for it, I think)
• Pablo: "TV is only used for movies, I like...TV s not my favorite medium"
• At least two of them don't understand the appeal of Facebook. The audience of adults cheer that one on. 
• Cumbio's pretty sober about the difference between core friends - 5-10 - and the extended network of aquaintances that the Facebook software chooses to call "friends."
• Cumbio champions a new kind of media literacy - how to best use Fotolog and retain your privacy. very smart.

WeMedia08: Sound Bites from Traditional Media in Transformation

As usual, an eclectic mix of media, bloggers, marketers and business people came together at MALBA in Buenos Aires to talk about how media is changing at WeMediaBuenas Aires. There is a fair amount of tension between the traditional media folks onstage and the social media natives in the audience. For every newspapaer journalist who comments from the stage about their discovery of blogging, there is a Tweet about their "newness" to the medium. This tension is not unusual. I am with the Twitterers on this one. many of the journalists are going through the motions but have not really embraced social media.

My Theory: the traditional media companies feel confident in their leadership position due to the 'reach'they command at the head of the tail. When they look at social media, they see technology. they adopt technology and expect they have changed. Change is more constant. media companies did not just temporarily lose their monolithic status in our society. Those days are gone forever. 

Newspapers Transform Everywhere
Roberto Roja (sp?) from Clarin.com (large media company in Argentina) launched the conference by sharing about the violent disruption for print media (their foundation is built on their newspaper but they own TV, internet connectivity and more). Five years ago, they introduced color to the disbelief of the newspaper purists.

They added an online "version" of the paper to reach new audiences. He feels very bullish not just about newspaper readership but also about the leadership of newspaper Web sites. Users of their sites have doubled since 2003. The big questions are how to grow print readership and increase online revenues. 

He certainly seems like a man who sees the writing on the wall while dragging a traditional print-based media company to its obvious future. I wonder if he is more optimistic about the future of the print paper than is warranted. 

Eduardo Hauser CEO of Dailyme.com - His 6 Trends
Dailyme.com offers personalized news in a crowded market.

1. Fragmentation: Records (aka "albums") vs. iTunes
2. Atemporal (time-shifted): cable box vs. TIVO - growth of new advertising models including a 3:00 segment
3. Form of Payment: micropayment a la the $1.99 song on iTunes
4. User Participation: Election 08 Twitter feed
5. Distributed Experiences: he uses an example of DailyMe which aggregates content from everywhere including Clarin.
6. More Devices: iPhones and Blackberries and Kindles, Oh My! The Kindle is a platform that you pay a regular fee (subscription) - this represents a new business model.

Mariano Martino: Blogger vs. Journalist vs. Both
Blogging since 2001, Mariano and I spoke before the conference. He is outspoken and spends his time bridging traditional media and advertisers with social media. He is running a panel of journalist bloggers incuding

• Leandro Zanoni from tercerclick.com is giving a simple overview of social media including Facebook, wikipedia and the slide with all of the Web2.0 logos. He is teeing up the premise that I will cover tomorrow when I speak about my version of "perpetual beta" - test, try and train and allow for failure.
• Ernesto Tenembaum, journalist and blogger
• Daniel Fernandez Caneda, journliast and editor

Working with Blogs

Lilian Beriro, Development Manager for Telecom portals - Brands create stories so that they remember us and choose us. She is championing "listening" - we listen to how consumers "react." She shared three examples of ad agency created video programs - funny, fake videos. The question remains is embracing the  vocabulary of social media as powerful as actually engaging with social media (and the people amidst it)?

Esteban Panzeri/Lenovo - Esteban worked with us on the Lenovo Olympics. He is a smart guy and is actually sharing something of substance. He talks about the needs and wants of the consumer. First time today that we are talking about what the consumer needs vs. what journalists need or what advertisers need.

Future PR Skills 2008: Identify and Engage Influencers Online and Off

This is Part of a series: The 13 Skills of the Public Relations Professional of the Future

We need to rethink who we consider influential and how we assess that influence. There are a lot of new influencers out there whose voices are amplified by technology. Understanding how that all works is critical for the communication pro of tomorrow. My graduate class at Johns Hopkins has just been exploring influence from theory to practice. We re-read Cialidini's book on Influence. That gets us back to human psychology - an area of knowledge that the PR pro of the future needs a deeper knowledge of. What motivates each of us to listen and act based upon what others do and say? That path is the key to developing new, more meaningful metrics than what the entire advertising industry, itself, is based upon (e.g. "reach x frequency" as in the HeadOn ads)

Traditional Influence

Communication experts have always been good at understanding who is influential on a particular subject. Some of that comes from gut, contextual understanding of who community members turn to for guidance on whether the cross county road will actually be good for the community or a mere boondoggle for developers. Some of that comes from careful analysis like the Influencer Quotient mapping analysis and tool that my colleagues, Jamie Moeller and Dr. Jenneifer Scott developed - mostly for offline influencers. That actually asseses influence via a scoring system to leave you with a managable "map" of who is influential on a particicular topic. These are the KOFs or KOLs (Key Opinion Formers/Leaders). This is the traditional assesment of influence. It helps tremendously to focus a corporate or public affairs program on those individuals that can really become allys.

Things are different in the Long Tail of social media. Once you step back from a strategy of engaging those niche influencers to trying to assess the core set of influencers for an organization, issue or brand, you will survey a broad number of folks against criteria like this:

• Prominence within organization
• Prominence of organization
• Reach in mainstream media
• Reach in digital media
• Level of investment in the issue
• Level of authority/ connectedness
• Grassroots reach

It's Not Just Reach (nor inbound links...)

Who is influential in our lives today? When marketers and communicators ask this question they often mean who is influential to a lot of people or who "reaches" lots of people. The easiest answer is anyone extremely popular or who commands some type of audience like a celebrity, public official, captain of industry (what a quaint term) or someone at the top 10% of their game - whatever that game can be.

Long Tail Influencers
But the Long Tail offers a different answer. Social media and Web 2.0 have turned anyone into a publisher or a 'stranger with expertise.' In the new book, Crowdsourcing, XX mentions the old adage that on the Internet no one knows your a dog and then updates it in regards to authority - on the internet, no one knows you don't have a medical degree or PHD or other common form of social certification. His point isn't that the Internet is filled with lots of poor information from know-nothings. Rather, the Internet fuels a new meritocracy where everyday people can develop scientific solutions inside say, Innocentive, the crowdsourced solution marketplace for science. Their old school identities don't matter.

Criteria
Niche influencers are everywhere: blogs, social networks, message boards, review sites and more. If you want to decipher who is influential online, you have to be willing to roll up your sleeves and look for the data. The data infers behavior and reflects some of the fundamentals found in Cialdini and other experts. here is a sampling of what we look for:

Blogs & Microblogs

• Number of inbound links
• Frequency/timeliness of posts
• Followers & subscribers
• Number and content of comments
• Affiliation of author
• Search engine visibility
• Traffic
• RSS feed subscriptions

Videos & Photo Communities

• Number of views and downloads
• Number and content of comments
• Ratings/peer assessment
• Relevant groups
• Number of subscribers
• Number of inbound links

Message Boards & Forums

• Breadth of boards
• Quantity and timeliness of activity
• Search engine visibility
• Affiliation
• Membership numbers
• Traffic

Social Networks

• Membership numbers
• Types of community features present (e.g., profiles, blogs, video, message boards)
• Activity level on features
• Affiliation
• Search engine visibility

Be A Geek
The communications pro of the future will need to be equally adept at understanding inlfuence at the Head of the Tail and along the Long Tail. You will benefit from being a bit of a geek as you will need to turn the knobs on some seemingly arcane software to completely understand influence online (Brian Williams from Viget Labs reminded me during his talk on my panel at Interact 2008 that being a "geek" is a good thing)

How do you assess inlfuence? (and how do you train others on this model) 

Must-Attend Events #1: We Media Buenos Aires

There are 3 events coming up this year that are truly must-attend events for me. I play a role in each which isn't the full explanation of why I "must attend." Each is compelling as it pulls unusual and smart  people together for conversation that can actually push our business forward this year. Each engages that part of my brain that longs for fresh thinking and apreciates the power of divergent groups.

The first is put on by ifocos.org and is part of the WeMedia summit series. here is the skinny:

We Media 2008 Buenos Aires

October 14-15 Buenos Aires, Argentina at MALBA

Why it's compelling: The conference brings together smart thinkers from media, technology, marketing and non profits to discuss how our world and our businesses are transforming in light of social media, user engagement and the Internet as a whole. Not the usual echo-chamber of tech-heads, this experience forces us to make connections/comparisons with different businesses and always injects new thinking. It is like a great dinner party that puts together interesting strangers for a reason. I inevitably apply many things I learn to my work with a week or two.

Who is participating/speaking (besides myself):

• Eduardo Hauser, CEO, DailyMe.com
• Josh Cohen, Business Product Manager, Google News
• Steve Herrmann, Editor BBCNews.com
• Victor Kong, VP and managing director, MySpace Latin America
• Florencia Pettigrew, International Marketing Manager LinkedIn
• Esteban Panzeri, Lenovo
• Martín Tinghitella, Director de Movilización Pública y FR de Greenpeace
• Sergio Hernández,  Negocios Digitales Infomedia - Intel Social Media

Come if you can. Or tell your Latin American colleagues to come.

Social Media: the New Face of Financial Lead Gen?

As the financial services market reels from a huge indiscriminate reputation hit, they are still pumping out brand advertising. Those media dollars are going to waste. Building awareness for your financial service - bank, investment, insurance - when all that people are aware of is doom, gloom and questionable civic morality (e.g. golden parachutes, bailouts for the top tier, etc..).

Turns out that traditional search marketing lead generation also tilts away from the reasonable to favor...social media. Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins over at Mashable covered the purchase of the blog Bankaholic, essentially a one man shop, for $15M by Bankrate.  The value to bankrate? A way to connect with potential customers beyond traditional advertising or search marketing. I posted about an alternative approach for retail banks to start digging their reputations out of the colossal crater. This is a similar approach. Bankaholic is doing well but not a huge reach play (Alexa ranking of 42,168 average less than 20 comments per post). Mark has a strong POV from his own experience:

"Several years ago, I served as chief technology officer for a financial services and credit restoration company, and assisted in setting up our systems to work with our AdSense buys at the time. At the time, bankruptcy laws were in extreme states of flux and people were looking to get in quick on matters relating to their credit ratings before the legal changes went into effect, and AdSense keyword buys were sometimes north of $48.00 a click.

It was around that time where it became far more efficient to look to social media as a means for promotion than CPC advertising for lead generation, and I suspect that’s what’s going on here."

Effectiveness of Social Media

As we push our models for mapping and confirming the effectiveness of social media to reach hadcore communications and marketing goals (like lead gen), the marketplace confirms same with a nice-size purchase price for an engaging financial blog.