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%`

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.

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.

Internet World took place in London this week. Jonny Rosemont of Weber Shandwick has posted a nice summary of the key lessons. Here is part of it:

“Digitising is changing the world but it shouldn’t change communications strategies i.e. it is still all about giving people what they want

Consumers have to be co-opted into the marketing process, they are the new brand managers …”

This chimes with some thoughts that have been percolating in my head for a while.

Brands find it harder currently to respond to all their customers and stakeholders in ways that satisfy them.

There are three reasons for this:

a) It is now easier for the consumer to address the brand. Brands can no longer hide behind call centres and complaints procedures. Customers can discover email addresses and when they email they expect a response. When they don’t get that response, or aren’t happy with it, they can make a post on a message board, or post a hostile review, or blog.

b) It is now more difficult for the brand to address the consumer. All of the various “channels” have broken down, eroded, become one. All communications by the brand have become part of one general conversation. The comments of a tired call centre worker, or the carefully judged explanations of a chief executive briefing analysts all represent the “brand”. And they have as much, if not more currency than conventional marketing and advertising messages . It doesn’t necessarily all take place online, but 80% of it is recorded online. Worse, the relationship between the brand’s message and the consumer is mediated by the search engines, and that means that the brand’s message gets mixed up with the comments and statements of all of its other stakeholders, including the disaffected consumers mentioned above.

c) The expectations of both consumer and brand are out of whack. The consumer expects the kind of response he or she might get from the local dry-cleaner (”I’m sorry about that, we’ll clean it again”); the brand expects to be able to choke off the access of the consumer to dialogue (restricting access to call centres by ensuring wait times are long, and concealing emails and phone numbers). Neither is realistic. The consumer will have their response, but this cannot always be a one-to-one experience. The brand will have to communicate with the consumer, but will have to find ways of doing so without setting up a response centre the size of the Inland Revenue’s.

In these circumstances brands can learn much from the lessons of the early community builders online. They need to give some of the work of communicating their brand values and compiling their FAQs to the broader stakeholder group. When we set up the message boards in the early days of BBC online we discovered (copying AOL) that it works better to recruit online moderators (brand advocates and protectors) from amongst the stakeholder group (EastEnders fans, or mums with kids) than it did to use paid employees. The EastEnders or Doctor Who fans cared more about the forum and worked harder at maker it a success than the paid employees.

Similarly a Land Rover aficionado knows more about Land Rover than any product manager working for Land Rover ever will. These are the new brand champions, and the constituency who can do most to create a channel with that vast, mass amorphous group of Internet searchers and (potential) customers who are so hard to reach by conventional means. What a brand needs to do is to figure out how to get their stakeholders to do some of their communications for them, to empower them. What is the good news about the brand? What are its responses to key challenges? Brands can use the tools of social media research to learn how to identify and to speak to its key stakeholders: who are they? what messages do they respond to? what messages do they reject? If they communicate based on that understanding there is a chance that the positive message will spread.

This is an argument which is inspired by customer service, but it applies as well to investor relations, marketing communications and - perhaps most urgently - advertising.

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.

Edelman have been famously effective in advising their client Wal-Mart in how to cope with an avalanche of negative press from unions, media and local pressure groups. My colleague Flemming Madsen even credits them with turning round sentiment about Wal-Mart.

All the more surprising then that Edelman should do something as dumb as a blog which purports to be from a member of the public, but actually is from their own team. Richard Edelman has now apologised. This kind of trick is really damaging to a brand, because it erodes the very thing they are trying to reinforce, which is the value of their word. How can I believe you on what you say about your policy on employment, or local sourcing, or whatever it is I am sceptical about, if you are capable of this kind of thing? Ouch.

Like Antony Mayfield (whom I have to thank for the link) one has some sympathy for Edelman. It is difficult to get this right, but if anyone should know how to do this, it is Edelman, with their payroll of A-list bloggers like Steve Rubel. The web is so unforgiving about this kind of mistake. Edelman phoned Robert Scoble to apologise.

[Update] Here is an excellent summary of the issues raised by Matthew Ingram. Some commenters claim that PR and blogging don’t mix. Constantin Basturea’s comment mentions a couple of successful blogs engineered by PRs at MS&L - Fastlane - and Hill & Knowlton - LG Chocolate phone blog.

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.