Mark Rogers is going to be at SES London this week, giving a talk about how brands can make sure that they get their own messages out online, even (or especially) during major crises. If you plan to be there and would like to meet up, please get in touch through the website or call the office on +44 (0) 20 7793 1575.

When we first speak with a brand manager or a PR person they normally ask us these questions:

“What are people saying about my brand in blogs?”

“Can you help me monitor that?”

We say: we can help you monitor blogs, but first you need to do to help us define the questions you want answered. Monitoring blogs, review sites and messageboards on its own gives you large quantities of information, but few answers that can help your business. It is easier to make a business case for spending on online research and analysis if you can be pretty specific about the question that you need to have answered and about the relationship between that question and the business’s bottom line.  These are the questions that we suggest the client starts with: Question 1: “Why do people choose my product?”

Question 2: “Why do people choose my competitor’s product?”

Question 3: “Why do people recommend my product to their friends?”

Question 4: “Why do people recommend my competitor’s product to their friends?”

Questions 1 and 2 may seem at first blush to resemble questions 3 and 4. But actually they are dissimilar. When someone recommends a product they will often choose a reason that says something about themselves. People will rarely say: “I chose this product because it’s cheapest”, but they may often say: “I chose this product because I care about the environment”. Conversely, why people actually buy a product is often around a combination of product features, reputation and price.

(Reputation and price are in some measure inversely related. Products with good reputations generally achieve that reputation by good service. Good service costs money and although consumers are tempted by cheap offers, they know that “free broadband” generally carries a cost in poor customer support. We recently completed some detailed research in this area which shows that brands with good customer support can keep their prices higher for longer than their competitors. )

All these questions are answerable from online research, and we can put numbers against the characterisitics of a product which are most likely to drive adoption. Those numbers have direct benefit to a key hiearchy of stakeholders within the company:

a) the product managers suddenly know which aspects of the product are key to marketing success (and which need most attention);

b) the marketing managers know what is the key product strength to push in relation to the corresponding weakness of a rival’s product;

c) the word-of-mouth marketers and PRs know which messages are most likely to drive viral adoption amongst users and can devise appropriate campaigns.

On Wednesday I presented at a fascinating training morning run by e-Consultancy’s Craig Hanna along with Blogging4business’s Matthew Yeomans. The agenda was to educate the audience about blogging as a phenomenon and to give them a sense of what it could teach them about their own customers and how they could use blogging and other social media tools in marketing.

The speakers were Andy Budd of Clearleft, Heather Hopkins of Hitwise, Debbie Weil, author of The Corporate Blogging Book.

There were some great case studies presented and interesting stories from the floor. Heather wrote it up here. I am afraid I missed Andy Budd’s presentation, but my favourite moments were:

Heather’s account of the huge impact of social networks on e-Commerce (it is as important as search) and her observation that 2% of Amazon purchase traffic comes from blogs. It doesn’t sound like much, but Yahoo! only provides 3%.

Debbie’s account of how marketeers are trying to use social media, sometimes well and sometimes poorly … she used an hilarious parody GM Chevy Tahoe ad, which was submitted in response to an online promotion. (Can’t find a link, but here is an ABC report) I talked about how brand messages are mediated by search, and how that means that the brand has to compete for thought space with journalists, competitors, regulators and bloggers. Thus …

The upshot is that you have as a brand a central duty to find out the words that are being used about you, particularly in the context of links, and try to make them as relevant to your core brand promise as possible.

BTW: After I read what Heather had written about what I said, I sent her the following mail, explaining the points I had been trying to make about links:

I am addressing a CBI conference this week in Birmingham, UK, where the agenda is to discuss Crisis Management and digital media.

When we established Market Sentinel two years ago we thought that online monitoring and response would be a leading part of crisis management. As time has gone on and we have learnt more about crisis response, we now have a much clearer idea of what works and what does not. Onlinetools have a part to play, but they are more effective in crisis prevention and in dealing with the aftermath of a crisis than they are in managing the crisis itself.

The nature of a crisis

A crisis rarely comes out of the blue. Normally it is something which was previously an “issue” - poor earnings, a problem with a product, a safety worry - which suddenly flares up. In principle the web is a great medium for addressing such issues before they get to the crisis stage, but in practice this rarely happens (more on that below).

When such crises arise the management of a company has an imperative first to act and only then to speak. When they speak they do well to speak to the nearest mass media, radio, TV and print - ideally simultaneously. Such statements should of course be carried on the website or blogsite, but that is not the first outlet for them. Most media outlets will put the full text on their news websites in any case.

When a crisis happens the senior management of a company would naturally be well advised to monitor the response to their words. PR company Weber Shandwick recently reported that a large majority (61%) of business executives were sceptical about responding to bloggers, even if they had their facts wrong. They instead highlighted fixing the underlying problem. The communications professionals should perhaps be exercised by the response to the message, but in practice - again - their time is better spent talking personally to key stakeholders, answering questions and getting the message out.

There is, however, a huge opportunity for using the web to speak directly and in detail to smaller stakeholders where call centres can simply not cope. For example - is your laptop battery one of those which is likely to explode? Here is a link to the webpage.

The nature of the web

The web is an accretive, not a narrative medium. It helps to think of the web as a palimpsest of information, where new information does not quite efface old information, but gradually becomes more prominent, thanks to the impact of new links, new ways of looking at the old information.

Search engines react to changes in corporate reputation only slowly, as the consensus around a topic changes over time. Google indexes only part of the web, and indexes disproportionately the pages that change frequently. Often the key pages in corporate reputation management belong to influential but staid bodies like institutes of safety, or regulators, or tax authorities.

This means that it is only when the immediate firefighting of the crisis is out of the way that the web comes into its own. Perhaps the brand has sustained some damage. How much damage and from whom? Who needs persuading of the error of their information?

This is the time when the tools that could usefully have been deployed earlier, in the pre-crisis, issue management phase of the problem can be deployed. Here it is useful to benchmark corporate reputation in relation to an issue, to identify key stakeholders who need to be communicated with, on or offline, to monitor those stakeholders, to analyse their own networks of influence and to work at understanding how knowledge flows through the group.

So, I am in the lucky position of not having a crisis on my hands, what should I do? First: write down the issues that might become crises; second; note what I am doing to keep an eye on them from a communications perspective; third: ensure that I know who the key authorities are in relation to these issues. Understand them, listen to them, monitor them. When they start talking about these issues, you know that the issue has moved one step closer to becoming a crisis, but you also know where to address news of your response.

A client, reviewing some of the sentiment scores on the net approval work we have been doing for them recently asked: “why are these people so negative? We don’t get these scores from our off-line net promoters work.”

The client was identifying a pattern we see quite regularly. Online commentary is more negative than off-line. Why? There is no systematic answer to this question, but if you were to attempt an answer you would divide it into three sections:

The squeaky wheel. People are likely to post on a blog or message board or a consumer review site when they have a reason to. The post can often be prompted by a problem they wish to solve, for example - difficulty with the product - if a car won’t start or a program won’t install. Because of this, and given the likelihood that the problem may persist, complaints about the product and the brand are likely by-products of a web session.

Monologue is more negative than dialogue. Research we have previously published  refers to work done by Delahaye pointing out that blogs are more negative that messageboards. 23% of blog commentary is negative, compared to 11% of message board commentary. The reason? People tend to be more measured, more polite face to face than they are in monologue. They do not make such bold, inflammatory “look at me” negative comments. The reason is that in dialogue a speaker is unsure of the feelings of the interlocutor. If he or she makes an emphatic statement about a product or service, he or she risks spoiling their social relationship with the other speaker (or poster) who may be a big fan of the product in question. This politeness factor may also explain why the results of face to face conversations are less negative than a sample of online opinion might suggest.

The third reason is that, particularly for bloggers, staking out one’s social territory online involves a certain amount of display activity - particularly for men! A vehemently negative comment about a large brand demonstrates a certain kind of alpha male aggression. It is show-off behaviour. Bloggers want to be linked to, and being showily negative, particularly in a witty way, may garner more links than a considered “one the one hand, on the other hand” approach.

Paradoxically, as we explained in our “Measuring blogger influence” report, this negativity amongst bloggers actually reduces their authority on a topic. For the casual reader, strongly negative views are off-putting. A neutral is more likely to be impressed, and influenced by the argument of someone who has weighed up the evidence for and against a brand, citing their evidence, than by someone who says: “Brand X SUCKS!”So … although brands are worried about extreme negative commentary online, it generally has little influence. That is, unless there is a special case.

The special case is, as in the example of Jeff Jarvis and Dell:

a) the issue complained of is real and the complaint justified, and echoed by others;

b) brand makes no direct statement on the topic, leaving the existing authorities no choice but to link solely to the complainant.In that one case, bloggers can be VERY influential.

Microsoft’s Live Search team have come up with a really cool piece of code (a search macro, in their terminology) which allows you to search a sub-group of sites all of whom are linked from a particular site. (A similar piece of code already allows you to track sites that link to a particular site) This is a very useful tool for a director of marketing or communications who wants to track the progress of an idea. O’Reilly’s Brady Forrest writes it up. Really useful stuff. Kudos to Microsoft.  As Joseph Hunkins pointed out, this is out-Googling Google.

It resonates with a lot of the interesting work we have been doing here at Market Sentinel. One of our observations is that a series of contextual links create what is, in effect, a focus group on a specific issue. Not a normal focus group, but an opted-in focus group, a focus group of experts.

The effects of this are very intriguing. For example we did some work recently looking at developments in social search. We found that we could look at the sites that were being disproportionately linked by the stakeholders in this topic - and realised that they were consistently identifying cutting edge technology developments ahead of the mainstream media. If I was working for a VC, or a technology company on the hunt for acquisitions, this would be information that would be of great interest to me. via John Battelle

How do you measure word of mouth? The increasing importance of social networks to brands and advertisers has raised this problem very sharply in the last few weeks. Media owners, pharmaceutical companies, automotive manufacturers all need to know the same thing: how am I doing?

If a brand can establish how it is doing in “word of mouth” in relation to other brands this information can drive decisions about the allocation its marketing or campaign spend.

We would need to agree what a ranking in the word of mouth market means.

In the Market Sentinel methodology there are three possible ways of ranking in word of mouth:

• Buzz (numbers of citations)
  
• Approval (sentiment compared to benchmarked competition)
  
• Authority
  

“Buzz” is chat, pure and simple. Measuring it gives you an indication as to whether something is worth mentioning. Britney Spears has buzz. It ebbs and flows. The weakness of buzz as a measure is that you can be talked about without your product necessarily being purchased, or your value endorsed. Key to consumer brands is the central flaw that not all brands have talk-about-ability. Some products and brands are worthwhile, and do their job well (like car insurance) but they are just kind of boring. That doesn’t mean that they are bad products, or that they aren’t relied on, but it means that using “buzz” to track them is bound to fail.

Approval is better, as it equates to the likelihood of customers to recommend your products. We measure it using the “Net Promoters’ Index” - that is a simple index of how many people promote and how many detract from a product or brand in relation to industry benchmarks.

Authority is best of all, it equates to trust, which means that your marketing messages are more likely to be believed, and it corresponds approximately to Google ranking, since it relies on authorities citing you and linking to you. We measure this using a “Stakeholder Analysis” - an index of all the stakeholders in a topic as to who they view as authoritative.

Here is how we would address the problem of benchmarking a brand in relation to word of mouth:

• Identify the topic in which the brand seeks greater authority
  
• Benchmark its existing authority (conduct a stakeholder analysis)
  
• Identify the key authorities to whom the brand would need to communicate its broader proposition
  
• Profile those authorities in terms of their ego-net (who they link to and by whom they themselves are cited), and in terms of the statistically improbable words they use (i.e. their idiolect or individual language)
  
• Assess the brand’s own “Clarity” (consistency of message on the topic) and “Resonance” (the extent to which the brand’s language is picked up - or ignored - by stakeholders). I will return to these concepts later and examine them in more detail
  
• Then we work with the brand’s communications people to produce high value content designed to appeal to those authorities. This communication material could often be contained in a blog, but could form the kernel of a buzz marketing campaign, or a strategy for offline communications.
  

The last few days have seen us talking to a number of different companies about whether it is possible to measure the success of marketing campaigns using our tools. It is.

The traditional way of measuring marketing success is:

1. Sales of the product. This is the point of the exercise after all. But sales numbers are a crude tool. How and why did these folk reach you? What were they responding to? The original campaign, or word of mouth generated by it? If they are buying it, are the also recommending it?

2. Consumers seeing the campaign. In offline this would include estimates of people seeing the campaign in papers and on TV, in online you could measure how many people reached any of your pages, downloaded your collateral.

3. Numbers of links to your campaign. This is the primary traditional buzz measurement. A campaign needs links from those who are qualified to endorse it.

4. Numbers of citations (how many people mention your campaign). The secondary traditional buzz measurement. If they are talking about you more after the campaign then you know the campaign is working at least on some level.

All these metrics deliver some value, but they don’t really tell you enough about the campaign itself. If you are a mobile operator the retail returns on handset sales tells you what is hot and what is not, but it does so retrospectively. You can’t predict the success of a product on the first day it is sold by a competitor.

The numbers of customers seeing the campaign is a weak indicator of whether a campaign will be successful. The bubble era was strewn with campaigns which were seen by millions but acted on by very few. (Remember the ISP “Breathe”, whose beautiful, but baffling advertisements were hard to avoid?)

The number of links to a campaign and the number of citation of it form the beginning of an important measure. But both these metrics are incomplete in themselves. Firstly not all links have the same value: some links are more equal than others. If a link is from someone who is authoritative in the area of the product, it is worth far more to the campaign, brings more Google influence and hence more prominence in natural search and therefore more sales.

Natural search is the key target for this kind of buzz measurement. Why? When customers go to Google, their eyes disproportionately linger on natural search. Consumers consider natural search authoritative. The image below is courtesy of Eyetools and demonstrates this in practice.

This is authority is inherent to a brand and it is something that Market Sentinel can measure. What can be measured, as the saying goes, can be managed.

Secondly these measures leave out the quality of the citation - is the reaction positive or negative? A citation is not necessarily an endorsement.

We have recently been looking at a clever viral campaign for Sony Bravia on behalf of the agency Tonic.

The campaign’s origin was a commercial shot in San Francisco on 26th July 2005. Thousand of brightly coloured plastic balls were dropped on a street in Telegraph Hill. This spectacle was so astounding that passers by stopped to photograph it. They posted their pictures on Flickr. This photo has been viewed 245974 times. The agency spotted the opportunity for a viral marketing campaign, and created a site using high quality assets from the photoshoot, as well as making the commercial itself available online.

We were not able to give Tonic all the help we would have liked to, because they only came to us in the last couple of weeks, and benchmarking this in retrospect would be time-consuming. However: this is what you would do to measure the impact of a digital campaign like this.

1. Benchmark the “approval rating” of the product. Compare it with two or three direct competitors. How many people recommend and how many disparage the product? Measure this before the campaign, during the campaign and three months later. If you have changed sentiment about the product relative to the competitors, the campaign has had an impact.

2. Measure the influence of the Sony Bravia brand in relation to the sector as a whole (LCD TVs). That is: how many authoritative commentators in the area of LCD TVs give authority to Sony Bravia. To do this you need to use our proprietary software. Again benchmark this against competitors in the sector. Repeat during the campaign and six months after (these effects take longer to worth, and are themselves longer lasting). This is the key area. If the campaign is successful Sony Bravia will rise up the Google natural search returns for “LCD TV”.

3. Undertake a stakeholder analysis of Sony Bravia itself, before and after the campaign. Look at who were the key influencers before and afterwards. Examine the actual words which are used by those influencers. Examine the context of the conversation - what other websites were cited in that context? These subtle and sensitive measurements help you measur how the climate of opinion around a brand has been transformed.

4. Measure search volume for crucial terms. How many people are looking for the campaign, or for the brand in the context of the campaign.

The preliminary work we did looking at this Sony Bravia campaign identified some interesting methods by which the campaign achieved traction as well as throwing up some interesting lessons about what the brand should try to achieve next time. Tonic will be publishing more detail in the next few weeks and when they do we will return to this subject.

Tomorrow I am on the blogging4business panel in London and talking on the topic of “what blogs are saying about your business”.

So what are blogs saying about your business? In the US, where blogging has become a widespread phenomenon, blogger Eric Mattson has just demonstrated in an anecdotal survey that top US companies are much discussed. [Hat tip to John Cass of Backbone media for the link]

The UK situation is different. Athough the last few months has witnessed a huge growth in the use of community sites like mySpace, the majority of bloggers are either hard-core early adopters, or younger people. That still leaves blogs as a smaller scale phenomenon in the UK than in the US as far as most brands are concerned. Pick a UK-focussed brand like John Menzies and the comment count on Technorati is pretty anaemic. 79 comments in the database, and most cut and pasted from online news sources like Reuters and the Scotsman.

The truth is that for most UK industries the bulk of commentary happens in message boards or in other traditional sites. This kind of commentary is technically harder to get at than blog commentary (Technorati won’t be much help) but it’s also less susceptible to infestation by keyword spammers.

Market Sentinel has a number of automotive industry customers and our automotive database is comparatively light on blogs. The majority of these sources are sites which allow customers to review cars, or simply message boards. For the automotive sector at least, blogs are a rather small part of the story thus far.

This is not to say that the automotive industry shouldn’t itself use blogs to communicate with its consumer base - of course it should. And the most enterprising of the online brands are either doing this already or have plans to do so in the near future. But as far as listening is concerned, brands need to spread their nets a little wider than the blogosphere.

[Update] My colleague at our partner Onalytica Flemming Madsen draws attention to a phenomenon which can be made use of in the blogosphere today, and that is something he calls “statistically improbable links” and which we deliver in a branded form as “Stakeholder Spotlight”. That is to say - what urls are disproportionately linked to by the stakeholders in a particular topic? We have found this to be a fascinating predictor of trends and an early indication of problems. Flemming has identified that the Vodafone stakeholders are highlighting a blogger who has a complaint about data charges. For other Market Sentinel customers we have found that this functionality throws up interesting links to companies that might be considered acquisition targets, with the stakeholder group serving almost as a focus group of what might be considered cool and interesting on the web.

Google has reported that the UK population as a whole now spends more time online than they do watching TV. This is an epochal change for marketers. It means that they must finally get to grips with a medium (the internet) that has remained largely resistant to their wiles.

Think of an online marketing campaign that has impressed you. I bet you that you can’t. Think of the online products that you use and value: iTunes, Amazon.com, Skype, Google. I would bet that you did not find these products as a result of a marketing message. Someone recommended them to you. You may have followed a link on a web page. And if you did I bet that link was contextual. It was not an advertisement.

Old school advertising is good for awareness, but it has not been a major part of the success of internet-era marketing. Internet era marketing is about testimonials, about peer recommendations, about serendipity: stumbling across something interesting whilst looking for something else.

It is no surprise that the way to internet marketing success has been shown by paid search. Paid search has the huge advantage of being contextual. Advertisers choose when to give you their message. They give you their message only when they think you are likely to transact. They are only going to communicate to you if they feel their communication is welcome.

But there are other products waiting in the wings behind paid search. These products, too, will depend on marketers opening a conversation only when they know that a consumer is responsive. It is one reason internet marketers are using our products at Market Sentinel. They want to find out what is being said online in ongoing conversations, conversations that are (or could be) relevant to their product. And then they want to join in with those conversations.

And that joining in process is one of the hardest things to pull off. Years ago, when I was at the BBC, I was one of those responsible (with my current colleague Sheila Sang) for launching the BBC’s message boards. It was an invaluable opportunity to learn about how communities worked. One thing I learnt good and early is that if an outsider comes into a community with an irrelevant marketing message, they will be shunned. It is as if an insurance salesman were to wander into a snug bar and suddenly pitch into a sales spiel in front of eight surprised drinkers. Such a conversation only works if it is relevant. If someone is discussing where to go skiing, and you happen to mention that you know a good place, they will be keen to listen, particularly if you seem to be impartial.

That is why we work with our customers to identify where the appropriate conversations are taking place online, and to identify the authorities. That is the beginning of understanding where a conversation can begin. Is there a strategy for beginning a conversation that always work? No. Conversations of this kind are like pick-up lines, nothing quite works twice. But honesty helps: “Hi I know you like my product because I noticed you talking about it. I am keen to hear your reaction to some new features I am planning to introduce.” This is the strategy that Intuit used to get their QuickBooks blogging strategy underway.

You might call it contextual marketing, and, as a science, it’s in its infancy. We are taking baby steps to figure out how it should work. As ever in this new world of marketing communications, it is going to be all about permission, about honesty and about relevance.

The following story just appeared in The Economist:

Internet trends: Companies are eavesdropping on online discussion forums to find out what their customers really think about them

ONE of the things that makes the internet so appealing is that for any subject, no matter how obscure, there is almost guaranteed to be at least one website, blog or discussion forum where people congregate to talk about it. Online discussion forums cover a huge range of topics: it is not just stereotypical geeky bickering about Macs versus PCs, or Windows versus Linux. Worried mothers compare the fat content of different brands of potato crisps; car enthusiasts discuss the merits of forthcoming models; fans of obscure bands swap trivia.

The internet’s oldest discussion system, called Usenet, dates back to 1979 and can now be easily reached via Google, which also maintains archived discussions going back 25 years. More recently, web-based discussion boards, and the comments that can be appended to blogs, have become the most popular forums for online debate. Most of these discussions are of little interest except to their participants. But the direct, unfiltered, brutally honest nature of much online discussion is gold dust to big companies that want to spot trends, or find out what customers really think of them. As a result, many firms now monitor online chatter as an adjunct to more traditional forms of market research.

For example, ConAgra, an American food giant known for its Butterball turkeys and Healthy Choice ready meals, tracks discussion groups to keep abreast of new diet trends, such as Atkins and organic food. “These discussion groups are very useful to determine whether a trend is really a trend, or just a fad,” says Nick Mysore, ConAgra’s director of strategy. “They also help you get a read on the marketplace quickly and cost effectively, and provide you with the ‘baseline hypothesis’ that you can test further, using conventional market-research techniques.”

This sort of thing has been going on, in an informal way at least, for several years. Sometimes public-relations teams are asked to keep an eye on online discussions, and switched-on company executives visit forums to stay in touch with the public mood. But companies are now looking to do it in a more systematic way. Initially, this involved throwing lots of computing power at the problem. Accenture and IBM have each built computer systems that trawl the web in search of trends and insights. But the extensive use of jargon, abbreviations and obscure slang can make it hard for computers to figure out what people are saying.

So smaller specialist firms, such as Wavemetrix in Britain and Nielsen BuzzMetrics in America, are now using a combination of computers and human researchers. They track general discussions and try to spot trends early, by identifying the members of online communities who are most likely to influence other participants. BuzzMetrics does this kind of work on behalf of 100 of the world’s biggest firms, including General Motors, Ford and Microsoft.

Such research has a number of weaknesses, not least the fact that it excludes non-internet users, so it is not about to replace telephone surveys and focus groups any time soon. But it also has many advantages, notably its high speed and low cost. Opinions appear on the web within minutes of an event. Convening a focus group or performing traditional market research to gauge the impact of a campaign, in contrast, might take weeks or even months.

The results can often be surprising. Wavemetrix, for example, carried out a study for a European mobile operator that was aware that its network was less reliable than those of its rivals. Online research, however, showed that the general public believed the opposite to be true. Other surprising findings arise because participants in discussion groups can say anything they like, whereas people answering a survey answer only the questions that researchers think to ask.

What of privacy? Max Kalehoff of BuzzMetrics insists that “openness and transparency are the most important things in our industry.” Even so, many companies are reluctant to discuss their activities in this area. Although firms track only public forums, they do not obtain the participants’ formal consent, and many users may be disconcerted to learn that their conversations are being listened to. That said, people who post their thoughts online generally want them to be read. While the ethics of monitoring public discussion boards are a matter of debate, there is general agreement that the active abuse of forums-in particular, posting poorly disguised product plugs-is unacceptable.

Occasionally, the monitoring of discussion groups itself becomes a topic of conversation. In one car forum, a discussion of BuzzMetrics’ research for General Motors produced no objections-just disbelief that the carmaker could listen to their conversations and still produce such unappealing products. Consumers often moan that companies do not listen to them. Might the monitoring of discussion groups provide an answer to that problem? Discuss.

To Paris yesterday to hear the great David Weinberger, by the special invitation of Guillaume du Gardier, now with Edelman.

David Weinberger was one of the editors of the Cluetrain Manifesto and thus has a legitimate claim to be at the heart of the philosophical shift that underlies the rise of consumer-generated media, and the transition of public relations into “public relationships”.

Weinberger is now at Harvard Law School’s Berkman centre for the Internet and society. As he spoke I made some notes on my PDA. This isn’t everything he said - it is everything that he said that I thought was interesting. So not an impartial account at all - and please mail with corrections!

Weinberger:

“If you want to understand at how the internet has impacted information look at Wikipedia. It has 994,000 articles in English alone. I mean, Encyclopedia Britannica has 32 volumes and contains 65,000 articles. That’s not just because the editors decided there are only 65,000 things in the world that are interesting enough to write articles about. It is because of the sheer costs of paper and printing, and shipping books about the place.

“And the Wikipedia is not edited at all, in the conventional sense. No single person decides what’s in or out. Famously, there are articles about the use of the umlaut in heavy metal - something that would never find its way into a conventional encyclopedia. The Wikipedia approach to knowledge management is that the originators don’t manage it at all. They allow people, members of the public to decide what’s relevant, and what’s not.

“What the Wikipedia is to knowledge management, the blog is to personal expression. Everything is allowed. Tonight, though I would like to talk about what a blog is not. A blog is not about advertising …”

Weinberger used the Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit blog. He pointed out that this was not a blog in any meaningful sense of the word. It was not a true expression of someone’s experience. It seemed to revolve around two people arguing which of them liked Juicy Fruit more.

“I mean - even the guy from the advertising agency doesn’t like Juicy Fruit that much … Anyone from Juicy Fruit, here? No. Good. I mean, come on.

“A blog is not about cats. I hear that a lot from people in marketing. People blog about their cats, right? In fact one of my neighbours in Boston really answered that the other day. If I want to blog about my cat, who are you to say that I can’t do that. I should be able to blog about anything that interests me. And in fact, there are many blogs about cats. But that is not the point. A blog is about whatever I want it to be about. It is my agenda, and not yours.

“A blog is not about journalism … although some journalists blog and some bloggers are increasingly being hired as stringers by the news media. The worlds of blogging and journalism overlap, but they are distinct. Bloggers distrust journalists because they suspect them of being corporate whores serving some kind of hidden agenda from the news organisation’s proprietor. Journalists distrust bloggers because they suspect bloggers don’t check their facts (right! and newspapers do, I suppose?) and that they are single issue merchants and cranks.

“Blogging is not about 1 to 1 marketing. 1 to 1 marketing in blogs often doesn’t work, because one of the 1’s isn’t really a 1. It is a big corporation. How can I have a conversation with Wrigley’s, or with Ford? The fact is that blogging is about a conversation. Blogging is a new social space. My weblog is me. It is my body in the new public space.

“One of the key things about blogging which distinguishes it from the stuff that’s gone before - the marketing messages on the one hand, and the conventional journalism on the other - is the freedom to write badly, the freedom to make mistakes. Making mistakes is a sign of authenticity. It is a sign of being human. Of course we are all going to make mistakes. It establishes intimacy. And on the internet pretty good may be good enough. “

Weinberger went on to talk about links:

“Links are little acts of generosity. They are saying: don’t stay on this site, visit this other site. The web is based on links. The web is links. But look at the home page of the New York Times (registration required). It only links to itself - oh, and to advertisers. Journalists talk about bloggers being narcissistic. That’s narcissism. The New York Times home page.

“In the old model, businesses thought of themselves like a fort. They controlled their brand, they released only the information they wanted. But now the fort has holes in the walls. People are having conversations about those companies that the companies can’t control. The fortress business model has been overtaken. Now our customers know more about our business than we do. And the customers trust other customers to tell them about our business more than they do the marketers. You cannot control your customers by the selective release of information. Customers are not there to be managed. We trust Google, craigslist, Robert Scoble and Jonathan Schwarz because they are there for us. They are for us.”

Weinberger talked about Howard Dean’s election campaign, which he was involved with as an election strategist.

“The thing that characterised the Dean campaign was its openness, the sense of involvement that it generated. And typical of that was the way that they got this 31 year old kid Matthew Gross blogging. Traditionally the campaign messages are tightly controlled by the candidate and by the press officer. This time Matthew Gross just blogged the whole campaign, talked about it the way he saw it. It caused a sensation, got huge buzz.”

Weinberger on branding:

“Branding - as a metaphor - is drawn from what you do to a cow with a red hot iron. And that is still - mostly - the way it is done. Branding is done by someone to your customers, the way you might brand a cow.

“And yet business is evolving. You start with brand and you move towards the idea of reputation and then the idea of relationship. That means that every business is going to be involved in blogging one way or another.”

Weinberger on trust:

“Blogging is best - or at least very good - if taken internally. The blogosphere operates as a vast, amorphous focus group - a defocus group. It creates a sense of trust. I feel that this is my company. That is like the relationship I have with Google. I feel that Google is my company, although I don’t own stock. “

What should companies do?

“Public relations needs to turn into ‘public relationships’. Companies need to listen, to audit, to engage, to give up control to their employees. Companies need to develop a blogging policy - not rocket science, just saying that blogging employees need to observe the same standards as anyone else - keep corporate secrets, don’t run down the corporation. Fundamentally companies must try to sound like a human being, to be like a human being. Engage, don’t defend, be transparent, and link, link, link, link, link. “

What mistakes do companies make?

“You don’t know more than your customers. Your customers know more than you. Don’t be boring. Take risks. Blogging is about opportunity, about connectedness, about breaking down the walls.”

Weinberger then fielded a few questions. What would he say to corporations who worried about loss of control:

“You would better ask: do you want people to talk about you? That is the question. If you do, you should blog.

“Thinking we were in control was magical thinking, it was delusional. People have always talked about us, we were just deaf.”

Technorati have launched a mode button on their search which allows the user to sort by authority. They are trying to solve a problem that bedevils the consumer blog search companies: how to filter out spam results. If spammers are targetting keywords - last week we saw a blog targeting the christian name “Alan” - then live searches become gradually less and less effective. One approach is to say that if a blog has links back to it, it has authority. Increase the number of links and you increase the authority. The idea depends on links having a certain value.

This was the approach taken to internet search by Altavista around 1997-98. Altavista favoured sites with lots of links over sites with fewer. It worked for a while and made Altavista the most effective internet search engine. Then the spammers discovered that links could be spammed just as effectively as keywords and the Altavista approach failed. The problem is that a link does not have a universal value. A link from a spam site has less value than a link from the New York Times.

This is the weakness of the current Technorati approach. A full analysis of the weakness of the Technorati system can be found by our partner Flemming Madsen here.

This is a press release which was released today:

Market Sentinel announced today that Sheila Sang, former editorial director of AOL UK, of handbag.com and executive editor of BBC Online, will be joining the company as Online Publishing Director.

With blogging and content syndication growing in popularity by the day, corporations are increasingly looking to get their message across using new tools like these. Sheila will be working with Market Sentinel’s roster of blue-chip companies to help them understand blogging and to how to use content syndication to reach their stakeholders online.

“I am delighted to welcome Sheila Sang to Market Sentinel,” CEO and former BBC Online colleague Mark Rogers said. “Her résumé speaks for itself. Market Sentinel’s clients are already benefitting from Sheila’s matchless experience in creating high quality content-rich websites.

Sheila Sang will be representing the Market Sentinel in a panel discussion about monitoring blogs at Les Blogs in Paris next week.

An article in the New York Times (requires free registration or use Bugmenot for a one-time password) profiles how Wal-Mart have taken on their detractors with a pro-active PR campaign, run by a number of ex political campaigners.

The PR campaign emphasises the Wal-Mart positives (good value, local employment) and looks to off-set a campaign of detraction from pressure groups like Wal-Mart Watch, run in part by trade unions who oppose the company’s employment practices and who cannot get recognition from the company. (Note their website’s heavy use of email newsletters, syndicated news, its blog and comment pages) The trigger is a new documentary entitled “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price” by Robert Greenwald. The documentary looks systematically at Wal-Mart negatives - the effect on smaller local businesses of a Wal-Mart opening up, their healthcare policies and employment policies.

Key quotes:

A confidential 2004 report prepared by McKinsey & Company for Wal-Mart, and made public by Wal-Mart Watch, found that 2 percent to 8 percent of Wal-Mart consumers surveyed have ceased shopping at the chain because of “negative press they have heard.”

To keep up with its critics, Wal-Mart “has to run a campaign,” said Robert McAdam, a former political strategist at the Tobacco Institute who now oversees Wal-Mart’s corporate communications. “It’s simply nonsense for us to let some of these attacks go without a response.”

The impact of the negative sentiment in slowing Wal-Mart’s growth is a classical demonstration of Frederick Reichheld’s net promoters theory. This theory maintains that as the proportion of your detractors grow, your growth is curtailed and that a decline in your net promoters index (the number of your promoters minus your detractors) is strongly predictive of a stock price decline.

It would be interesting to track the impact of Wal-Mart campaign, which is run by Edelman on Wal-Mart’s online net promoters index.

Thanks to Flemming Madsen of Onalytica who suggested we blogged this.

Forbes magazine has devoted a sensational cover story to bloggers who set out to damage people and brands. Since the piece itself is password-protected, here is how it kicks off:

Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.

Blogs started a few years ago as a simple way for people to keep online diaries. Suddenly they are the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns. It’s not easy to fight back: Often a bashing victim can’t even figure out who his attacker is. No target is too mighty, or too obscure, for this new and virulent strain of oratory. Microsoft has been hammered by bloggers; so have CBS, CNN and ABC News, two research boutiques that criticized IBM’s Notes software, the maker of Kryptonite bike locks, a Virginia congressman outed as a homosexual and dozens of other victims–even a right-wing blogger who dared defend a blog-mob scapegoat.

Forbes’s writer Daniel Lyons point out that first amendment rights protect many writers who are simply out to settle scores, or in the case of “Pamela Jones” - the writer of Groklaw - take a partisan line on SCO’s case against IBM over Linux. Lyons suggests that Jones may be an IBM mouthpiece.

The article is written in a sensational flack versus counter-flack style, but both it and the indignant response from bloggers are worth a read.

(via Micropersuasion)

New Communications Blogzine has published Mark Rogers’ article looking at how Market Sentinel measures corporate reputations with our “net promoters index”. Here it is:

A year ago when our new company Market Sentinel started distributing live reports on brands drawn from monitoring message boards and blogs, one of our early pitches was to a research head of a large mobile carrier who was sceptical as to the value of it.

“Who are these people?” he asked, reviewing a page of sometimes negative remarks on a new mobile handset. “Isn’t this just chit-chat?”

We realised then that we would need to produce a metric which showed – in as objective a way as possible – how positive and negative commentary played online. We lighted on the work of Bain and company’s Fred Reichheld. Reichheld, in a series of books like “The Loyalty Effect” (1996) and “Loyalty Rules” (2001) has demonstrated that there is a simple way of measuring the public attitude to a company. You simply ask a consumer:

“Would you recommend this product or service to a friend?”

If the answer is yes, the person is a “promoter,” if no, the person is a detractor. You deduct the first number from the second to reach something known as “the net promoters index.”

The index really comes into its own when you compare two or more companies in the same sector. The higher the positive number applied to a company, the more likely the company is to grow (more recommendations=more customers). The lower the number, the more likely the company is to shrink (more detractors=fewer repeat purchases).

Recommendations matter. In Emanuel Rosen’s book, the Anatomy of Buzz he points out that

• 65% of Palm customers heard about the device from another person.

• Friends and relatives are the number one source for information about places to visit or about flights, hotels or rental cars.

Of people surveyed by the Travel Industry Association:

• 43% cited friends and family as a source for information.

• 57% of customers of one car dealership in California learned about the dealership from another person

“This is not unusual,” says Jim Callahan of the research company Dohring.

[Source: James Torio’s “Blogging a Global Conversation” ]

The recommendations we would formerly seek from friends and family we increasingly find through Google. Research shows that 75% of shoppers use search engines with the intention of purchasing products and services . What they find when they get there is increasingly determined by bloggers and contributors to online forums. Recent research by Market Sentinel in the UK showed that, of Nielsen’s Top 50 grocery brands, 40% had negative commentary in the top ten results on Google UK . Searchers will even put keywords into searches to look for issues. For example, in the last 30 days, one of the popular searches tracked by UK-based paid search vendor has been “Ford Focus problems”. This is a search designed to flush out online resources dealing with customer service issues.

Why does this “net promoters” index matter? Why is it important to keep the number of detractors down, and the number of promoters high? According to Reichheld’s exhaustive studies, it is very accurate leading indicator of stock price. A high value means that your stock will rise, and a low value spells trouble.

I was reminded of this recently in the context of some work Market Sentinel and its partners are doing looking at the issues a famous corporation has been experiencing with its customer services function. The corporation, faced with a highly competitive marketplace, took the decision to offshore much of its customer services function to India. It cut down on expensive home visits which were an important constituent of its value add. Wall Street applauded and the stock price rose. However the number of negative comments about the company in message boards and blogs rose steeply. Customers did not appreciate the long waits for customer service. They did not appreciate the failure of the company to fulfil on its after sales promises.

Finally, earlier this summer, the company was targeted by a famous blogger who had bought one of its products and was frustrated not just by the poor quality of the product, but by the company’s failure to fulfil its customer service promise. The blogger started writing about it and was immediately deluged with comments and trackbacks by aggrieved fellow customers.

A couple of weeks back the company published its latest numbers. Growth has stalled (more detractors=fewer repeat purchases). The stock price fell like a stone. As Mr. Reichheld puts it in a paper published by the Harvard Business Review, the “net promoters” index is /”The One Number You Need to Grow”.

Market Sentinel’s benchmarking service provides an index of “net promoters online” and tracks it live. It is now our most popular service. Tracking corporate reputation online is the business equivalent of the Nielsen rating. And it is something managers and corporate investors simply have to do if they want to look at whether a company is on the way up, or the way down.

An interesting article by Jim Meskauskas in iMedia Connection, points out the significant dynamic that blogs have added to traditional word of mouth recommendations and discussions about products.

“Blogs have become a phalanx of information on the internet. Marketers know this and want to harness the power blogs have demonstrated as the embodiment of the notion that, as the Cluetrain Manifesto claimed, ‘markets are conversations.’”

As a case in point, Proctor & Gamble learned about problems with early samples of a new single serve coffee maker through feedback from a panel blogging through BzzAgent. P&G’s prompt action to replace all faulty machines created a small group of brand advocates who would proactively further the company’s reputation through word of mouth.

Mark Rogers is interviewed by Guillaume du Gardier of Blogging Planet in a podcast about online visibility, brand auditing and benchmarking, and brand response.

We launched our “Search is Brand” whitepaper at the end of June, discussing how customers experiences of brands was increasingly dictated by search - and pointing out that the search gives a lot of prominence to detractors. Our means of publicising the white paper was to blog it, and to email the key opinion-brokers such as Steve Rubel, Shel Holtz, Neville Hobson, Elizabeth Albrycht, Rok Hrastnik and Guilllaume du Gardier. We also talked to our good friends at New Media Knowledge, e-Consultancy and Net Imperative. The cash budget was zero (although it helped to know who the opinion-brokers were).

Prior to the publication of the white paper the “Search is Brand” search on Google turned up citations like “Yahoo search is brand new” in about 50-60 results. As of Thursday 11th August 2005 there are 846 results. 90% are references to our white paper. This process has taken six weeks. References are growing geometrically - when we checked on Monday the number of results was 737.

Our experience suggests that if you if you identify a unique idea or “meme” and decides you want to colonise it, blogging is a highly effective way to do so.

Conversely, although the white paper received coverage in PR week and Campaign, the influence of coverage in these publications was far weaker, partly because the journalist, writing in an offline format, didn’t link to us or use our exact terms, and when the article was published online, it tended to be cut and pasted, again without links or keywords.

To spell out our conclusions (at the risk of stating the obvious):

1) blogs offer you total control over your message and keywords;

2) blogs reward other bloggers for reusing your words and keywords because a) it is easier to link to something than copy or paraphrase it, and because b) linking offers a fellow blogger a chance to associate their comment with the original material and boost their own traffic;

3) off-line media tends to weaken your message because a) they paraphrase it, and b) they choose keywords reflecting their own agenda, and because they are off-line;

4) the combined effects of a number of different sites using the same keywords to link to your site powerfully impacts your Google algorithmic ranking on the message and keywords you have chosen.