Microsoft has struggled to convince users of Vista’s superiority to XP. And there continues to be a demand for the old OS. As of 1st July Windows XP is officially no longer being shipped by PC suppliers, but Dell have announced on their small business blog an ingenious way of downgrading to XP Pro after buying Vista. Gamers can also access the “bonus downgrade” for a fee of between $20 and $50. [Story from Internet News] As Will Smith remarks on the blog: shouldn’t Dell offer consumers what they are asking for, the ability to keep using what they perceive as a “superior product” - XP? Both Dell and Microsoft are playing a dangerous game by ignoring this level of consumer dissatisfaction.
H & R Block have published impressive year end figures, driven by growth in the number of people using their software to file tax returns. Could this be linked to their success in using social media to boost their brand awareness?
Some scientists at Microsoft have applied to patent a method of recommending contacts in a social network. For social networking nerds it is worth looking at the claims and the prior art responses. Social networking is now close enough to the mainstream of web activity for this patent claim to represent a serious business opportunity. Some of the prior art appears persuasive.
We have just finished a disastrous six month flirtation with Vonage, the voice over IP (VOIP) telephony provider. VOIP providers offer a great solution for a fast-growing business. You can run your own exchange software - Asterisk - create conference call dial-ins, allow staff in different countries to share your switchboard - all very useful. Sadly Vonage has all the characteristics of old style telephony businesses: poor quality of service, an inflexible billing structure, hidden charges (they even charge you for the privilege of closing your account) and the appearance but not the reality of good customer service. Their customer service folk are (wearily) polite but all work to a script and know too little about their business to be helpful. They mimic, but don’t replicate the experience of dealing with human beings. Welcome to the revolution, intones the announcement as you reach the automated switchboard. The announcement - a taped British voice - sounds flat, perfunctory. You are talking to a machine with a human voice. And that’s what you get.
Unlike (e.g.) the excellent and reliable Zen Internet, Vonage have no “cancel account” functionality on the web interface. (Why not?) You have to call the company. As the billing lady tried to talk me through a script designed to find out why I was leaving I felt sorry for her. Customer service, I kept saying. Price, I kept saying. She started talking about new packages that were on offer. After five minutes of this I had to cut her off. Cheez! Trying to keep a customer from quitting by making it difficult to quit! I thought this sort of thing was on the way out …
Unless they change their ways the real revolution will do damage to Vonage. This ain’t the way to grow a business.
Roger Cohen writing in the New York Times points to the success of Barack Obama’s campaign as an example of the role of social networks in 21st century marketing. It is an example of the power of the many and shows up Hillary’s somewhat narrower base. Quoting from Joshua Green in the Atlantic Cohen writes:
“Obama’s claim of 1,276,000 donors is so large that Clinton doesn’t bother to compete.” [Green] gives some other Obama campaign numbers: 750,000 active volunteers and 8,000 affinity groups. In February, a month in which he raised $55 million ($45 million over the Internet), 94 percent of donations were of $200 or less, a number dwarfing small contributions to Clinton and John McCain.
H&R Block used social media marketing to boost their profile and raise awareness of their digital accounting product, reports Ad Age. The lady responsible was Amy Worley (Photo: Jonathan Fickies). They used YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Second life. As AdAge comments, this kind of marketing in social media is “about stacking up many small ideas to create a big total impact”.
For the casual person, the more emails you receive, the more popular you are: normally be a boost to your ego. You’d expect that popular bloggers will be thrilled by this as a recognition of their popularity but 300+ “PR Spam” emails a day can be a little much.
Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, is one journalist/blogger that has got fed up. In addition to filtering and blocking out emails, he has made the addresses and domains of these ’spammers’ public in the bid to shame them. This sparked a wave of imitators the most recent being a wiki of PR Spammers by Gina Trapani, of Lifehacker.
Tom Foremski has announced he will only accept pitches via Facebook as has Robert Scoble. Both went as far to say they’ll only listen to their list of friends on Facebook. Bad news for hopeful PRs. On the other hand short ‘twitpitch‘ messages on Twitter are being hailed as the new way of getting bloggers attention without infuriating them.
Stowe Boyd, who coined the idea term twitpitch, has certainly found it effective for him during his recent visit to Web 2.0 Expo. Together with Brian Solis, they are pushing for the idea of MicroPR, where PR and marketing pitches get more personal.
The trend suggests PR will have to change tack in getting their message out. As Jeremy Toeman observes, “relationships are more important than ever”. Knowing who to target with your message will be key to the success of future PR campaigns.
The scene is the playground at my wife’s school in Oxford in the 1980s. Two children put their arms around each other’s shoulders, they start chanting: “Anybody want to play kiss-chase?” As each child joins they put their arms around the shoulders of a child at either end of the line they join in with the chant: “Anybody want to play kiss chase?” The chant gets louder, so more of the other children can hear. Finally enough people had gathered for a game of kiss-chase. The line breaks up and the game begins.
This is a nice emblem for social marketing.
You try to find a group of people who like what you like, do what you do. You belong to the group not for itself, necessarily, but perhaps because you want something to happen. You want to bring back the Wispa chocolate bar. You want Dell to carry on shipping PCs with Windows XP. But you could simply be celebrating your love of Van Morrison or Rock Band.
Of course Dell and Cadbury and Van Morrison may want to join in - not as members - but they may think - we should talk to these folk, they want to talk to us …
How to start that conversation? How to sustain it?
Facebook has real challenges for marketers. Brands can’t join as individuals. It is expensive to open a channel and very hard to measure the impact of what you do. Marketeers - including in our own client base are reviewing alternatives like Twitter. So how do the channels compare?
How effective Twitter is depends what you are trying to do. Twitter is best viewed as a channel through which to reach an existing audience - one that has formed spontaneously elsewhere.
Facebook manages the cohesion of people around an idea or interest - the forming of that playground group - Twitter simply allows it. In principle that makes Facebook the superior option, but its high price and the opacity of the metrics it offers make other options attractive.
The attraction of monitoring existing conversations about you and marketing your Twitter feeds to these groups is that you can track your following and the direct responses to your messages. You have control; no one is taxing your ability to talk to the market. So in the long run, for marketers, Twitter wins.
Steve Jobs of Apple doesn’t employ a sales force to persuade corporations to switch to Apple. Nonetheless Apple market share in this area is growing, driven in part by the consumer’s liking for the iPod and iPhone. In an intriguing Business Week survey Peter Burrows highlights that employees, sick of a PC by day, Mac by night existence, are pushing their firms into switching to Apple.
Mark Slaga, chief information officer of Dimension Data , a large computer services firm based in suburban Johannesburg, says he has received 25 e-mails recently from employees who want permission to use Macs at work. So far he has refused, because he doesn’t want to hire people to provide Mac tech support, but “it’ll happen someday,” he concedes. “Steve Jobs doesn’t need a sales force because he already has one: employees like the ones in my company.”
It’s a neat example of word of mouth advocacy in action. It is driven by the consumer, not the salesman and in this case the company (Apple) does not even explicitly support it, preferring to cater for the needs of the consumer and the education market and to concentrate on making the product desirable.
This definition of social media is hard to beat. It boils to three steps:
Listen to the conversations that people are having about your brand, the brands of your competitors and the issues that you both address;
Ask yourself how you can be useful to those conversations, either by making changes to your product or service, or by offering information or interaction;
Engage - and keep listening to check how you are doing!
XP - that stable, reliable operating system we have pretty much gotten used to - is going to be killed off in 73 days time, on 30th June. Windows users will then only have the choice of “upgrading” to Vista, an OS which has proved troublesome for pretty much all its users. You can sign the online petition to ask Microsoft to keep XP alive here. There are 153,000 so far.
[Update 25th April] Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has announced that if customers want XP Microsoft will keep offering it. According to CNet Ballmer added that no customers were asking for the OS to be reprieved “so far”.
Joe Marchese over at MediaPost has a good post on the Watts vs. Keller controversy. He, too, thinks that the truth lies in a middle ground. Influencers are important, but not for viral marketing. Hubs/mavens/folks with high “betweenness centrality” scores are helpful in that case.
The experience of our client the UK confectionery manufacturer Cadbury in two separate 2007 campaigns would seem to support this. In one campaign we helped Cadbury communicate with nut allergy sufferers when they wished to announce a product recall of incorrectly-labelled product. We identified authorities (influencers) in that topic and PR agency Blue Rubicon contacted them individually. The negative coverage (which had been considerable) dropped from 30+ negative items a day to 1 in a week.
In the second campaign Cadbury launched a video made by ad agency Fallon showing a gorilla performing the drum solo from the Phil Collins song “In the air tonight”. For this they targeted high volume media bloggers inside and outside the “chocolate” conversation and made the video available for easy download. The resulting buzz included more than 100,000 separate blog and messageboard posts and millions of online views of the video on YouTube and elsewhere. The campaign had 4 times the response of Sony Bravia’s “bouncing balls”. Targeting “influencers” would have been irrelevant here.
Duncan Watts is a Yahoo researcher who has done detailed work looking at the best strategy to launch a viral campaign - the kind of campaign which is aimed at getting the consumer to pass the idea along. Watts compares campaigns which targeted viral communications via “influentials” in the social network with campaigns which simply seeded the viral in the maximum number of places in the network. Watts found that the latter was a more effective way of launching a campaign. Watts’ work - it’s argued - casts doubt on the hypothesis of Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point that “influentials” are the key to successful marketing. The canonical example is that the craze for hush puppies in the 1990s was sparked by them being worn by people who were trendsetters.
Watts’ ideas are explored in an excellent article by Clive Thompson of Fast Company. Since much of our business comes from identifying who is influential and measuring how influential they are, this is a fascinating topic for us. Instinctively one feels Watts has a point. Viruses spread when a critical number of carriers are reached.
This is a common understanding amongst epidemiologists. Someone first died of AIDS in the late fifties, but the disease took 25 years to become widespread.
I think the problem here is that the marketeers who have been inspired by Malcolm Gladwell have taken several ideas and conflated them.
The first idea is that some people are “hubs” - they are well connected. (True, as far as we can tell).
The second idea is that some people are influencers. (Also true, as far as we can tell).
The third idea is to spread an idea - any idea which is “sticky” - you target the influencers, who are gatekeepers to the mass market. (This is an idea which is false, in our experience).
The third idea does not follow from the first two. The reasons for this are to do with how networks assign authority. Authority is - in our metrics - topic specific, it is the characteristic of being disproportionately linked by other authorities on that topic. Authorities are, by their nature, hard to target. A communicator wishing to influence an authority must tailor their message, sometimes at great pain, to make it relevant to that authority. Once it is relevant to the authority, the authority will further shape it (they are, after all, authorities) and pass it on to their network, but in their own time and manner.
This does not make influencers suitable for targeting with “viral” ideas (ideas which are clever, but to an extent generic). The marketeers notion - that influencers have the characteristic of reaching large numbers of people based simply on who they are - is simplistic. It leads to the idea that influencers are simply going to shill any idea or product - if that product is cool enough. Influencers are the last people likely to adopt anyone else’s agenda wholesale. Care must be taken to frame a topic so as to fit their agenda. Trying to apply a single marketing approach to this group does not work.
There are of course, people in the network who do carry information disproportionately - in the jargon these are the group with high “betweenness” values. These people may more closely approximate to the people Ed Keller (author of “The Influentials”) describes as “fonts of word of mouth”.
These people perhaps more closely approximate to Malcolm Gladwell’s idea of “mavens”. They are sometimes authorities, sometimes not. They tend to have more links. They tend to have a higher proportion of leaks from weaker authorities. In communications terms these folks can be just as hard to target as “influentials”, but for a different reason. Because they tend to communicate more on a topic they are less well tracked by real influencers. Their profligacy with messages makes this so. They are likely to be responsive to viral messages, but only in their key subject areas.
A good strategy for a viral marketer would be to target as many people as possible (mass communication works!) but to make sure these hubs are amongst those targeted. For this kind of communication, unless the intention is to radically change thinking in subject area, actual “authorities” can probably be ignored.
Our competitor Umbria - Boulder, Colorado based text mining company - has been acquired by J.D. Power/McGraw Hill. J.D. Power’s customer satisfaction focus links nicely with the kind of opinion-mining methodology used by Umbria. A good deal for both.
Matt Richtel of the New York Times has a chilling piece about how blogging (amongst other fasten-you-to-your-desk activities) carries a severe health risk. The costs of being a one-person media outlet can be high. I didn’t realise the great Om Malik had had a heart attack. Get well soon Om.
Research from the European Interactive Advertising Association suggest that the power of the web to lure consumers into trying new brands is greater even than we thought. 49% of UK consumers admitted to switching brands after online research. 76% were driven by search, 72% by personal recommendation.
We’ve been measuring a pan-European digital marketing campaign. We noticed that volumes in German were significantly lower than we were expecting and lower than those in Greece, Spain, Turkey etc. We hypothesised at the time that this might be down to German speakers choosing to comment in English rather than in German.
The astounding drop-off in US newspaper advertising revenues (down 9.4% year on year to $44bn during 2007) can be read three ways. One: the slow down from the credit crunch took hold faster and harder than everyone thought; two: the credit crunch is accelerating the switch out of old, unclickable, untrackable media into new clickable, trackable media; three: this move is being spearheaded by individuals - the classifieds market dropped hardest - down 16.5%, retail only dropped a modest 5%.
Retail is slower to switch because it hasn’t yet totally got to grips with the online model, where customer behaviour, promotions, responses and conversions are tracked and managed online. That will happen increasingly during the coming slowdown.
A lot of brands are dipping their toes into social media marketing. They naturally want to know what ROI they can expect. For that reason we are delighted that our client Avis UK has gone public with the results of their 2 year experiment in monitoring and responding to online conversations. They are experiencing double digit growth in a sector (car rental) that is growing at 1% per annum. They attribute much of this to their online actitivity, which shows that social media marketing can have a direct impact on ROI (details here). Kudos to Xavier Vallée, Rob White and their colleagues and thanks to our partners at Web Liquid - Avis’s digital agency.
This blog is mainly the work of Market Sentinel CEO Mark Rogers. We use it to review recent developments in the areas of buzz-monitoring, buzz-marketing, word of mouth, online public relations, blog marketing and related topics. Feel free to comment or email us direct
+44(0)20 7793 1575