Digital Influence Mapping Project

For the Guy/Gal Who Has Everything: Web Trends 3.0

I love great visualizations. This is going to be a year for more of them, no doubt. Oliver and his folks at IA Japan have released another version of their mashup of the Web 2.0 landscape and the Tokyo subway map. It is but one group's view on cataloguing many of the significant brands and businesses online. It is done so well that it is worth having. You can buy a poster at their site. You can also download jpegs and even a full pdf.

The best part if their interactive start page which makes all of the "destinations" on the route clickable - not sure what Badongo is? Just click on it to go there.

Buy a map for someone you care about in social media. And tag their site, they do great work.

The Shape of Corporate Comms: Ford

There have been a couple of interesting social media-driven corporate communications stories during the last quarter. One is, of course, Motrin. That has been posted about ad naseum. Suffice it to say that there was a missed opportuntiy there for J&J, but that's another post.

The more interesting story unfolded in the middle of December with Ford. While the specifics of the conflagaration between Ford and it's attempt to protect trademark with Ford fan sites and blogs, the more interesting by-product is Scott Monty's (Ford's recently hired social media guy) willingness to jump into the conversation. He held a sober conversation, stayed within the bounds of messaging without coming off like a flack in any way, and he didn't take the bait from the more extreme voices in the comment flow.

For those who weren't following along, the basic skirmish arose as follows (from PickupTrucks.com):

"Ford and TheRangerStation.com, a 10-year-old website for Ford Ranger enthusiasts, have mutually agreed to end a legal dispute that originally had Ford's attorneys demanding $5,000 and the rights to the domain name "TheRangerStation.com." Word of the dispute quickly caused an eruption of online support for the fan site that had some questioning Ford's relationship with some of its most loyal customers.

According to Jim Oaks, owner and founder of TheRangerStation.com, Ford's legal action had merit. It focused on vinyl decals sold to raise funds for site maintenance that bore Ford trademarks without Ford's approval.

"We sold vinyl cutouts with Ford trademarks that we shouldn't have," Oaks told PickupTrucks.com. He posted similar words on TheRangerStation.com's forums.

After being contacted by Scott Monty, Ford's public relations manager for digital media, Oaks and Monty quickly worked out a tentative agreement that ends Ford's pursuit for monetary compensation and the site name" 

The more interesting side to this was Scott's willingness to carry on a blog-verse discussion (trying to avoid the "blog-o-" word) about what was going on while at the same time offering some clarifications on Ford's POV on the bailout and even his perceptions of Alan Mulally's leadership. Scott commented 8 times over the course of a day.

Here's an example of a comment from Scott on the Voltage Blog (marketing firm in St. Louis that hosted a 59 comment post on the subject):

"Scott Monty 12/10/08
Sorry, I wanted to add one more thing. In the heat of the RangerStation fiasco, I neglected to respond to some other points you made above.

1. Ford has not been denied. In fact, we chose *not* to accept any of the funds in the pending bill. Our statement is at: http://is.gd/aSY1

2. In my experience at Ford (and mind you it's only been 5 months), Ford does not suffer from hubris. Anything but. That's been part of our perception problem - we've just got our heads down and are working steadily.

3. Alan Mulally is a very honorable and likable guy. He had a long day of Congressional testimony behind him when he said that, and I'm sure he regrets it.

We've tried to put together a pretty plainspoken and user-friendly site to tell our story. It's appropriately titled "The Ford Story" and can be found at http://thefordstory.com. I hope you'll check it out, including a video of Alan on the "Our Plan" page.

Thanks for giving us the opportunity to share our side of the situation and for being so fair in your airing of it.

Scott"

This is the form of modern coporate communications: a willingness to have a clear conversation with people over an issue of mutual interest. Scott and Ford carefully (and quickly responded) with facts and what I will call human-speak (normal conversation not "message-delivery"). They joined the conversation out where it was happening. They didn't freak out when they got criticized.  

Motrin comparison:  I would argue that J&J overreacted in the Motrin case to the complaints of moms about their admittedly poor web video spot. they could have easily engaged and discussed and ended up ahead of the game. What woudl have happened if J&J asked moms to create a better spot about their particular pains?  I got the sense that they just wanted to mollify those crazy mom bloggers and Twitterers and get the hell out of the conversation.

The Ford approach is much different. I actually believe that having Scott's voice out there will have a great and positive impact on the Ford brand reputation. He will not only help be a corporate communications voice (and brain) as they navigate the next tricky 12 months, I believe he will be part of a new commitment to word of mouth marketing (strategic use of social media) that will ultimately help sell cars in the future.

Check out this case study of Scott's experience from Ron Ploof, a B-to-B social media consultant:

The Ranger Station Fire

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Marketing Business communications twitter

Idea Bar #11: The Agency of the Future - Innovation Lab

Agencies are going through a dramatic transformation. Traditional Ad Agencies will scale back staff between now and first quarter. Media agencies, at the top of the pile, are choking on word of mouth marketing because that discipline does not behave like all of the paid channels out there. Public relations continues to grow and not because it is the "cheap" medium. PR works really hard for clients and is more efficient at selling and building brand at the same time. With all this change, what is the shape and role of the agency of the future? Sure, the marketing and PR silos will crumble into one 360 pile. But there is another opportuntiy for agencies as the next innovation lab for clients (and themselves).  

Google spends a tremendous amount of time and money on innovation (the fabled "20%" of everyone's time and the expression of that effort via Google Labs.) Agencies struggle to follow suit due to the business model of the big conglomerates (mine is WPP). Considering my entire business - 360 Digital Influence - is a boot-strapped innovation within Ogilvy/WPP, innovation does happen and it can be quite impactful.

The People's Innovation Lab
We plan and deliver some pretty intense workshops for clients to help them understand or simply get more out of social media and word of mouth innovation. We just held a 2-day word of mouth marketing workshop for a major client and consumer marketer. This was done essentially in partnership with Word of Mouth Marketing Association (member) to bring the best thinkers and doers together to help the 315 brand marketers in attendance understand and apply WOMM to their marketing efforts.

We also have the beginnings of a digital innovation lab across the Ogilvy eco-system. We plan to participate more in that this year. The model is very locally driven which means good ideas from local markets being shared across the globe.

I want to take that a step further. I want to create a consumer-driven lab experience that comes together at the point of sale: retail. Let's create an Ogilvy storefront where we apply some of our best thinking not simply in terms of retail experience but all of the marketing that surrounds the products and services we "sell" for our clients. The store/lab would have an intense digital layer that engages a cadre of advisors and influencers to engage them in ongoing feedback and to be the seedbed of outbound word of mouth on new innovations at the Open Lab. And we will integrate our clients into that store/digital experience. One month, the partner would be American Express, another Kaplan University, still another the Lance Armstrong Foundation (all clients). Clients would subscribe to 6 month episodes.

Episodic and Continuous Innovation
Many companies have their own innovation labs. Certainly the CPGs all have the fake stores where they work behind the scenes to optimize the selling experience. Ours would be different. First of all, the Open Lab, would be, literally, open to the public.

Look at what Urban OUtfitters is doing in Hollywood with Space 15 Twenty. They have created a retail experience that accomodates a number of brands in a new collaborative retail experience. Or there is the creative marketing agency - Neverstop -  that also runs a barbershop storefront. (You can read about it in my favorite magazine - Metropolis)

They wanted to add some "social" street-level experience to help them stay in tune with other consumers. Let's take that a step further and create a storefront which can be designed around a brand (rolling "pop-up" episodes with a single, street-level storefront). Digital programs - word of mouth, social media and digital marketing would all be launched to drive traffic and engagement.

What's the Point?
Certainly this is not a reach play or a volume sales play. This is about innovating around influencer marketing. That's who would come here. That's who would susbcribe to our Facebook group. People who want to know what is next, who have something to contribute (for spotlight, social capital and to try a product experience), and who love the brands that would be featured in the Open Lab (I know, we have to work on that name....).

This is about innovating from the outside in. Brands get the benefit of the real world exchange with people and the creative thinking from the agency "creatives" who try these ideas out. For me, it's where these Idea Bar ideas could see the light of day for test and insight.

For every 6 month "epsisode," brands would have 2 month-long positions in the store plus a full digital influence program to support it. These would include planning and reporting. The promise would be to deliver 3 tested marketing innovations that could each move the needle on their business.

One of the great advantages of brands working with agencies is to get the benefit of fresh thinking from marketers who work across different clients and have a built-in methodology for being creative*. I want to extend that role to product and service marketing innovation. No one can afford to go back to the "old way" of marketing even in this full-blown recession. We must go forward. We must innovate in that quick and dirty way that let's us try something quickly, refine it, and deploy it. The days of camapign cathedral-building are over (plan a program for 6 months or longer, then deploy, then start over). We all need a source of continuous innovation and much of it had better come from outside the organization or we haven't learned some of the most enbduring lessons of this crowd-sourced era.

Everyone inside the agency would work in teh Open Lab at one point or another. It would not be its own sequestered group. It could become more than a retail lab and become a place to try out new creative, put together experiences (you know, arty stuff like poetry slams and origami jams).

We need a nice pedestrian city - Chicago, Philadelphia, New York. We need 5 clients at $200K initial subscriptions with a modest investment from the agency side.

Oh, the things we could learn. Oh, the ideas we would launch. Oh, the agency business we would transform.   
  
Related Pop up stores information:

• Trendwatching

• Businessweek

• PFSK

*creative must be defined differently. Now it includes a strategic view, an eye toward channel and platform complexity. The "big idea" is not enough.

Social Network Advertising Must Change for Brands

One of my favorite quotes for a presentation I am working on comes from a blogger, Samir Blwani at left the Box. He summarizes much of what has been written about the effectiveness of the current style of advertising in social networks:

“Social Network Advertising is a Waste of Time…”

While he gives a shot to inventorying the strengths of social networks including their larger-than-TV reach, ultimately he arrives at the conclusion that many have come to: the old model of interuptive advertising will not work well on a platform based on communication. But it's not the ad network inside Facebook that is at fault but how it is being used...

Randall Stross takes his own look at brands on Facebook in the NY Times. He questions the meager examples offered up by P&G and the somewhat empty experience of becoming a "fan" or "friend" of many brands. The Crest Whitestrips fan page dwindled from 14,000 back down to 10,000 following the wake of a promotion. Randall wonders if the effort of endless promotions to keep that number up may be prohibitive. Actually, it looks like Whitestrips has a weekly drawing or free product. While not the most inventive promotion, I can actually imagine that being useful to people.

He questions the promise of "social advertising" and the latest shiny object from the Facebook ad sales team, "engagement ads." A microtargeting test revealed a single person who perfectly fit that profile.

Brands are struggling (when experimentation gets "hard" it feels like a struggle) with how to make use of Facebook and other social networks. Some go the advertising route. Some create fan or group pages without much strategy beyond acquisition of fans or friends. Even Victorias Secret which has "acquired" some 790K fans on it's Pink Facebook pages, has not demonstrated the ability to do anything with that list yet.

My favorite anecdote is the contest within Facebook, "America's Favorite Stains," for Tide. The 11 month old campaign sports 18 submissions of people's "favorite places to enjoy stainmaking moments." I have been in those same conversations with different brand managers at other CPGs. Why not create a contest around my brand idea? Because it is not something people care about. This is also one of those cases where the real action was happening on the brand domain contest site. Facebook was merely an "acquisition window" for contestants. At least Victoria's Secret is delivering conetnt right into their Facebook page.

Wrong Conclusion

Mr. Stross concludes that brands can either try to be more intrusive in what will certianly become an escalating race of animosity with consumers - look what is happening with TV advertising. Or brands can spend a fortune creating "genuinely entertaining commercials." Wrong. Brands have a third path. They can shift gears from being the entertainment between the real entertainment to being of-use to people. To truly earn their attention and engagement, brands must provide customers something of value via their marketing efforts. An application that helps them save money or be more productive. Content that helps them do something more than just buy more product. An experience with the product. Or an invitation for customers to contribute what is important to them - content, product ideas, feedback.

There is so much more that brands can do to deliver value beyond the next generation of hyped-up advertising.

Recession Marketing #2: We hunger for marketing and measurement innovation

We are all looking for more efficient marketing solutions. In previous recessions we often dialed back on marketing budgets solely because they were the easiest budgets to cut rather than any knowledge of how that might impact the business. One truth of a recession seems to be that it sparks innovation. I actually think that is true.

Look in Sunday's Washington Post business section covering the book, Buyology from Martin Lindstrom  and you see a scientific detection of one of the extra values that Coke drinkers supposedly get. Using brain mapping technlogy, these marketers see different activity in the brains of subjects when shown materials from Coke versus Pepsi. The additonal brain activity in Coke drinkers they attribute to the 'warm and fuzzy' feeling subjects have internalized over the brand from years of marketing messages like my generation's "I want to buy the world a Coke..." This scientific approach is indicative of a hunger for more meaningful and absolute measures of marketing effectiveness. That extra feeling one may get from a Coke is one way to deliver extra value. In essence, this is what brand value has always been - an inferred value from the brand beyond its simple product performance.

Monitoring our brains is one new direction to go. It will take time and lots of experiementation to refine that into a viable everyday way to gauge impact. We need many new innovations to find a practical few.

For years, we have been planning marketing and communications programs based upon some standard research that tells us how many times we need to see a message before it becomes memorable in some way. Reach and frequency or Gross Ratings Points are based upon this and much of our TV spend is still governed by this model.

Meanwhile, in the online world, measurement seems so much more absolute in the land of Google Analytics and click-to-action. Too often, the promise of the measureable Web devolves into a sea of KPIs that don't seem to really tell a story.

For us, the next innovation in marketing and measurement is in word of mouth marketing (WOMM). This is the year that WOMM will demonstrate how efficient it truly is. Really interesting models of measurement were unvelied and discussed at this year's WOMMA Summit and Research Symposium. You can find chairman, Walter Carl's presentation which summarized four top approaches at Slideshare.

Next Innovation

What if you could tell not only reach and action of a WOMM program - the best of mass media and online metrics - but you could also report preference and intent to purchase? Word of mouth carries a lot of trust - much more than advertising or traditional earned media. That is even truer today when many NA consumers have lost even more faith in corporations and institutions. this new WOMM measurement model will help marketers understand and gauge the value of their programs on terms that are potentially more valuable than how traditional medi is measured.

That's how we are innovating in a recession. What are you up to? 

Wordle's are Addictive

Apparently Change.gov published a Wordle or two last week. If you haven't tried it, you will find it addictive. From inputting text, urls or feeds, you can get a very cool type cloud display that reveals patterns via word size. Sometimes very revealing. here is the Wordle from my blog:

Recession Marketing #1: How social media helps understand consumer attitude and behavior

We've been having many discusisons inside Ogilvy about how to market successfully in a recession. One of the first things that I noticed was how helpful it is to tap into our listening post methodology to "hear" what is going on with other consumers. A brief conversation with Lisa Stone from BlogHer revealed a couple of her own insights from interacting with that community:

1. While everyone is being pinched, squeezed or downright flattened by the economy, many women are not just limiting spending but when they do have to spend, they need to get the most for their money. This "value" may not be a simple price issue. It includes the value that comes with a meaningful brand. Or it could be additonal promotional value like coupons or partner product.

2. Many of the BlogHer women seem focused on playing a part in "fixing the world". They are also ready to stand up and take on a personal leadership position in their household. Both of these attitudes are strengthened by the Obama win. They reflect an optimism and sense of personal responsibility that usually is absent in a recession.

3. Not surprisingly, families are staying in more and cooking more. As we try to save money, that is only natural. True benefits are coming to those who cook at home over many nights not just one night here or there. That way the cook can make use of leftovers in a highly efficient way.

4. People are turned off by overindulgence. There is a certain sense that individuals are culpable in the current economic crisis not an abstract economic force. Our own personal attitudes might make us all a little responsible, too. Certainly many institutions are taking a big credibility hit (i.e. how much do you trust your bank or your investor right now), but they may be softened slightly by the sense that our own appetite for more and better got the best of us. I have to wonder what this means for the upper third of the luxury market. Those products that were supported by upward striving middle-classers may be in for a significant hit. The blog Financial Armageddon not only has the coolest name, they also have some supporting points:

“The overwhelming reaction is to pare down, to simplify”-- an intensification of BrainReserve's “cashing out” cultural trend, says Popcorn. “Price increases have a straight-line impact on spending, and we're treading in lethal waters as the costs of basics jump 10, 15 or 20 percent. There's very little that's safe in commerce today, beyond value channels and value brands in staple categories.”...

...Other findings include: 42 percent gave up some of their favorite brands between last December and this May; 50 percent buy more private-label products, and 24 percent now purchase private-label brands virtually every time they shop (compared to 19 percent in 2007 and 17 percent in 2006)

This type of quick feedback from the Blogher community is priceless. Certianly, big professional surveys and research projects from GFK Roper, Faith Popcorn and others have their place. But social media - specifically communities and social networks like Blogher, Gather, Eons and many more - are great live panels to dip into and get information from immediately. You can do it by posing questions to the community. You can also do it by just listening to blog posts and message board threads.

Our new, "social" world moves too quick for quarterly surveys. Having a listening post or a regular routine of seeing what people are saying in their online universes can help you find insight for a quick and impactful budiness decison today.

Take a look at a few clever and intriguing views of Blogher from Wordle. The first is the pattern formed by their core RSS feed. Without scrutinizing the technology, it seems clear that Blogher continues to bubble with discussions and commentaries around the new President. Compare that with the url Wordle feed from their partner iVillage and you can quickly see that lifetsyle topics dominate today. I can't testify to the "solidness" of Wordle as a topic tool. I am feeding it invisible feeds. Still, I think these two views are probably indicative of those two communities/sources and explains why there is only about 30% overlap in their users (which makes the combo a smart ad buy!)

This next one is the Wordle formed from the blog post segments on the Blogher food and drink page:

This last one is from the core page of iVillage. Interesting comparison with Blogher.

Future PR Skills: Integrate new technologies into our own lives

This is Part of a series: The 13 Skills of the Public Relations Professional of the Future. It's also the subject of a panel we ran at PR Week's Next Conference a couple of weeks ago.

You Gotta Walk the Walk

It's one thing to know or talk about social media. You can gather the right graphics from Slideshare that articulate the world of social media in a clever way. But if you are not trying the platforms, the technology and the behaviors, you will not completely understand nor likely be able to translate the business communications value of different trends in social media.

We recently published the Business Guide to Twitter. This seminar looks at 8 key business uses of Twitter from Customer Service to Crisis Management. The only way we could do this with confidence and insight is by using Twitter ourselves over the past few years.   

You cannot fully understand the possibilities of del.icio.us, FriendFeed, Yammer or, even, facebook until you have started to use these platforms. And the best place to start is in your own life.

There are three great steps to embracing technology:

1. Create a Social Foundation: take care of three essentials

2. Publish Yourself: Try your hand at one type of "blogging"

3. Embrace a Beta-life: Build a discipline of  trying and finding new things

Create a Social Foundation
There are three platforms that you can embrace now that will only grow in value and will give you experience at the same time. Each will give you a daily experience that will help all of your work in communications.

First, breakdown and set up a tabbed-version of an RSS Reader. Not Bloglines or even Google Reader. Set up NetVibes or iGoogle. Each will allow you to easily collect RSS feeds from the 7 types of sources you should try:

• Traditional media like CNN and TechCrunch (yep, they're "traditional" now)
• Blogs

• Google Search results

• Google Blog Search results (forget Technorati - too much of a mess)

• YouTube Search results

• Tweetscan Search results

• Flckr Search results

Put yourself, your company and any key clients if you are an agency into separate search feeds. This will give you a simple monitoring solution (not comprehensive but a good start).

Second, breakdown and establish a del.icio.us account. You can start to replace whatever bookmarking you used to inside your browser with this web-based solution. To get the most out of this, get your colleagues to do the same. Connect each to your network via their screen name and now you can save and share bookmarks with them. You won't fully appreciate del.cio.us until you have used it for a few months. Just stick with it.

Third, make sure your Facebook and Linked-in profiles are up to date and make use of a handful of different features (e.g. collect a handful of different Facebook apps that are relevant to your interests and business. )

Publish Yourself
Not everyone needs to be a blogger. I remain a big fan of blogging and mine sits at the center of my social graph. You can either try blogging via Wordpress or Typepad or choose a simple platform. Tumblr is somewhere between blogging and microblogging.  You may want to jump right over to Twitter, the most popular microblogging platform. It takes less of a commitment and, of course, it is all the rage. You could also publish via your Facebook status and acheive something similar. Or you could choose a multimedia platform like YouTube or Flickr. The point is to try your hand at publishing your pov on a routine basis.

Embrace a Beta-life
Who knows what will come next? Who knows what will be the next breakthrough platform or behavior? The bottom-line is that no one knows. The best you can do is commit to a discipline of reading and viewing and trying things. I try to do the following:

• Scan my RSS collections a few times a day: total time 40 minutes
• Add a handful of feeds every week (get rid of a few too): total time 20 minutes usually concurrent with daily reading
• Try a new software or service once a week: total time 40 minutes
• Actively attend a 3-4 conferences a year. Nothing beats being with other geeks or people who share some affinity with you. The best way to get the most from these expensive events is to  really commit to being there and being "present" - make a point of meeting people, sharing conversation, connecting outside of session.

No Substitute
You cannot be great with social media through simple observation. Applying it to your life and committing the time to actually "do" it will help your business. It will help you understand first-hand and give you ideas. It will suck up time. But two things happen: it doesn't suck up as much as you fear and you end up with greater rewards than you imagined.