Digital Influence Mapping Project

Weak Ties are Better for Awareness Than Persuasion

One of the things we have learned in designing programs to inspire word of mouth is there is a difference between how weak ties or strong ties move us. The classic concept of weak ties is captured in Mark Granovetter's paper, The Strength of Weak Ties. People I have spent more time with, have a level of emotional intensity and intimacy with and some reciprocal activity will qualify as strong ties. Think about your 5000 Twitter followers or 500+ Facebook friends and you quickly recognize that most of those qualify as weak ties. 

Weak ties are not as helpful in driving behavior change. They are pretty good at introducing us to new ideas. In fact they are probably better at turning us on to new things that we might not discover by sticking with our regular crowd of close ties. 

Mombo.com delivers movie rankings based upon Tweets. They sift through overall Twitter traffic for mentions of Tron, rank sentiment and score movies based upon the volume and sentiment. Signing in then allows me to see movie mentions from followers and a view called "Recommendations for You." I don't care what a Twitter follower of mine says, I am not going to see HP7. I doubt I will ever select a movie to see this way.

Strong at weak ties

Twitter is about weak ties - which is great. I can actually discover a lot from the tweets and links of folks I follow. But Hollywood has multi-million dollar marketing budgets, and I hardly need to follow Twitter to discover a new movie. New foreign film or a gem from the Criterion Collection perhaps. 

The movie reviews won't help me decide which film to go to. I need strong ties or review sources that I have learned I have some affinity for (Rotten Tomatoes and Roger Ebert are good sources - Ebert I often agree with; RT favors movie enthusiasts and is always worth a quick qualitative scan). No matter how good Mombo makes its service, it will never rise above premiere-night relevance (getting a whiff of whether Tron is a stinker or not). I suppose if it reported out on a Twitter-list I maintain of strong tie movie-philes, it could start to bridge over to stronger relevance. 

Think about how strong and weak ties work and how different platforms may support either as you develop social media marketing programs. The science of influence and persuasion is key to using social media effectively. 

The Facebook Wall Gets More Relevant (for Brands)

Currently brands have a choice of defaulting their Facebook wall to display posts from the brand, from users or a mix. These all follow the "most recent first" business logic. The net result is that user posts are often a chaotic mix of mostly irrelevant content with a few gems mixed in. The chaos is so severe that many brands spend loads of effort on moderation or, conversely, don't seem to really care what folks post as they know if will be pushed down quickly by time. 

Facebook is testing a new feature that would allow admins to feature more relevant posts higher on the page (for an extended period of time?). This is currently being tested and may be rolled out soon. Here's how Inside Facebook put it:

"Like the news feed’s default Top News filter, Top Posts gives posts with Likes and comments more prominence, allowing a Page’s own community to influence what user content visitors to a Page see first. Posts that aren’t necessarily favorable for the Page but that receive Likes and comments could also be surfaced. Instead of seeing the old “[Page] + Others”, “Just [Page]“, and “Just Others” filters, Pages with access to the tested feature show “Top Posts”, “Most Recent”, and “[Page]“."

The lingering question I have is whether this logic might keep certain posts high on page 1 for days or weeks or if there is a complimentary business logic that would let even popular older posts to sink. It seems that "Top Posts" is one filter and "Most Recent" is another. The gang at Liveworld speculated on a few issues in this post. 

In general, this is likely a good thing for brands. It may actually lead to the comments of fans becoming even more influential as they linger on page 1 longer. It may strengthen the sense of community and cause people to participate more as their posts are rewarded by the community with likes and comments beyond what even happens today.

Of course, there is another effect. The ninja warriors NGO's like Greenpeace can more easily hijack and dominate a brand page by driving users to "vote-up" content. Conversely, the brand administrator can change settings to display only brand content, as well. 

What determines influence? Why should marketers care?

There is a long thread of opinion being thrown out in Quora to answer a user question - "What Determines influence?" The neat thing about Quora right now is that a lot of digitally influential folks (by my intuitive measure) are answering questions. I am pretty sure this is experimental behavior and it is anyone's guess whether more than the professional pundits (paid to write, essentially) will stick with it. But I digress. 

There are lots of thoughts in there from smart people. Many are interesting. Most don't really help today's marketer beyond giving him/her something to wonder.

Why we should care about influence

Everyone is trying to make use of commonly understood phenomena:

• Consumers in many markets around the world trust in friends, family and people's opinions online for purchase decision and opinion on issues(not equally). 
• With the explosive growth of Facebook more and more people get information via their news feed - i.e. from the weak and strong ties of the people they have friended
• 51% of searchers are looking for other people's recommendations. (from Global Web Index 2009) That means Google connects us to both brand-sourced content and third party opinion and that people actively seek out the later
• Network and influencer "influence" seems to be challenging the accepted effects of reach and frequency-based advertising

With all this going on, its no wonder marketers want to tap into personal influence. 

A model for influence & relevance

Many of the answers in Quora catch many great points:

• Influence is contextual - the nature of the publisher, the topic and the relationship of the reader are not static states. I listen to some people on car advice, others on music. They are rarely the same people or sources. 
• The many "scores" out there including Klout are insufficient yet still some do serve a purpose. The discussion gets academic pretty fast and I am not talking Harvard-academic
• In the online space, we are all just learning how to actually apply our understanding of influence to actual marketing and communications programs.

We have a model for gauging the influence of individuals. It varies depending on the person's main platforms (e.g. I blog, tweet, publish via other blogs, and now have published in Quora, etc....). But here's the model for a blog-centric individual:

We have gone through the painstaking process of defining simple but useful formulas for each of these KPIs that we feel really define how influential a source can be. But how relevant? To assess how important that influence might be for a vehicle recommendation vs. a hotel, we also map relevance. the key criteria  for that are as follows:

Yet practically-speaking, this precision needs to be simplified for us to use on a daily basis as marketers. The scores for these simple criteria allow us to map individual sources on a simple XY axis. Now we have something to work with. But notice a few things:

 


We don't specifically call out qualitative assessments about a person's affiliation or credibility. That doesn't mean we don't value someone's affiliation with a top university, for example. That should show up in the data. Still there are always anomalies. Celebrity is one. The question in Quora related to an article in Ad Age on paid celebrity tweets. Many people in the Quora stream have commented on how influential they feel a tweet from Justin Bieber's stream might be.  A celebrity tweet can raise awareness about a product or service. I have no doubt that core fans may even be driven to behavior simply because Justin's stream suggested a product. But in general, it is not realistic to think that any one source can be predicted as the "persuader" or cause of a purchase.

The complexity of influence and compound effects

Marketing has long been struggling with attribution. Which communication actually drove the person into the store? Traditional online marketers try and track the 'last click' but even that is deceiving. The influence of individuals and networks is no less complex. 

Weak ties vs. strong ties - this is not a new concept. There is a difference between the impact people close to me may have on my opinions or decisions and those that span out far into my social graph.

Network effects can challenge the impact of influencers. From how clusters work to broad networks, researchers like Duncan Watts have demonstrated that a broad network can have greater influence on a behavior than any single, highly influential individual.

People form clusters that can have great influence on behavior. Online and offline we tend to flock with folks that we share some affinity with. Sometimes this is referred to as homophily. The importance of homophily is likely overblown in my humble opinion. (here is a neat opinion in support of its importance) Still marketers need to be mindful that it takes special effort to communicate and engage with groups across clusters to avoid being trapped in an influence-chamber that does not extend beyond that affinity cluster.    

Owned, earned and paid media have a complex effect. We are all experiencing a tremendous number of messages and interactions each day related to products and services. many of those are advertisements, may are  third party opinions.  They also have a compound effect. For instance, some studies point out the increased effectiveness of paid media in proximity to earned media.  

A practical approach to influence for marketers
Tons of sources influence a purchase decision. Social media, advertising, brand reputation, offline relationships and much more. If for a moment, we say what can we as marketers do via social media to affect influence towards our ends, we need to understand:

• What is likely to make a source more influential on a subject with a particular audience
• Understand how networks 'work' and have a reasonable understanding of how people make decisions
• Then build a program that both engages influencers and networks such that each generate authentic and useful word of mouth

It will never be as simple as identifying the top 10 "influencers" for a given topic and then convincing them to chatter positively about a brand.   

What does your brand look like in social media?

The Internet is a visual place. 

I love photography and graphic design. I grew up admiring some of the world's great photojournalists like Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Without waxing too poetic on this tradition, I believe we all expect to find some truth in pictures that is often obscured in long narrative. While journalism is a discipline embroiled in change if not decline, the demand for photography of events, people and places remains strong.

When we search for information via Google, we look for videos and images as well as Web pages filled with text. Search behavior for most of us is turning into  'net fishing' where we fling a few nets in many directions and drag them in to see what we have retrieved. We sort through it all in some "blink" fashion discarding the irrelevant and much of what doesn't align with our world view and end up with the information we feel we need. 

More corporate brands care about their image

Large multinationals who sit behind some of the best known product brands (insert FMCG - fast moving consumer goods -  of your choice) used to be content to build awareness and loyalty against those product brands. They were satisfied that Wall Street knew full well that P&G, Kraft or Unilever was behind that rich portfolio. Now all sorts of corporate brands feel the need to establish consumer affinity with their corporate brand not just the product brands filling the shelves at point of sale. 

Part of that is rise of "purpose-driven marketing" which is a thesis about the strength of a company that has a higher mission when combining its community mission with its business mission. Brands see a future where the constant product variation that fueled sales in the FMCG world - new flavors, new packaging, new brand positioning - will not drive sales nor loyalty from customers going into the future. 

Part of corporate brand self-consciousness is fueled by the effects of social media and the Internet. Increased transparency is more than a buzzword. We can find out anything. What is the truth behind a brand's environmental claims? I and millions of digital forensic anthropologists can find out without their cooperation. If its not buried in a myriad of unforeseen places online than it may just be published by a employee with a grudge (or a conscience) just as the US State Department grapples with Wikileaks.
Whether by good business or good conscience or more realistically, both, corporate brands care about their image online. 

Brand visual search doesn't deliver

Then why do visual searches for many of the world's biggest brands return a chaotic universe of imagery that does nothing to give evidence to their purpose-driven commitments?

Go ahead, search Pepsico, P&G, Kraft or Unilever in Google images. There is an odd consistency:

• Lots and lots of brand logos
• Product packaging montages out the wazoo 
• CEO headshots - smiling in that forced portrait kind of way
• Office buildings - a testament to unexceptional high-rise architecture
• The occasional embarrassing protest image 

If it is a brand with some deep heritage like GE, you will also find some great historical shots from packaging to signs to corporate photography. But almost nowhere will you find photography or graphics that support the social commitment from the company. Go to Flickr and the results are equally chaotic and unflattering. 

Where is Pepsi Refresh? or P&G's Changes That Matter? I get plenty of visual analysis of the Pepsi logo "refresh" but nothing on their commitment to the environment and community. 

A commitment to visual content

If brands really want people to know them for what they do and not for how many redesigns their logo has gone through. They must take care to document that work and that commitment via photography that shows us its true. Visual evidence is key. Even, perhaps more so than video. Search images are part of that grazing and collecting we do as searchers. There are only so many videos we can take the time to sample. 

Part of the problem is that many brands only have a partial understanding of search engine optimization. We can't completely control what shows up on organic search results but careful content creation, a social strategy and understanding search intent can allow us to get our content out there.

Part of the problem is that brands are only now getting serious about becoming content creators and media companies. That means a serious commitment to creating and distributing  content that delivers business value back to the enterprise. 

Time for brands who want customers to know their true nature to care about how they are seen online and to care about the visual evidence of that true nature. 

Are Paid Tweets Effective?

Celebrity tweets have been for sale for a while. Services like ad.ly and others sell one-time tweets from celebs like Kim Kardashian and Snoop Dog for $1K-10K. BusinessWeek even covered the practice in this weeks issue. (here's a link to a related article in the online BusinessWeek)There are few new services cropping up. PayWithATweet.com is s recent example. Clearly a nascent service cooked up by a couple of agency guys trying to help bands or small business get the word out, this premise is similar. You can receive compensation in the form of product or payment for tweeting out a promotional message. 
Is this an effective paid strategy? Are there any hidden ethical challenges with this approach to marketing?

EFFICACY 

The value of social media is the real “earned media" it generates and propels. When any one of us retweets something, comments, "likes" and so forth, we are in some small way endorsing or recommending that content. Conceptually, that content must provide some value and relevance to you for you to bother passing it along. I follow people who share their POV about the things that matter to them.

Paid placements may sound appealing in terms of scale or reach but the quality and efficacy of such a strategy is really questionable. I realize why the promise is attractive - messages get passed via people you know or feel you have an affinity for, Twitter has a really high click-through rate and it smells like social media. Social media begs for a better understanding of influence and the different roles that strong ties and weak ties play in decision-making. Most of the research tells us that strong ties - people I know and trust - have stronger influence on behavior. Weak ties are better at getting us new ideas. Celebrities? Matthew Creamer at AdAge puts it this way: 

"It's hard to imagine that Justin Bieber, with his 6.4 million followers, is driving much behavior other than getting people to talk about Justin Bieber, frenetically retweet him, and possibly buy a record. Is that influence?"

Whether paid tweets come from celebrities or from regular folks, I would argue that this type of use of social media will weaken its overall value to us as consumers and as marketers. People will become confused and perhaps resentful at the unqualified recommendations that start filling their social media dashboards. They may not be so blase about learning that their favorite celebrity has rented out their personal stream to some marketer who works hard to get the 140 character cadence of the celeb just right. 


ETHICS

I was pretty surprised that that BusinessWeek article  documented the practice of paid tweets pretty matter-of-factly even revealing that the promotional messages are written and sent by copywriters not the celebs, themselves. That may be obvious to you and I but why else would those copywriters try so hard to speak like the celebs if not to fool people. In the case of ad.ly, they do label the tweets with (ad) and in doing so 'disclose'. (see WOMMA's Disclosure Guidelines) There is no clear sense in the examples they cited as to whether the celebrities have tried the products, though.

‘PayWithATweet’ does not automatically disclose. That means that a user will send out a tweet promoting a product without revealing they were compensated. Their model seems to be based upon sending a tweet then receiving product/compensation which implies that the user has not used the product before promoting or endorsing it. That may be against many countries consumer protection guidelines. Using such a service could put brands at risk. 

As governing members of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, we are keenly aware of the dangers of the practice of any type of pay per post model where full disclosure to the end consumer is not enforced. In fact, in the US, our consumer protection laws from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), aim to enforce full disclosure of any ‘material connection’ like receiving product, services or cash.    

BOTTOM LINE

Are paid tweets a good tactic for some brands? Based upon short term measures like retweets and click-throughs, they may serve a purpose. In the long term, I doubt they will do much but weaken the overall value of social media which relies on trust first not reach.  As it stands today, it certainly isn't word of mouth.    

(Here's a related article from BNET on one man's view of the value of paid tweets)

Social Business: Create a Content Activation Culture

CES 2011 is all tablets, wireless connectivity, Internet-enabled 3D TVs and Android-fueled smart phones. Look at the innocuous next generation Chumby2 - essentially a bite-sized internet-enabled tablet for the end table. Each represents the diversification of internet and content access.We are accessing content in more ways via more devices.  Add that to the established trend for people to spend time and get information via social networks. We are not spending significantly more time on brand web sites. And while TV-usage may be trending up in the US, I guarantee you much of that is multiplatform time (laptop open). Oh and don't forget that professional media companies from B2B trades to B2C multiplatforms are hungry for content. The time for brands to step into the role of their own media company is here. 

Content Activation = Create, Distribute, Promote and Measure

Today, the corporate marcom lead has plenty of reasons to see the value in developing a complete content strategy to reach corporate communication goals and to reach product brand marketing goals. Brands can build virtual engines to create a mix of multimedia and more spontaneous content that is designed to either be useful or entertaining.  This causes people to spend time and interact (i.e. "engage") or spread that content across their social graph (i.e. advocate). Brands must distribute that relevant content across an ever-changing ecosystem of owned, co-owned (e.g. Facebook), earned (e.g. bloggers, media) and paid platforms (e.g. all types of ads from advertorials to print ads to online display).  But feeding the fire hose with the right content is not enough. Brands must take responsibility for promoting content to get in the hands of people who will engage and advocate. Lastly, true content activation culture requires constant measurement to understand performance and the diagnostics or levers that can be pulled to improve impact and outcomes. 

Chief Content Officer vs. Process

There has been a lot of good discussion about the notion of a new C-suite position - Chief Content Officer. LinkedIn has a group dedicated to the concept (but where few members actually carry that or a related title.) I particularly like Greg Matusky's take on a job description:

"If you can write like a journalist, think like a marketer, and understand the vast and shifting seas of digital communications, Mega Global Corporation needs you to express our world view and communicate our value to financial and consumer markets, partners, and governments.

You must be able to manage a worldwide editorial staff, producing both written and visual communications, and must be able to deliver daily, even hourly, content that is fully optimized to gain visibility over digital pathways.

This individual will report directly to the CEO, but will have the strength of character to beat back corporate encroachment in favor of honest, accurate content that provides real value to worldwide audiences.

Most important, this individual must understand how to monetize this content throughout the enterprise, converting incoming interest into business opportunities for the organization as a whole. Compensation: Name your price if you can deliver on the seemingly impossible yet urgent responsibilities described here."

I am not convinced that centralization in the C-suite is the only way to go to create a culture of "content activation." Equally important is the right mix of teams and process to make it happen. 

 

Creating Responsive Content: Analytics Team

What are customers searching for and what are they saying in online conversations about the product, brand or important ideas that connect with them? This sympathetic intelligence fuels all of our best content strategy. We literally make content that has the words and ideas people are looking for. Of course that content must be useful or entertaining to customers and it must authentically represent our brand or products. This isn't about tricking people to consume content. It is all about relevance. 

Brands should establish or expand the role of existing groups to take responsibility for this intelligence. The Analytics Team is constantly sensing what customers need and want. That is feeding into creation and distribution strategies. There is a "geek factor" here that is best delivered across the enterprise form a single group. In other words its hard to get right and this type of foundational knowledge and insight should come from one place such that it cascades throughout the organization from a consistent center.  

Establishing Clear Brand Themes: Theme Development Process

In corporate communications we call it a message platform. Marketing teams think more in terms of 'brand story.' Internal communications think more in terms of values and principles. Our customers and employees are seeing both what corp comms delivers and what marketing publishes. They ought to be aligned. the disciplines ought to work together to establish a common and focused story platform. I will call it "theme" as it can sit above and drive individual stories (or campaigns). We don't need a single unified team but a process that brings marketing and communications together. Their goal should be to define three themes that can drive their work over a half year or longer. These themes can be revised from time to time yet ought to be consistent for long stretches as they are likely derivative of true culture and ought not to change like so much campaign "fashion" (i.e. constantly changing campaign messaging). Product brand stories can be written in alignment with these themes. Even short-lived campaign ideas can be derived from them. It's important to establish and communicate across the entire enterprise. 

Train on Technique: Content Optimization Process

There is quite a bit of technical and process know-how needed from meta-information creation to advanced techniques in search optimization to really succeed with content activation. But most groups who create content can get it. I am arguing against a centralized 'content factory' responsible for all content creation and optimization.  I just don't think that is realistic. Too many disciplines within the enterprise have an interest and need in content creation. It is possible to think of the content factory as a federation of distributed groups. Let's simply establish a common process for making all content work as hard as it can. Let's train our teams in this highly valuable optimization process. 

Always Be Assessing Progress: Measurement Team

Every week, brands should be looking at a dashboard of performance. That must have the simplified view of key performance indicators as well as enough diagnostic data to know which levers to pull to improve things. This is best left to a Measurement Team both cause its geeky but also because senior leadership will trust the numbers from an independent group. The only generalization that I can make about what these measure should include is that the ought to report both on whatever KPIs describe the action you want from people and those that reflect increased advocacy.

Teams and Process

Don't get me wrong. I love the idea of the Chief Content Officer. But this lucky guy or gal will still have to establish the teams and process I have described to actually implement a content activation culture in today's business enterprise. The benefits of this approach include:

• More people talking about the brand in relevant ways
• Input into how your brand is talked about
• Increased brand presence in search engines
• Alignment of internal and external communications
• More customers and prospects spending time and interacting with the brand via content
• Treating employees like the advocates they are
• Moving beyond a campaign marketing cadence into an always-on relationship 
• What else?