Quantifying the Impact of Social Media: Where the Edelman White Paper Got it Right, Got it Wrong and What We Should Do Next
January 31, 2008 | 23 Comments
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Earlier this month, Jonny Bentwood of Edelman published “Distributed Influence: Quantifying the Impact of Social Media.” Edelman gets picked on a lot (often deservedly so) for the highly visible mistakes they’ve made in the social media space, but there’s no question that they are both deeply involved and pretty darn thoughtful on the topic. This white paper fits the latter; it was a thoughtful analysis by some major players in the game on how you measure online influence.
What they got right:
1. This white paper builds on the concept of a Social Media Index, which is an effort to get all of us in this space to think about a standard way of measuring of influence. The index is not perfect (as they openly admit), but it is thought provoking. It’s a good starting point and a must read.
2. They gave some additional insight into how meme’s get started, concluding that there are:
- meme starters,
- meme spreaders,
- meme adapters,
- meme commentators, and
- meme readers.
This is analogous to Forrester’s Social Technographics Ladder, which measures web participation from low to high as:
- Inactives (52%) –>
- Spectators (33%) –>
- Joiners (19%) –>
- Collectors (15%) –>
- Critics (19%) –>
- Creators (13%).
3. They begin an interesting discussion that influence as measured by the power of an individual isn’t the way to go, but by the power of the idea and how much it actively moves within the space. Credit to Jeff Jarvis for that thinking, which I think is 100% right. This is similar to what Radian6 does in their monitoring tool when they allow you to search content by the activity surrounding it (i.e., total comments, unique commenters, etc.). I firmly believe that this is likely to be more useful than chasing an amorphous, ever-changing group of influencers for reasons I explain below.
What they got wrong:
Early on Bentwood acknowledges that this white paper doesn’t even try to be the definitive answer we’ve all been looking for, but another piece of the conversation. It’s a valuable one at that. These “got it wrong” statements are meant in the same way: to contribute another series of thoughts to this conversation, not to criticize even in a small way. So here goes:
1. For the bulk of this white paper, the roundtable seems to conclude that influencers are influencers by their very nature. I don’t believe this is true.
Relationships (both online and off) are contextual. A powerful influencer in one situation is a meek influencee (or someone who simply doesn’t care) in another situation. Steve Rubel has influence in social media conversations, but likely has no influence in conversations regarding women’s shoes, vitamins, Bollywood, etc. (Steve, if you are, in fact, a player in the women’s shoe world, more power to you, but hopefully the point is well made.
2. Social networks and trend starters are too complicated to ever be identified in advance.
That “influencers” exist and “do their thing” is the premise of the Tipping Point, a favorite book of mine. But we all know (or hopefully should know) that the world is vastly more complicated than that. Duncan Watts of Yahoo has done some groundbreaking research on social network behavior that suggests that the power of the idea is in the context of the moment, and the influencer on a given idea varies widely and unpredictably. As a result, we should not be trying to pin down the “powerful people” as some fixed set (n=what?), but rather build better systems to help us quickly identify powerful people by topic.
3. Personality-type is not the horse we should be betting on.
According to Bentwood, the roundtable concluded that “a system equivalent to Myers Briggs was needed for micro-communications. This would enable people to be able to map target media, meme creation, consumption and sharing habits.” In my view, that sort of effort would miss the boat entirely and be of dubious value. As someone who works in a multi-client social media agency, I have to work within conversations by topic. I believe that people’s passions and influence are not innate qualities of the individual that make them either an influencer or an influencible, but rather vary widely based on their comfort in and knowledge of a particular topic relative to others in the discussion. (Think of the bossy know-it-all around the office who is meek and mild when his big brother is around.)
Whether they ever choose to participate may relate to their personality type, but among those willing to participate, influence-level is not fixed. Max Kalehoff’s statement in the white paper that, “You don’t go for the most influential but the most easily influenced” is interesting, but misdirected and sounds suspiciously like targeting 1.0. (I acknowledge that I don’t know the context of Max’s statement, so I may have missed some nuance he injected.)
What we should do about it:
Based on all this, what do we do about it? What’s the ideal situation for moving forward? Here are my thoughts to add to the conversation:
1) To move the social media index forward, we’ll need a system that serves as the white pages of social media with RSS.
In other words, one of us needs to build an open directory into which people can voluntarily put their various online personas (blog, Facebook ID, Flickr account, LinkedIn, Twitter name, Utterz account, etc. etc. etc.). There’s no question that everyone would not do this, but social media types are openly creating online personalities and want to be found, so active “creators” users would. While Naymz and a few others do something similar to this, the utility comes not from just a “look-up” feature, but the ability to use this data to analyze contribution levels. (The social media index is interesting, but to make it work in the long-tail we have to be able to both automate it and use it as a tool within a monitoring platform.) So we’ve got to be able to allow folks to query this data in an automated fashion as part of our monitoring.
2) With the dataset we’ve created in Step 1, we will be able to improve our online monitoring so can identify both the most virulent ideas that are percolating within each conversation (measured by the activity around the idea including comments, photo tags, unique commentors, length of the comment, etc.) and cross reference it with the most active contributors in each conversation (by volume of contribution, across multiple platforms and media type).
3. If we then build an algorithm that weights the activity around contributions (audience receptivity to a contributor as measured by their engaging with that contribution) with volume of contributions (across multiple media like blogs, Tweets, Flickr tags, etc.), we’ll have a useable, ever-changing snapshot of which individuals are controlling and guiding a particular topic at a particular time. Ideally, this system would allow you to adjust weights like a graphic equalizer to get different outcomes depending on exactly what you’re trying to learn with your search.
Summary
When you work for a social media agency, you end up participating with the “true believers” in the world (like the folks on this roundtable), but you also participate with the openly skeptical and the cautiously optimistic. They neither know nor care who Robert Scoble is and their universe (online or off) is unlikely to intersect with his. But I firmly believe that there are billions of interesting conversations taking place out there, being steered (intentionally and unintentionally) by hundreds of millions of micro-influencers. To chase them all as somehow wired differently than us is not the way to go. To have better tools by which to find them within the conversations just as you need to is the way to go.
With that, I’d like to tag Jeremiah Owyang for his thoughts on the concept of context-based influence versus personality-based influence. I’d also like to tag Duncan Watts for his thoughts (although I can’t seem to find his actual blog, so doubt he’ll see this). I’ve likely bastardized and twisted his brilliant thinking into something he’ll barely recognize. I’m always curious as to what Geoff Livingston thinks. And, finally, of course, since I’m contributing to a roundtable that I did not attend, I’d love to hear from the actual participants, including Jonny Bentwood, Max Kalehoff, Sarah Petersen (who is either too shy to blog or needs some SEO help), Henry Copeland, Jeff Jarvis, Steve Rubel, Keith O’Brien, Richard Edelman, Rick Murray (another hidden/nonexistent blog–irony noted), David Dunne, Peter Kim, Charlene Li, and Dr. Walter Carl (congrats on the baby by the way–she’s very cute).
Now, who wants to build this tool I described? I’d certainly pay to subscribe to it… Heck maybe we’ll build it, who knows…
Why I’m Voting for Ed in 08…
December 14, 2007 | Leave a Comment
I’ve officially decided that I’m voting for Ed in 2008. And yes, I admit that this decision is primarily on the premises of the campaign’s marketing and social media efforts. But let me explain….
So with this being said, I encourage you to check it out and see a great example of a campaign that merged social media marketing tactics with traditional marketing tactics. And if you visit the site my teacher friend advises you to order a kit - if nothing else for the “sturdy and reliable” box.
Molson Beer Ends Facebook Contest After Objections
November 27, 2007 | 1 Comment
“Use Facebook to share pictures of yourself using our product and we’ll give the winner a trip for five to Cancun.”
Ok, not a bad idea. Fun enough. Innocent enough. Unless, that is, you’re Molson beer and colleges in Canada get really irked that you’re encouraging irresponsible drinking. So maybe the colleges are a bit oversensitive, but you play the good corporate citizen card, punt and pull the contest.
I mean, it’s not like Molson encourages Canadian college kids to drink their beer, right? (Pay no attention to the actual Molson ad below…) But in Molson’s defense, isn’t the drinking age in Canada aligned almost perfectly with freshman year??
Backlash Against Facebook’s “Beacon” Begins
November 27, 2007 | 3 Comments
It’s the holiday’s right? A time for merrily buying Christmas gifts, Hanukkah gifts, Kwanzaa gifts (and, if you’re wondering, time for buying MY birthday present–the 29th of December, write it down…).
Imagine this scenario. A Facebook member, you buy a nice pair of leather gloves from Overstock.com for your boyfriend for Hanukkah. A while later, **poof**, your choice is sent out in your news feed–a feed that broadcasts to all your friends, including er, um, that boyfriend. Dang!
That’s exactly what happened to Matthew Helfgott’s girlfriend, he says. Another couple had their choice of movie broadcast on their feed because they bought the tickets at Fandango. This was ok, they said, because they were seeing “No Country for Old Men.” But here’s the best line of the article:
“What if I was seeing ‘Fred Claus‘? That would have been much more embarrassing. At least this was a prestigious movie.”
While his reaction is funny, people are starting to see why Facebook’s new advertising platform is named “Beacon” (see definition of beacon if you don’t get that). Many bloggers are unhappy about it. Link 1. Link 2. Link 3. And it can send news about things you do away from Facebook to your Facebook friends.
“Add 3 lines of code and reach millions of users,” Facebook says.
As someone who runs a social media agency, I love this idea. What an opportunity to market on a social media platform. What a great way to let the confidence of a friend influence buying decisions. This should be powerful stuff.
But as someone who believes that social media marketing is more than being about a new place to run ads, I think this solution was a little too easy for Facebook. I believe they rushed it out to capitalize on their otherwise great momentum and to prove to people that they could monetize their success.
What this backlash may be showing, however, is just how hard it will be for Facebook to ever monetize their success to the point that they can justify their current valuation. They may yet figure it out, as they’ve done a lot right. But if the Beacon backlash continues, it could be seriously brand damaging for Facebook. I think this is the first of many mainstream articles about unintended consequences.
Here’s a prediction: A boss somewhere is going to notice on a news feed some purchases by his co-worker that align with times he was supposed to be working. Watch for that article. Just like that intern who got Facebook-busted for the Halloween party, and he didn’t have a Beacon shouting about it…
What do you think? Is Beacon the opening that social media agencies and social media marketers have been looking for? Or is a fairly significant mistake by Facebook that needs to be tweaked?
Using Social Media as Part of a Product Launch
October 22, 2007 | 9 Comments
Conventional wisdom about social media marketing includes a few truisms, among them:
1. Social media marketing is a slow, steady burn.
2. It’s hard to turn social media marketing all the way up, like you can with a big ad buy or a big PR push.
3. Social media marketing isn’t about selling, it’s about talking about the topic and hoping sales will gravitate to you.
Something Joseph Jaffe has been doing all day Sunday turns that conventional wisdom on its ear. Joseph has a new book, called Join the Conversation, a fact I learned because I follow him on Twitter. I’ve not read it yet, but it’s in the same area as the book I’m finishing up.
So he has a new book. He wants to sell them. He wants to sell a lot, quickly. So he thinks, I guess, “I’m pretty well versed on this social networking/social media stuff. What if I unleash all of it at once? Maybe I can sell a bunch of books all at once and shoot up the best seller charts at Amazon.com.” Ok, gotta give him props. That’s brilliant. Here’s what he’s done that you can learn from:
1. Set up a Facebook event, even though it’s not a traditional “event”
2. Do some video blogging to explain what you’re doing and, heck, plug your customer while you’re at it.
3. Be available using audio chat using Skype
4. Do blogging and podcasting about it.
5. Provide a feedback loop (in his case, writing on the Facebook event wall).
According to his Twitter feed, it’s working well. He’s currently at #26 overall and is the second best selling business book, behind only Alan Greenspan. That’s pretty cool.
So what did Joseph do to kick-start his book sales using a social media marketing campaign? Here are the lessons:
1. He built personal credibility online, well before he wanted anything. (515 people, including me, follow him on Twitter.)
2. He used a wide variety of tools and unleashed them all at once.
3. He made it fun and made it feel like a big group activity even though he’s the sole beneficiary. (He is donating the affiliate fees today, which is nice, but honestly, this benefits only him.)
4. He didn’t pretend to be doing anything other than what he was doing.
5. He didn’t ask anything too hard–you’re just buying a book, which is likely to be pretty decent.
These lessons go well beyond book selling. You can use social media to kick off a campaign after all, IF you follow these rules and IF you’ve invested in the space properly before you do. If you’re a chief marketing officer (CMO) still waiting to figure this whole social media thing out, the boat is sailing. Jump on board now and start figuring it out. If you don’t know how, get help. Call me. It’s what we do. (Gratuitous plug…)
I haven’t bought Join the Conversation yet, but since it’s a topic I’m very interested in and since I’ve got to give Joseph props for being clever enough to figure out this little ploy of his, I think I’ll go buy it now, and write on his wall…
Shoutlet Is Well-Worth Checking Out
October 16, 2007 | 2 Comments
In my earlier post, “Is Shoutlet Overselling Itself,” I took a look at the Shoutlet website after their product launch announcement and
wondered aloud, basically, “What is this thing? Does it work? Or is it hype?”
Jason Weaver, CEO of Sway, the company that developed Shoutlet, was listening and last week offered a couple of us from the Ignite Social Media team a demo of the technology conducted by him and Jason Konz.
Here’s what I thought after that demo:
Shoutlet is an evolving product that has good features today and a well-thought out plan for additional features going forward. The Sway/Shoutlet team understands the space, is realistic and are putting together a product that will save social media agencies and social media practitioners a lot of time. It may not allow you to do anything that you couldn’t do before, but it does seem like it will allow you to do much more of it, much more easily, more quickly, and with one place to go to measure your efforts.
Basically, what it does is helps you distribute your content more easily, via email, via podcast, via RSS, across multiple social networks and multiple content distribution platforms and more. Here’s one easy example: You’ve got a video you’d like to have on 5 different sites. Upload it each time and your done. Or upload it once via Shoutlet and your done faster and you can track it in one place. Which one is easier?
They also have pretty easy widget creation tools that can work either embedded on websites or on a desktop. You can then send updated content to these widgets as you wish. Simple. Cool.
What I like about it too is a coming feature that will allow you to take a campaign of a lot of different pieces and shout them out simultaneously across email, podcast, RSS, video, widget updates, etc. etc.
So, Jason/Jason, and the rest of the Shoutlet team, I said in the first post that: “I may yet be their biggest fan and biggest client.” We’ll work on the last part, but I can say at this point that I think you’re on to something that may well end up as an essential tool for a social media agency like Ignite.
In the Battle of the Sandwich, will Social Media Win?
October 16, 2007 | 1 Comment
Subway, Jimmy John’s and Erbert and Gerbert’s Subs and Clubs. Three companies with three degrees of national recognition and three very different marketing approaches to selling pretty similar turkey sandwiches.
Everyone is familiar with Jared, the Subway guy, and his sub diet, thanks to a marketing campaign that has stormed the airwaves for the past few years, most recently including a NFL star athlete fueled by the same ham and turkey combo that Jared chooses. But not every sandwich shop has the advertising budget for national 30-second prime time spots, with celebrities in tow.
Jimmy Johns takes a guerrilla marketing approach, stopping by our office at 3:30 on Thursday afternoon to ask us whether we want a veggie, turkey or ham sample sized sub right as the mid-afternoon dreariness sets in. Easily the most craving inducing campaign as of yet, but does it really seem economical?
Lastly, Erbert and Gerbert’s Subs and Clubs, an emerging sub shop in the Midwest who has turned to social media. One hundred and fifty T-shirts, one admirable iron, 9 hours of standing and one male model produced a YouTube video that is sure to put them on the map. An obsession with flipbooks, the abundant availability of humans and a story of a boy’s hunt for a sandwich is the concept of this viral marketing campaign that a friend recently sent me. Since when does an advertisement for a sandwich get passed around? Since social media came to town.
Click here to see how the commercial was made.
Did Target Steal Our Social Media Marketing Playbook?
October 11, 2007 | 3 Comments
Back in August, we wrote a post about how Wal-mart’s latest social media marketing campaign was inherently flawed. We predicted that it would, once again, blow up in the retail giant’s face. (Note to the folks in Bentonville: Let Edelman focus on the traditional PR. Give us a call on the social media marketing stuff, k?)
Here’s what we said then, in a nutshell: This campaign won’t work because Wal-mart is talking “style” when they are known for “practical.” The campaign should focus on the utility of trying to move to a dorm. Alas, it was too late for them to listen.
But Target, on the other hand, did listen. (Note: Check with legal, Do they owe us royalties?)
As it happens, while Wal-mart was prattling on about something they don’t understand, Target was listening! (See Listening is Social Media Step One on how important that is.) They began to understand the flow of the conversation among incoming freshman. They began to understand the Facebook platform and how conversations occur there. They wisely noted:
“We aren’t there so much to tell a story, but to put on a party, giving the students a platform for social interaction.” Any content provided by a marketer in such a setting “needs to work as social currency. … Whatever story there is, it’s mostly told by the users, not by the brand.”
Their Facebook page was about dorm room survival. They had practical tips, they had photos, they (gasp) let users upload their own photos in place of the ones they carefully designed first.
They made the marketing very subtle and were rewarded by posts from people saying how much they love Target (See that: brand evangelists doing the marketing work for you, if you (a) deserve it and (b) give them the platform on which to do it.)
Wal-mart, on the other hand, had vicious wall posts slamming their corporate practices, for example.
“Wal-Mart is toxic to communities and livelihoods.”
There’s so much right with what Target did and so much wrong with what Wal-mart did, I could go on for days (maybe I have already), but here’s 5 points to take away from this (different than our earlier 5 Steps to Rolling Out a Social Media Campaign):
- Listen first. Social media marketing is cocktail party dialogue. When you enter a new group, you listen politely first.
- Talk on your prospects’ terms. Back to the cocktail party analogy. Incoming freshman were talking about their fear of being properly prepared for dorm life. Wal-mart said, “Let’s talk style!” Target said, “Let’s talk survival.”
- Understand the value you bring. There are a lot of people who hate Wal-mart. This doesn’t preclude Wal-mart from participating in social media, but they ignore this truth repeatedly and get slammed for it. They don’t understand the value they bring. Target, on the other hand, doesn’t have that baggage, and played their “we’re the place you can get cool, functional stuff pretty cheap” card beautifully.
- Social media campaigns can cost a fair amount. Target budgeted $500,000 for their campaign. Facebook’s media kit talks about minimum investments of $50,000 per month. People think of social media as “free” and it can be. But you’ve still got to budget for time, at a minimum, and if you want to buy you’re way onto a media platform like Facebook or MySpace, you still need a budget of some kind.
- ROI measurements are different, and not very evolved. Target had 7,176 members of their group by September 31. That’s great, right. If you calculate a CPM (cost per thousand) relative to members, the CPM is over $69,000. Of course, CPM is more traditionally applied to “impressions” which were no doubt higher. But the point is, the value of over 7,000 people engaging with your brand in a positive way is much, much higher than 7,000 people being exposed to an ad. The ROI calculations, however, are still being fleshed out.
Kudos to Target for getting it. That will pay dividends now and in the future.
Oh, and their campaign started July. I guess they don’t owe us royalties… Dang…
Breaking Down Viral Marketing
October 10, 2007 | Leave a Comment
This morning I found an excellent post written by Karl Long over at ExperienceCurve discussing his ideas on co-creative marketing, a concept he feels is similiar to viral marketing but as he put it “more holistic”, as it builds value over time through user
contributions.
Truthfully it is hard if not impossible to pinpoint what causes something to “go viral”, or causes something to go one step further as co-creative - but we do learn a lot from breaking down some of the key components of these campaigns. In Karl’s post he does a great job outlining what he believes to be the three components of co-creative marketing: Shareable, Mashable, and Hackable.
He goes into great depth describing each of these in his article so I’ll let you read it for yourselves- but I do think it causes some questions to arise that regardless of whether you are executing a social media campaign currently or not - we all need to consider.
1. Does your website have RSS feeds? Why not?
2. Do you have valuable industry information that you are hoarding? Why aren’t you sharing with customers or prospects?
3. How are customers bringing added value to your product? Are they customizing? Are they using your products in new ways? If so, what are you doing to share this to other customers and prospects?
These are just a few of the many considerations that come to my mind, but the basic consensus is this - are you sharing? Are you making it easier to spread your message?
As always, let me know if you have anything else to add or revise.
Why Social Media Marketing is Hard for Corporations
October 5, 2007 | 6 Comments
Geoff Livingston over at The Buzz Bin has an interesting post about how savoir-faire is needed in social media marketing, and how hard it is for companies to be genuine. He says, correctly, that relationship building is about trust and perhaps this is why the Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) of the world are having a hard time grasping social media.
That’s all true, and easy to say, until you’ve been in charge of marketing in an organization. Suddenly, how “it could be so hard” becomes obvious. The system around the CMO has not historically valued long, patient, frank, two-way dialogue. Far from it.
Advertising maintains its appeal to the CMO because he/she can control and measure it, you can buy as much “noise” as you want. PR has similarities, too. But with social media, the people you’re “targeting” have to want to talk about you. When you work for a social media agency, you learn pretty quickly that “targets” don’t have to want to talk about your client’s product. Or they may not want to today. But the CMO is being asked to move product–today.
Over the last 40 years we’ve all gotten away from the true “marketplace” mentality (like the picture here…) in which an exchange is negotiated via two-way communication). Professional marketers were trained to talk. They were the “spinners”, the ones who could come up with the talking points, the unique selling proposition. Whether a customer was ready to listen wasn’t a big concern. We just had to figure out what shows they were watching and hope they stayed on the couch.
Now, fairly suddenly, the “marketplace” concept is coming back through social media, and people are talking about the principles of community building. Accurate, all of it, but also a sea change. I have a Masters Degree in Public Communications that I got only about 11 years ago. We never once talked about community building. We basically talked message packaging…
Social media marketing is coming, more slowly than maybe it should. And big marketers are used to having control and doing big campaigns. That means they are going to make big mistakes. Should we call them on those mistakes? Abso-lutely. That’s what we do on this site (Example 1. Example 2.). But we also respect the ones that have their toes in the water, because some of them are getting it right (Example 1. Example 2.). And when they get it right, it makes communicating with these companies that much better. Hang in there.
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