How do you build brands post-Google?

As the recession begins to bite, brands are finding that getting through to customers is tougher than ever.

Offline advertising is showing diminishing returns. McKinsey predicts that by 2010, traditional television advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990.

This is partly because online media is growing at the expense of offline. A UK survey by Media Week showed that time spent for both live/realtime TV and teletext tv decreased by 1% and 2% respectively between 2006 and 2007, while internet usage by 50%; an IDC study of U.S. consumer online behavior found that the Internet is the medium on which online users spend the most time (32.7 hours/week). This is equivalent to almost half of the total time spent each week using all media (70.6 hours), almost twice as much time as spent watching television (16.4 hours), and more than eight times as much time as spent reading newspapers and magazines (3.9 hours).

It is partly because of the rise in ad avoidance strategies. DVRs owners (according to an IBM survey) watch at least 50% of television programming on replay, thus avoiding television advertising. It is partly because of a major decline in public trust in brands. People trust people more than they trust the media. In a 2006 survey of U.S. consumers, Forrester found that 83% of respondents trusted friends’ opinion, but only 75% trust product reviews in a newspaper, magazine or TV. (Groundswell, Charline Li and Josh Bernhoff).

The answer would seem to be to move the business online. More than half of the world’s Internet users have made at least one purchase online in the past month, according to Nielsen. The web also seems to offer promising growth for advertisers: Nielsen estimates that spending on online advertising will escalate at 19.2 per cent annually till 2012 and will surpass the TV advertising budget in the US in the next decade.

But advertising on the web poses challenges. Online banner click-throughs on Yahoo!, Microsoft and AOL have declined from 0.75% to 0.27% according to ad monitoring firm Eyeblaster.

Paid search ads now represent the lion’s share of online ad spending. Contextual search ads are great for selling specific factual propositions (flights to Malaga, hotels in Brussels) but they are less effective at communicating emotion. In a recent report from The Wharton School, marketing professor Patti Williams observes that it’s unclear how a company like Crest can leverage search advertising: “How many people are going online to search for toothpaste? It’s not [obvious that] a little ad on the screen is going to attract them. For the biggest bulk of media spending, online is just hard to figure out. The Internet is not that good at big brand-building objectives, so there are a lot of companies struggling with a way to take advantage of the tremendous opportunity Google and other searches offer.”

A 2007 global Nielsen survey found that consumer recommendations are the most credible form of advertising among 78 percent of the study’s respondents. And there are perhaps clues for advertisers in the shift of online consumers to social networking sites. In the UK, social networks overtook webmail by percentage of visits in 2007, with social networks accounting for 5.17% of all Internet visits compared to 4.98% for email services. Advertisers want to follow consumers but that’s difficult. When you are chatting to a friend the last thing you want is to be interrupted with a clumsy brand message. Privacy settings in most networks preclude direct marketing. Facebook recently announced that it was opening up key pages to allow for contextual advertising.

So how do Brands engage with the consumer in a way that provokes conversation and endorsement? The most successful strategies for engagement with social media is for a brand do something which allows people to pass on a key message about your brand.

People can talk about you for three reasons:

You have given them useful information.

H&R Block set out to build awareness of their online tax return offering by creating content customised for channels. The budget was 5% of their annual digital spend only 0.5% of their total ad spend. They grew awareness 52%, and saw an 11% growth in tax services business, feeding net income which rose to $544m from an $86m loss the previous year.

Giant Food Stores increased monthly consumer website visits by 400% after lauching a “Super Shopping List”, which lets customers easily browse recipes, view weekly specials, and create a personal shopping list.
Brand discussion goes beyond the product itself. The entire process and value system around which a product created is also a source of conversation.

You have entertained them.

The hugely popular Cadbury Dairy Milk campaign which featured a gorilla playing the drum solo of Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” received 7m views online, more than 6,000 comments and boosted Cadbury revenues by 5% for that year. (Gorilla ad works its magic on sales of Cadbury bars ).

This jokey video from Philips Norelco Bodygroom raised the issue of persuading men to shave “below the neck” in the summer 2006. The video (cross-posted at youtube.com and at heavy.com) has been viewed 1.8m times, it boosted unaided awareness 8% and contributed to year-on-year growth of 17% for the DAP division (of which shavers represent 45%) to Q1 2007.

There is something in your product that they respond to.

Jeep’s “Have fun out there” website aggregates communities from where they already exist, such as Facebook and Flickr, to create its own uber-community where members drive the content.

The t-shirt company Threadless has used community as a mode to build its business by allowing members of the website to submit and vote on t-shirt designs. The top designs are selected for printing and sold through an online store with winning designers getting a cash prize and store merchandise. What started as a hobby in 2005 by founder Jake Nickell has been growing quickly with annual sales on track to hit $5 million in 2008.

The last is the best because it means that consumers have engaged with your brand and are doing your marketing for you. With the additional benefit that they are marketing to people who are inclined to believe their testimonials. It is also the hardest to achieve. New online measurement techniques (such as those used by Market Sentinel) offer the opportunity to chart how effective brand building in online by directly measuring response to creative campaigns, by gauging consumer engagement and by changing the creative to take account of live consumer responses. But how do you measure such responses. A consensus about this is only now beginning to emerge and we will deal with this in our next post.

Mark Rogers recently did a podcast for the company Knexus looking at the next generation of social marketing. We looked at how to do social marketing using case studies from Cadbury, Sony, Avis and H&R Block, and assessed how to measure the results. Here is the deck to accompany the podcast.

Penguin books have teamed up with Match.com to allow book lovers to find others with similar tastes. It adds value and shrewdly targets UK readers, who are predominantly female. Congratulations on a neat idea. It could be the start of a terrific online community - the best idea since the London Review of Books opened a tea shop.

Two years we highlighted the UK government’s decision to shun social media and opt for magazines and television in educating the young of Britain about the dangers of Chlamydia, Gonorrhoea and other sexual diseases. This decision flew in the face of research showing that most young people took advice about sexual matters from their peers (=social networks) rather than from information campaigns of any kind. The decision has had disastrous consequences for many young Britons. A report now highlights that sexually transmitted diseases are running at their highest rates since the 1970’s, particularly amongst the under-25s.

[Update] More on the woeful uptake of Chlamydia testing. “The shortfall has been blamed on … problems engaging young people,” writes the BBC’s Nick Triggle.

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”.

Key stats:

H&R Block boosted overall brand awareness by 52%.

They spent 0.5% of their ad budget in doing so.
…

Yes, 0.5%`

[UPDATE] More details on the H & R Block campaign including an interview with Paula Drum, VP of Marketing on Podtech’s Marketing Voices talking about how the campaign played on YouTube and SecondLife. Here is their social media site Digits.

We published this press release today:

AVIS UK WINS INNOVATION AWARD FOR SOCIAL MEDIA PROJECT

Avis UK has won the SOCAP award for innovation in Customer Service at the National Customer Service awards dinner held in London on 18th September 2007.

Avis UK’s work involved monitoring and benchmarking consumer generated content and making changes to its product and customer service practices in response, culminating in launching the We Try Harder blog. These changes have resulted in big increases in the approval rating for Avis (the Avis Net Approval Index has increased over 200% and remains well ahead of the competition) and key product innovations.

Market Sentinel provides the technology for CGC research and guidance on blog editorial.

Market Sentinel CEO Mark Rogers said yesterday: “The phenomenal growth of social media over the last few years has left many companies scratching their heads. Many congratulations are due to Eibhlin Payne and Xavier Vallée of Avis UK for demonstrating to others how to use statistical methods to understand social media and develop insights enabling them to forge real links with customers. We are very proud to have contributed to Avis UK’s success in creating a genuine partnership between marketing and customer service. Many thanks are due to Sheila Sang and Caroline Harris who worked so hard in helping Avis launch the We Try Harder blog, to Mathew Vattolil whose analysis drove decision-making and to our partners at Web Liquid, Matt Cronin and David Shiell who had the vision to bring the project to life, to Xavier Vallée and Eibhlin Payne themselves for commissioning the work and to Rob White for his tireless efforts in bringing it to reality”.

A good report in Rareplay observes that pharmaceutical companies are using social media in marketing and communications. The piece cites Wyeth’s Knowmenopause resource for women seeking information about the menopause and GSK’s appointment of a social media manager. There are good reasons why drug companies should be interested in this space. Social media tends to unite people with common interests (e.g. a common medical complaint) and bad news travel fast in these connected networks. It is important that pharmaceutical companies communicate factually about medicines and provide easy-to-use resources for patients and their families, answering common questions. The challenge of the internet is that it is a world (much like the real one) where the facts are mingled with misinformation and rumour. This is a situation familiar to anyone who has googled a medical condition, only to discover that their ailment is much more serious than they could possibly have guessed! Try this search for gustatory sweating.

The challenge to pharmaceutical companies is that engaging actively online demands total transparency, honesty and clarity. Legal requirements on pharmaceutical companies often make it difficult for them to talk in a way that patients can understand. The upside of social networks is that they tend to be rich in highly motivated individuals (bloggers, the hosts and moderators of forums) who can mediate the message to the wider community. The risk is that the authority of these individuals comes from their (sometimes cranky) independence. To be successful pharma needs to speak consistently to these folk and to build long-term relationships with them.

Today we publish a new white paper: Responding to Crisis Using Social Media. It is an update to our white paper Measuring Blogger Influence, which looked at the Dell Hell débacle and measured the role of bloggers in creating the damage to Dell’s reputation for good customer service. Dell has publicised their increased investment in customer services and has launched the social media initiatives Direct2Dell (their blog), StudioDell and IdeaStorm to increase dialogue with its customers.

Has it worked? We surveyed customer commentary from before and after the new initiatives and used our net promoters methodology to find out.

The bad news is that the increased spend on customer services ($150m - on Dell’s figures) has not yet had a strong positive impact on overall sentiment. There has been a slight dropping off in the volume of negative commentary about customer service, but errors seem to be up and opposition to off-shoring has increased. The good news for Dell is that its social media initiatives have offset this, and there are signs that they may be successful in changing opinions about the company. The recent PR wins which saw Dell salvage XP for domestic customers and announce the launch of a Linux Ubuntu desktop (although they occurred after our data sample was taken) have reinforced the impression that using social media is a big customer service plus for Dell.

Recent figures from the IAB indicate that UK online advertising has reached £2bn. This number has already outstripped radio and newspapers and is chasing down television (at £3.9bn). The internet’s proportion of ad spend in the UK is the highest in the world.

It is worth a second look at the trends hidden in the figures. The online advertising total was up 42% year on year. Paid search, however, grew at 52% (above the trend). Display ads grew below the trend at 35%. Display ads - which were the dominant form of advertising during the internet bubble - now represent only 22.6% of the total advertising spend.

The reasons are not hard to find: an excellent click-through rate on a display ad is 1%. Most click-through rates are far lower. The web surfers who click on a banner are poorly qualified as prospects. They may become customers, they may not. Even back at the height of the dot-com boom, frustrated ad analysts were writing columns like this - failing to find any way of showing that online advertising had any impact on buying decisions. It is still hard to track the impact of online display advertising and advertisers have found that frustrating.

Compare paid search: here customers have qualified themselves as having an interest in the topic chosen by the advertiser. It is a far more effective way of capturing monetisable online transactions and product searches (58% of the total £1.2bn is now going on paid search). But paid search remains a medium for calls to action, not for branding. It is very hard to give much of a flavour of your brand in the haiku-like format of a Google paid search advertisement. For that you need to find a way to connect emotionally with your audience, to make them feel happy, sad, excited. This remains a huge challenge online.

An upcoming conference organised by our friends at Search Engine Strategies looking at advertising through social networks. Clever approaches here seem much more likely to drive brand value than paid search. If I become the “friend” of Lily Allen, I am clearly qualifying myself much more as a potential buyer of her future output. The same goes for anything entertainment-related. But it is much more of a challenge for brands which are not entertainment related. Social networks pose them exactly the same problems as normal web pages. They either have to post a banner or sponsor an event. They can’t rely on pull, because (as sellers of motor insurance for example) they can’t compete with the Arctic Monkeys. No one on a social network like MySpace will publicly identify themselves with a functional brand - however useful they may find it - in the way they might with a star.

So where do brand builders go? The answer is that they need to identify their own target networks. Every brand has its own universe of key authorities, people who do spend their time talking about motor insurance or pension provision. We have recently been working for the car rental giant Avis Europe alongside our colleagues at UK digital agency Web Liquid. One of the things we helped Avis Europe to do was to identify:

a) who was talking about them and in what terms; b) who was talking about car hire/rental in general; c) the key authorities with whom they needed to connect;

This work identified those who could be thought of as Avis’s own “MySpace” - that is: a community of people who hire cars, talk about car hire and are authoritative on car hire. Our work enabled Avis Europe to identify the key topics that car renters were concerned about, and to help align their product with the needs of that market. We showed them who were the key authoritities in “trustworthy car rental”. Where they sat in that in conversation, and who they needed to impress to be talked about in a more positive way. We identified the key hot topics of those influencers - what language they were using, what their concerns were.

As a consequence of this work, the marketing team at Avis led by Xavier Vallée and Rob White, and the customer service team led by Eibhlin Payne and Stephen Spiers have been doing a lot of product and service development in the background and they have just now begun to talk about that in the form of a blog wetryharder.co.uk. The aim of the blog is to open a dialogue with the marketplace.

This kind of approach sets a benchmark - in our opinion - for what online brand building needs to become: a process of engagement with the online marketplace.

1. You find out what your brand is - by listening to the way it is discussed, by monitoring and measuring those conversations. How important are you? What are your key strengths, your weaknesses? What are your supporters saying? What are your detractors saying?
2. You start acting on the insights, improving the product, becoming if you like more like the best self you can be;
3. You start - very cautiously - to talk about what you are doing, trying to attenuate your voice not to the slogans of the marketing department, but to the words of your consumers;
4. You measure how you are doing. What is the change in sentiment around your product? Are you now preferred to your competitors? On what grounds?

Then you repeat the process. Slowly, and in lock-step with your customers, you build your brand. This process is not just about good market research, or good advertising: it puts both to the service of creating an impregnable place for your brand at the heart of the most valuable place you can be: the place where you solve problems for your customers.

A good piece by Andrew Gumbel in the Independent shows how the US mid-term elections have highlighted how scrutinised politicians are.  The scrutiny is no longer the job of the media pundits on TV, but of bloggers and commenators pointing at clips on YouTube.

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:

Clients sometimes ask us who are the folks that hang out online and contribute to social media. There are demographic studies. But here is a charming film giving a more emotional explanation, a compilation by Mick B. of clips of the people - young and old - who make video blogs on YouTube.

MySpace’s black carpet area - a forum for movie companies to offer free screenings to MySpace members was launched a month ago. It has proved its value already in the buzz it has created around the Borat movie premieres. This is not the first attempt to use social media for marketing - we have highlighted the ad hoc use of Flickr by Sony Bravia and of YouTube by Gillette, but it is the most systematic so far. This will be the first of man raids by marketeers on high-value online communities.

Danah Boyd has published a very interesting article reviewing the barriers to creating effective social networking applications via the phone. The variety of standards, handsets and displays in mobile have all limited what can be done. Voice, IVR and SMS are still the major revenue drivers, and will continue to be until someone bridges the blog/mobile gap more effectively, Boyd says.

A mile and a half up the road from our office in London is an area - Borough - which has undergone huge investment over the last few years. There are plans for even greater development, including constructing the tallest building in Europe, the Shard of Glass, designed by the man who co-designed the Pompidou Centre, Renzo Piano.

A search on Google for Shard of Glass reveals some interesting things about how brands function online. There is an official site for the Shard of Glass, but it has the unintuitive name www.shardlondonbridge.com and is not to be found on the first page of results. The number one result is a website called www.shardofglass.co.uk. This is the unofficial website for the Shard of Glass, built by James Hatts, the man behind the local community site www.london-se1.co.uk, home of a thriving message board about local issues.

What else is on the Google front page? A spoof website about ice lollies that contain “shards o’ glass”, news coverage of the project’s announcement, a book called Shard of glass, a software company called Shard of Glass studios … you get the picture.

Why is the community site result number one?

• It has an intuitive url
  
• It benefits from a large number of contextual links including links from influential sites like dmoz
  

The community site is number one despite consisting of a news story and little other information. Why is that?

Well, let’s look at the official site. This contains beautiful panoramas of the site, location maps, statistics - a smorgasboard of relevant information.

BUT search engine crawlers see less than fifty words of this. Here are those words:

“Home A Vertical City Timeline Renzo Piano Image Gallery Development Team Contacts Information You need flash to view this. State-of-the-art office space Efficient, flexible floor plates from 14,456 sq ft (1343 m²) to 31,473 sq ft (2,921m²) to let. More info Truly mixed use A truly mixed use vertical city in one building. More info T&Cs Sitemap”

Notice the absence of the phrase “Shard of glass”. Notice the presence of the phrase “you need flash to view this”.

There is no interactivity in the official website, no fresh content, no reason for the crawlers to visit it. (The news page is as invisible as all the rest, and without syndication, noone else will be carrying its headlines). Its links are partly from professional partners and partly internal.

I do not write about this because this corporate site is particularly worse than any other websites. A search engine optimisation expert last week (the largest in the UK) informed us that only 3% of websites are accessible to the search engines. But the two Shard of glass websites neatly symbolise the problems with brand websites. They are too often invisible online because of poor design, and this weakens the underlying brand. The Shard clearly has a community of stakeholders which lives around it, is interested in it, part of which lives at http://www.london-se1.co.uk. If, during the lifetime of the project, there is a controversy about its development, or any issue on which it needs the support of its stakeholders, it has no links with them. It is marooned, isolated. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. The Shard and other brands, can reach out into their communities of stakeholders. To do so is not just good politics, it is good business.

The rise of MySpace as a forum for new acts like the Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen has provoked UK-based Q magazine into scamming the industry with a bogus new actHope against hope. The bogus band successfully used MySpace to grow a network of real supporters including ex-Creation boss Allan McGee (discoverer of Oasis).

Proof (if further proof) were needed that social networking is a highly-effective way of promoting a new idea!

Two recent U.S. marketing campaigns have used social media to connect with a mass audience. First came Philips Norelco Bodygroom with their shaveeverywhere.com campaign. This jokey video as well as being hosted on its own domain was posted at youtube.com and at heavy.com and has allegedly been downloaded one billion times.

Now Gillette have launched a campaign, which parodies an online grassroots campaign in format. According to Advertising Age: “The Noscruf campaign includes paid search ads on Google and other search engines, promotional placement on Heavy.com and a posting on YouTube.com for two viral videos from a fictional advocacy group - National Organization of Social Crusaders Repulsed by Unshaven Faces - and its Web site, Noscruf.org.”

In this case the campaigners are women who want their menfolk to shave and have created the noscruf website as part of their campaign. The site (above) is being visited 60m times a day, say Ad Age, citing Alexa. It is the work of Digitas, a Boston-based agency.

What is intriguing about both of these campaigns is that:

1) they are online in inspiration and execution; 2) the off-line element is limited to PR - the Bodygroom campaign benefited from a plug on Howard Stern’s syndicated radio show; 3) they make use of existing places of debate and traffic - youtube.com and heavy.com and have not depended solely on destination urls.

Imaginative pieces of buzz marketing, both.

Answering the point I raised in the post below about how marketers engage with social media, Steve Rubel suggests that marketeers approach social media stars like YouTube’s Nornna directly and sponsor them or look for endorsement.

Neville Hobson reports on Firefox’s advertising campaign. User made commercials for the product and Firefox gave the best one a prize. The winners are here.

This campaign works on so many levels.

• It involves customer endorsement;
  
• It makes use of the customer’s understanding of the product - what they see as value (often different to what the marketeers might choose to stress);
  
• The campaign leverages the power of online endorsement, building Google ranking for Firefox.
  

Last night at the Mandrake Club I heard Simon Gulliford, ex-marketing director of Barclays Bank UK talking about how he make a Honda dealership a success. One notion to offer older drivers who were willing to demonstrate a model a £200 discount on their next car for every sale they achieved. One guy got 46 sales for them in a year. Not only was this cheaper than incentivising a salesman, it carried more weight.

Robert Scoble is suggesting that obscure bloggers might consider linking to the word “brrreeeport”.

The idea is that enough people link they they will build their authority courtesy of Scoble. Of course this only really works if someone else manages to interpose their take on the “brrreeeport” phenomenon and gain relevant authority. (And that’s real authority, not the Technorati sort) And that authority is only valuable in the context of someone searching on the word “brrreeeport”. My interest in this is that it is a text book demonstration, using humans, of what black hat influence brokers are constantly doing with spam blogs/splogs.

But there is an upside. Say if you are a marketer, with a message that you are blogging about. You encourage bloggers to use your message in a link using a particular keyword, and you reward the most imaginative of them with a frontpage link. We were talking to a publisher this morning and this would be super-relevant to them. Each time an author’s name or book title was mentioned in an amusing way the publisher could highlight the link, and share some of the brand’s authority with that blogger. A cool viral campaign.

[Incidentally - I came across this post as a result of a mail from my old friend from Amazon - Dave Mutton - who has launched a cool site called Blogcode . The idea of it is to find blogs similar to mine - kind of opt-in collaborative searching for blogs. Neat idea.]