In the wake of the devastating 7.0 earthquake in Haiti, Twitter has been serving as a main hub of information, the Nielsen Company reports. Nielsen refers to preliminary analysis of data indicating that Twitter posts are the leading source of discussion about the quake, followed by online video, blogs, and other social media.
Although most online consumers still rely on traditional media for coverage of the quake, they are apparently turning to Twitter to share information, react to the situation, and rally support. Sysomos, an analytics firm in Toronto, estimated that nearly 150,000 posts containing both “Haiti” and “Red Cross” were sent through Twitter since the quake. The Twitter account for the Red Cross, which on average had been adding roughly 50-100 followers a day before the Haiti quake, has gained more than 10,000 followers since.
Combined with tapping into the large mobile universe of text messages (136.6 million subscribers sent and received text messages in Q3 2009), many aid and relief organizations have begun utilizing Twitter to spread the word and gather donations, augmenting their other channels. As online conversations around the Red Cross’s 90999 text campaign ("Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to @RedCross relief") efforts grew, the Red Cross tweeted Friday morning that donations exceeded $8 million.
But Twitter’s growing power comes with new responsibilities. In the aftermath of the disaster, some people used the micro-blogging service to spread rumors and falsehoods, i.e. that UPS would be willing to ship any package under 50 lbs. to Haiti (UPS debunked that myth). Twitter was also aflutter with news that several airlines would take medical personnel to Haiti free of charge to help with earthquake relief (American Airlines and JetBlue said this was not the case). The FBI warns Internet users who receive requests for charitable donations on behalf of earthquake victims to "apply a critical eye and do their due diligence" before responding. "Past tragedies and natural disasters have prompted individuals with criminal intent to solicit contributions purportedly for a charitable organization and/or a good cause."
What all this shows is that Twitter is not like Facebook (as much as Facebook is trying hard to be more like Twitter). Relationships are not reciprocal, and they’re not based on trust but on authority - a currency that is easier to fake. Twitter is much more like a 21st century CNN, a broadcasting network cum narrowcasting option, and as such prone to propaganda and misinformation.
The question which brands are the best at “socializing” with their audiences is often asked, but rarely answered. Now Vitrue, a social media advertising solutions company, has attempted to capture a snapshot by releasing a Top Social Brands of 2008 list. The ranking is based on the Social Media Index (SMI), a measurement system the company launched to help track brands' share of voice on the social web. The Top 100, which range from the iPhone, CNN, and Disney at the top of the list, to Jet Blue, Puma, and Sears at the bottom of the list, were drawn from Vitrue's daily analysis of online conversations about more than 2,000 popular brands in blogs, social networks, microblogging services, and photo and video-sharing sites.
Strikingly missing is the Obama brand, arguably the most social brand in 2008, and there are other shortcomings. Vitrue’s press release states that some powerhouse technology brands were omitted from the list “as they provide the backbone of many social networks. While Google, Facebook and others are top brands, The Vitrue 100 is measuring companies that are using social technology, not those who are the technology.” You could argue, of course, that this distinction is rather arbitrary as the lines between technology and content are somewhat blurry and will continue to dissolve. Just take the iPhone as an example – it provides social technology, per Vitrue’s definition, but also uses it to socialize its own brand. The same applies to Amazon, CNN, the New York Times, and all other brands that constitute either latent or manifest social networks online.
Another pitfall is the narrow focus on volume and the lack of analysis as to what makes brands score higher. A high score may not always be attributed to an effective social web strategy. Brands may simply top the list because their sales have been successful and they are therefore much talked about (or, conversely, everyone’s talking about them because their sales are tanking). There is no metric for measuring if the conversations were largely positive, negative, or highly contested. As one commenter on Vitrue's blog poignantly remarks: “Looking at brands as something capturing share of voice online, without understanding the drivers of said volume, is kind of like looking at shadows on the cave wall and mistaking them for the truth?”
In any case, Vitrue’s list has started an interesting conversation and helped socialize its own brand.
Yes, we live in the "age of conversations." Even though "Marketers and consumers have always had conversations -- they’ve just been slow," as Casey Jones, VP of Marketing at Dell, observed, the velocity of both market conversations and marketers trying to join them, has significantly picked up. Companies such as John Battelle's Federated Media (FM) are smart enough to validate this trend by enriching the grand meta-conversation called "conversational marketing" with thought leadership and platforms such as a namesake conference. The Conversational Marketing Summit, hosted by FM last week in San Francisco, gathered 300 top marketers who are either leading the conversation or are eager to become a part of it. If you suspect this to be a solipsistic dialogue of the in-crowd, you may have a point, but it was actually a fantastic forum for meeting interesting people, hearing inspirational ideas, and having a lot of -- well, conversations.
The blogosphere is wild, violent, and nasty, and it can kill you.
I missed the opening sessions on the first day but the second day started off strongly with Steve Hayden, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Mather Worldwide, who provided a solid framework of conversational media by elegantly weaving together old and new school marketing, from the origins of TV advertising to the 1984 Apple "Big Brother" commercial to today's social media. His reflections on "marketing in a post-apocalyptic, fragmented, converged, and blogorific world" were spot on and came from someone who had obviously seen all parts of the long tail. Hayden began with examining the long tail of the blogosphere and provided some interesting base data: An estimated 2,600 blogs have 1,000 or more inbound links, 400,000 have 20 or more, and 100,000,000 have fewer than 20 incoming links. So, the big question for marketers is "How do you organize the long tail?" "The blogosphere is a new form of behavior," Hayden reminded us, "and not just a new media format. The blogosphere is wild, violent, and nasty, and it can kill you." Therefore you don't have a choice, you just have two options as a marketer: "Amplify or attenuate your message."
Hayden provided a convincing raison d’être for conversational marketing: As the "marketing confidence gap" -- that is, the gap between advertising dollars spent online and consumer time spent online -- is widening, "conversational marketing is the primary way to close that gap." Money follows eyeballs, and eyeballs follow conversations. It's as simple as that. However, in order to have true conversations, marketers have to give up their fixation on message consistency and repeatability, in one word: they have to learn to let go. Hayden: "In the age of conversational marketing, you have to move the message forward because that's the nature of conversations. If you don't move the message, you don't have a conversation." Hayden suggested replacing the "big idea" (the Holy Grail of marketers) with the "big ideal:" "A big ideal keeps your long tail from falling off." While the big idea meant "share of my mind," the big ideal was about "share of culture," and Hayden illustrated this juxtaposition with a nifty chart:
For Hayden, the big ideal can be defined by asking a simple question:
[Insert brand] believes that the world would be a better place if [insert assumption]
Examples:
- Dove believes that the world would be a better place if women felt better about themselves.
- Coke believes that the world would be a better place if we saw the glass as half-full and not half-empty,
- Virgin America believes that the world would be a better place if flying was fun again.
- Fanta believes that the world would be a better place if we didn’t grow up and had more time to play.
- Lynx believes that the world would be a better place if it was easier for men to have sex whenever they wanted.
…and so forth.
Hayden emphasized that it didn’t matter if the ideal was good or bad or a noble cause, as long as it was authentic and connected a cultural truth with the brand's authentic "self." To prove his point, he showed this over-the-top ad, courtesy of Lynx:
So what if a conversation such as the Lynxjet stirs controversy (remember the Chevy Tahoe campaign)? "Stay the course," Hayden recommended. It is paramount to deal with critical or nasty comments and accept them as an integral part of the conversation. At the end of the day, capturing hundreds of thousands of eyeballs outweighs any naysayers. And yet: "The best way to make money is not to focus on making money but on making a difference."
The Old Guard: Yes and No
It was good that the "old guard," earnestly and openly focusing on money, was represented at the summit as well, but as executives from Dell, Symantec, and HP proudly presented their recent forays into conversational marketing, the gulf between old and new school became evident. Casey Jones, VP of Marketing at Dell, was determined to get everyone excited about "the new Dell." I didn’t count but I bet he used the word "astonishing" a dozen times in describing Dell's "astonishing" culture. Even more astonishing was his answer when John Battelle asked him if he would move marketing dollars from traditional advertising to conversational marketing in the digital space: "Yes and no" (he actually got away with that).
James Rose, Vice President of Brand and Global Marketing Communications at Symantec, had brought his agency lead and had him run through a number of PowerPoint slides that were over-populated with data trying to prove the effectiveness of their blog campaign. Still, to really gauge the marketing revolution that is taking place, it was enlightening to see that Symantec, which had not allowed its employees to read blogs two years ago, was now launching a blog with user-generated content around security issues. The times they are a-changing.
HP is poised to move the needle, too. However, in referring to internal barriers in her organization, Daina Middleton, Director of Global Interactive Marketing in HP's Imaging and Printing Group, admitted that 66 people had been part of the decision-making process at one point or another. This was inadvertently proven by her presentation, which was the exact opposite of having a conversation with your audience. No one asked questions, and one of the FM hosts had to politely volunteer to save face. Bottom line: All these brands are on the right track, and their efforts to embrace new formats may be laudable, but, boy, do they have to work on how they talk about them!
Much more entertaining was Johnny Vulkan, a partner with Anomaly, the cutting-edge agency darling of the moment. He was in character as agent provocateur (the Brits just get advertising, for some reason). Johnny presented some case studies to illustrate what he propagated as the "three principles of conversational marketing:"
1. Leaning into the frame (in other words, hijack someone else’s conversation, for example by way of being the first in line for the iPhone release to promote a charity…). Best suited are market conversations with a built-in emotional response (sports, high-involvement consumer products, weddings, baby products, etc.). One could also call this the "wedding crasher" effect.
2. Branded utility (i.e. ShopText, an instant commerce service that lets you purchase online items via text messaging)
3. Fundamental goodness (i.e. Virgin America’s “Name a plane” campaign)
Vulkan argued that effective conversational marketing should always look for win-win-win situations between brand, consumer, and a third party, and that good advertising, in particular, should add value for the consumer if it really wanted to cut through the clutter ("value-added advertising") and, yes, "stick" (we all want to stick, somehow). He is right and his quick session demonstrated that conversational marketing is fun. As the socialization of the web progresses, marketing can in fact become the social glue when it no longer feels like marketing. And increasingly it doesn't. To quote Owen Van Natta, Facebook's Chief Revenue Officer and VP of Operations: "We know that many Facebook users click on ads and don't know even know they do. They don't perceive the ads as ads because they are so organically embedded in the content experience."
Destination Internet is dead – here comes the Distributed Internet
Speaking of Facebook, of course it was all the talk and became the main proof point for the summit's main theme: The days of "destination thinking" -- the idea of driving as many eyeballs as possible to a certain site ("one audience, one time, one venue") -- are numbered. Instead, "It's a distribution game now," as Jon Miller, former chairman and CEO of AOL. remarked. We are witnessing the rise of the "distributed Internet:" pushing the brand via branded content out to where the audiences already are, through "branded micro-networks" (Johnny Vulkan) such as Facebook, which essentially is a micro-Internet. John Battelle was one of the first to theorize on the emergence of "conversational media" over "packaged goods media." Not sure what's chicken and what's egg here but conversational media propel the verticalization of the web into specialist-driven content offerings with distinct micro-foci and micro-formats (case in point: "Seven Minute Sopranos" = seven episodes of the Sopranos in a seven-minute YouTube clip). In a nutshell, the history of online marketing goes like this: First came email, then web portals, then search (aggregation), and now there is the distributed Internet with its myriad atomized blogs, widgets, voice posts, Twitter grams, RSS feeds, and social networking hubs. This poses new challenges, for example the question of how to scale a micro-campaign and ensure its repeatability. Aren't conversations by their very nature designed to be unique and can hardly be repeated? The trick, I guess, is to design them such that they can feed themselves and stay. Of course this is easier said than done.
Alright, let's talk about metrics…
Ok, but how to measure if conversations actually have an impact on brand recognition and, excuse my old school lingo, "revenue"? In other words, what are the metrics of conversational marketing? Many speakers at the summit asked for new "engagement metrics" (i.e. time spent online + interaction with content) and "return on objectives" rather than "return on investment" for conversational marketing campaigns. There was also a strong need for some kind of consistent dashboard that consolidates different metrics into one easy-to-use solution for marketers, kind of like CRM software for conversational marketers. ComScore's "Conversational Media Report," announced during the conference, is a first and promising attempt in this space (are you listening, Technorati?).
Certainly, the 80/20 rule (20% of the visitors create 80% of the page views) no longer applies, nor is it all about reach. Many panelists agreed that the effects of the "distributed Internet" will likely cause a gradual decline in the number of web site visitors and page views on traditional brand and news portals. "Context of the conversation" is becoming more important than unique visitors, page views, click through rates, and CPMs. Frequency is another new factor that marketers ought to take into account when committing to a long-term social media engagement: Facebook has 40 million active users and half of them return every other hour. Moreover, the Pulse feature lets marketers survey thousands of Facebook users (or even just hundreds in highly targeted groups or networks) in instant polls. That's pretty powerful.
At the end of a day rich with conversations, I got the message: It's time to walk the walk. "It's a different organizing principle that is going to dramatically change the playing field," said Ross Levinsohn, who famously acquired MySpace for Murdoch and then got ousted: "Some marketers will lean forward, some will lean back. But if you lean back, other marketers may effectively outmarket you." In this new Cluetrain world of marketing, brands can either be the subject of conversations or they can host conversations, moderated by either brand advocates or brand atttractors, and facilitated by marketers whose titles should consequently change to "chief facilitation officers" or "chief listening officers." "Spend your money listening," was one of the watchwords of the summit, and in a variation of David Ogilvy’s famous "the consumer is your wife" quote, one could perhaps contend that in the amateur-driven, democratized conversational marketing world of today your spouse may in fact be your best marketer.
Ad network Fifth Network has introduced a new metric by which to sell online ads, based on the length of time a viewer is likely to pay attention to a particular page ("length-of-exposure targeting"), reports ClickZ.
This "attention targeting" method weights every URL for maximum ad exposure time and lets advertisers place ads on pages they feel will generate the longest exposure to readers. Fifth Network provides various data that helps advertisers make an informed decision, but generally purport that pages with multimedia content tend to be the ones people stay on the longest.
The product is geared toward brand advertisers who want to put a message in front of an audience for the longest possible period of time. Bill Caspare, Fifth Network's president and CEO, said early tests of the offering have enabled it to offer advertisers an effective CPM at a lower rate than they pay for premium inventory. He said the targeting method allows the same interaction and click-through rates, plus the theoretical branding benefit of longer exposure to an ad.
Fifth Network's solution is an interesting attempt to directly correlate attention with advertising value. Yet it misses an important point: the quality of attention is more important than mere quantity. Joseph Carrabis in his paper "Get The Attention You're Already Paying For" thus argues that exposure alone is not enough; a more complex task, in particular for multimedia sites, is to design the "attention experience" in a smart and effective way:
"Most websites -- especially Web 2.0, RIA and rich media sites -- haven't learned how to be non-threatening. One of the things that happens in media rich environments is that our multi-modal system is constantly accelerating us and decelerating us, giving us a little adrenaline then taking it away, because it's designed for survival and is now left recognizing nothing it's alerting us to is a threat. In fact, most of what it's alerting us to is an irritation, something we didn't come to a site to do."
And: "Getting someone's attention by hitting them over the head is no way to win friends and influence people."
Genius is a new web analytics service that claims to tear down the walls between lead generation, the corporate web site, and sales. The Genius launch party last night at the San Francisco MOMA was remarkable in many ways. It was a true demonstration of “how do I create buzz without having any customers yet?”
First, the start-up managed to get the smartest guys in the room into one place and make them feel even smarter. Second, Genius lived up to its name: whoever expected a modest event was dead wrong by any standards. Instead, it was a celebration of BIGNESS and BOLDNESS (including the self-created Genius Awards for accomplished professionals in high-tech marketing). It was like reliving the gilded era of booze, sushi, and geeky glam in the heyday of dot-coms.
“Web analytics is dead,” boasted David Thompson, former WebEx CMO and now Genius CEO, in his State of Marketing address, “Here comes web analytics.” Thompson is smart, a real marketing genius indeed, and the confidence he and his company’s launch party demonstrated was genuine. Charisma is definitely back in the CEO’s toolbox. San Francisco 2.0: High-tech is becoming pop again. And the best way to become a pop star is to behave like one.
Genius Incorporated™ (formerly MarketingGenius.com), a start-up providing on-demand customer intelligence solutions for sales and marketing professionals, announced that it has secured $5.1 million in Series “A” funding, led by Emergence Capital Partners and Walden International. The financing is being used to expand the management team and market its first product, scheduled for release in Q2 2006.
Genius™ says it will transform the way sales and marketing professionals qualify and serve customers on the web by instantly delivering one-to-one on-demand customer intelligence. Genius Incorporated was founded by David Thompson, former Chief Marketing Officer at WebEx, and Robert Seidl, former co-founder and CEO of Ceneca Software, which was acquired by Adobe Systems in 1995.
