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Entries in Word of Mouth (3)

Tuesday

09Mar2010

Five Schema-Busting Slides for Moving CEOs Beyond Search to Social

Tuesday, March 9, 2010 at 2:25PM

As Valeria Maltoni (@ConversationAge) put it so well in a recent post describing the increasing adoption of social media "marketers are finally putting their money where our conversation has been -- integrating social with their activities".

Even so, as a marketing consultant to smaller companies, I am approached by client firms that are still resistant to the "sea change" in the air. Frankly, some are still operating with 2007 market data (and schemas) in their heads. So it is I find myself called into executive strategy briefings and staff meetings and given a short time slot to plead the case for adopting social media.

Perhaps you know the drill? Fifteen "make it or break it" minutes to stand and present, survive a firing line of questions and, hopefully, actually survive long enough to open the door to discussing the company's own social media strategy. Catch: There's not enough time to show the Social Media Revolution video.

What I've found works very well in such situations is to have an opening set of market research slides, "schema-busting" slides I call them, which set a big picture marketing context, highlighting that our former Google-centric view of the online universe of the past decade is changing.

Yes- I refer to the ROI of Dell's social media use, Zappos, the brilliant customer service case studies of Comcast, the product innovation crowdsourcing by Starbucks, the even more brilliant crowdsourcing experiment by NetFlix and many others. However, too often, there can be a NIMI (Not-in-My-Industry) attitude that raises objections. So I launch usually with a more macro view of recent significant data. The sole purpose of these schema busters is to establish that significant changes are underfoot which require an alteration of the current marketing strategy, a realization of that "Ignore at your own peril" moment.

After all, why else would I be advocating a marketing strategy change?

Lately, I've had good results using the following slides.

Slide 1.

Social Media Sites are now among some off the top web properties. Dramatic changes have taken place since 2007.

Compete data | Erik Qualman's Socialnomics slideshare

There's no sense in being taken down on the first serve. As they say, begin on an unassailable point. Starting off with Compete, Quantcast or Nielsen data - authoritative market and web researchers - does just that. So I start by borrowing this slide from Erik Qualman's Socialnomics slideshare which shows Compete data to show that social media has changed significantly the top visited places on the net - places where people are sharing photos, product recommendations and links to articles with friends and colleagues. (Perhaps not the best time to point out that 'adultfriendfinder' will soon be replaced by Chatroullete though.)

This simple slide forces the conclusion " Dang, major tectonic shifts have happened since 2007." More importantly, it forces the question," Maybe we should revisit our strategy?"

Slide 2.

People online now spend 7 hours per month "friendcasting".

This is more time than spent on search engines Google & Yahoo, as well as MSN and YouTube combined.

In a sense there's nothing really shattering about the data actually as it reinforces what we've always known, Word of Mouth is the most powerful recommendation driver.

You can make a similar point by referencing Compete's latest data in terms of "attentional time" market share, shown in a more visual format.

Slide 3.

Facebook: More "attentional time" market share than Google or YahooSource: MarketingCharts, Feb 2010

What's cool about these last two slides is that they now set the stage for you to raise the question: Would you like your company to be part of this 7 hour per month conversation, one which is rising in attentional market share? Be part of the shared photos? The shared articles? The product reviews and recommendations?

Slide 4

Facebook is Besting Google in Driving Traffic to the main portal sites.

Based on data from Compete, Feb 2010

Compete Inc. and their director of online media and search Jessica Ong ignited a powder keg in revealing this data during a late February interview with the San Francisco Chronicle,

I say "powder keg" as this data ignited considerable reaction from within the SEO community. So be advised, Search and SEO aficionados within your audience may also take issue, especially as that group commands the lion's share of the digital marketing spend today. (It may help with any tumult here to say, to those who dispute that Google competes with Facebook and Twitter that more recently Google lists both as competitors in their latest 10-K report. )

Slide 5.

Social Networking is Passing Search in Driving Referral Traffic

Source: Compete January 2010

I first saw this slide just days ago during an enlightening presentation by Gigya CEO, David Yovanno at Gigya's "Social is The Next Search" webinar. While I've not actually used this slide yet, I will as it really delivers the coup de grace. In fact, if you only have one slide to show - this is it.

That social sharing is outdistancing search in referral traffic was pointed out earlier in a prescient blog post by ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick. He wrote

What would it mean if social networking over-took search in terms of sheer visits online? It would mark a sea-change on the internet. No longer would our dominant use of the web be seeking out web-pages built by HTML web-masters! Now we would all be publishing tiny little updates that perhaps only our friends and family care about. We'd be subscribing, more than we ever did by RSS, to syndicated updates from organizations of interest, large and small.

There's no doubt: there's an increasing intersection between search and social sharing. But perhaps it isn't that people are changing the way they search, so much as their friends are changing the way they find things. One of the more important questions you can open up at this point: Is the digital marketing spend allocation for social media vs search adjusted to these new market realities?

So there you have it: Five slides that can all be understood in five minutes. (Isn't it odd that we have to unroll the past conceptions, bust the old 2007 mental schemas, in order to see the best way to meet the future?)

What slides do you find work best to open the door to deeper social media discussions?

Postscript: My title notwithstanding, I am not advocating a wholesale revision of the search vs social media budgets planned. Just saying: The relative sizes may not be in line with the most recent 4-6 month marketing data.

5 Schema-busting Slides for Moving CEOs from Search to Social

Lisa Thorell |

How Steve Knox Disrupted My Schema of how Word-of-Mouth Works

Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 12:57PM

Manhead (c) BioRavenJan 28, 2010 4:45 pm EST

A few days ago Steve Knox , CEO of P&G's inside agency Tremor, wrote a most illuminating Ad Age post "Why Effective Word of Mouth Disrupts Schemas", describing the cognitive science behind getting consumers to talk about a product. I highly recommend your reading it as his examples and explanation deconstruct perfectly for online marketers how they too can successfully engineer Word-of-Mouth using disruptive messaging.

His starting point is this: Ordinarily the brain remains in a static state, relying on cognitive schemas or mental models of how the world works. Steve uses a simple example to illustrate a schema: Getting into your car, you're ready to drive on the right-hand side of the road - without even explicitly thinking about it. Driving on the right is part of your mental schema. So it is - when first driving in the UK- it is quite disruptive to see someone driving on the "wrong" side of the road. It's very disconcerting to your American driving schema -- and you tend to talk about it.

He then goes onto to describe a successful P&G Secret deodorant campaign leveraging these cognitive principles.

Here is an example of schema disruption and resultant word-of-mouth message from the Secret brand. The purpose of the Secret Clincal Strength brand is brought to life in our advertising through "Live Life. Don't Sweat It."

We uncovered the core schema in the category is the more active you are, the more you sweat and the worse you smell. We created a disruptive message of "The More You Move, the Better you Smell." It disrupts the schema first and then is supported by the brand technology (unique mositure-activated deodorants).

The 51,000 people who subsequently posted on P&G's Secret website were exploring the "disruptive schema" that, counter to popular belief, working out can intensify a deodorant's effectiveness, i.e when working out and wearing Secret, you smell better.

To me, a great litmus test of the schema-busting power of a tagline is to gauge whether it directly or indirectly raises the question "Can your product do this?" Connecting into cognitive science, the "this" in "Can your product do this?" must bust outside the current schema for the product category, namely, the current expectations of how a product works.

With litmus test in hand, I tried to find other examples. Taglines which speak to the fundamental definition of what is and what is not in a product category are of particular interest to me.

Disruptive Taglines - New School

Let's look at the Apple iPhone, whose brand popularity and overwhelming presence in online and offline discussions dominates channels today. Apple's tag line of course is "There's an app for that".

The somewhat techie word, "app" (for software "application") is the salient feature in the tagline. It may be a cell phone, but its software-enabled with an OS and, most importantly, tons of apps. (as of Nov 09, over 100,000) . In effect, this tagline raises the consumer's expectations of what a cell phone is and what it shoud do for you.

Nikon Coolpix S1000pj adHere's another example of a product whose tagline disrupts the schema. The Nikon Coolpix S1000pj introduced in August 2009, has yet to hit full stride, but given BlogPulse mentions is capturing a good share of Word-of-Mouth within the online digital camera community. It is in fact the world's first compact digital camera that includes a a small projector, allowing users to project a photo on a nearby wall. So friends and family no longer need to crowd around your small camera screen or wait to upload to a computer to view a photo.

The camera's tagline, "Your personal theater on the go" puts the new category-rivetting feature in the foreground. Encountering the Coolpix S1000pj, the product-researching consumer must re-look, learn and evaluate - and today, this usually generates a good deal of online discussion all along the way.

A tagline which successfully disrupts a product schema is like an upward knee thrust to the corner of the product category's gameboard, throwing competing products that lack the disruptive feature, outside of the consumer discussion. Is it a camera or is it your personal theater on the go? Is it a cell phone or everything-your-personal-computer-can-do plus more?

Now some of this isn't exactly new. Looking back, the power of schema-busting was exercised in some of advertising's most memorable taglines.

Disruptive Taglines - Old School

Source: TaglineGuru.com

The key difference today is that consumers can check and verify claimed schema busters. While the truthiness of that tagline will be tested in the online conversation sphere. we also see that it's also the marketers starter opportunity to guide that conversation.

For Steve Knox is right: Consumers generate much talk as they wrestle with their disrupted schemas, trying to reconcile something that initially defies their belief system, trying to verify a claim, determine if a new feature truly works or is useful and so on. Schema-busting products coupled with masterfully designed messaging can trigger these online conversations. But there's a catch. Creating the initial moment of confusion, the shake-your-head "This doesn't make sense" moment is precious and critical. It may be predictable from cognitve science, but its final potency is often determined by art and design.

Have a schema-buster to share?

Lisa Thorell |

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WOM

Friday

02Nov2007

Another E-Commerce Market Inversion: WOMing up Product Sales

Friday, November 2, 2007 at 10:57AM

A simplified but still useful view of today's E-commerce environment is that the world is divided into two discrete spaces: Places that sell and Places that provide news, reviews and ratings of the products or services for sale. Much of the PR (public relations) world infrastructure is in fact dedicated to connecting these two spaces, whether the reviews & ratings are from traditional print and broadcast, industry influencers, customers or new media such as blog pundits, social networks or podcast shows.

WOM as a Sales Supermagnet

Within the past three years or so, there's been a growing awareness of the role of Word of Mouth or WOM as an influence in customer purchases. And it isn't just any mouth that matters. There's a growing mass realization that WOM in the form of recommendations and testimonials from friends, family and co-workers may serve as a form of sales supermagnet, pulling forward a customer buy decision.

Here are some examples of data supporting the view of WOM as a sales supermagnet:

WOM%20by%20Purchase%20Type.jpg

According to a 2006 survey of by the Annenberg School of Communications and PR firm Ketchem, advice from friends and family is used by nearly half (43.7%) of consumers, while nearly one out of four (or 23.2%) follow advice from co-workers. The slide shows the strong impact of friends and family across a wide range of buy decisions (though significantly, not your cousin Harvey's stock tip to you)

A study by e-marketing expert, MarketingSherpa, cites that 86.9% of consumers say they trust a friend's recommendation over a review by a critic.
As described by the Center for Media Research, a recent survey by Deloitte Consumer Products Group finds that 62% of consumers read consumer-written online reviews - and significantly- 7 out of 10 pass this information onto family and friends.

As of a few months ago, the most popular application on Facebook was ilike. iLike’s music application enables Facebook users to:

Learn when one of their favorite artists is going on tour in their area, and see who among their Facebook friends will be attending.
Search and add streaming music from their favorite artists to their Facebook profile.
Discover new music by following what their friends like and via personalized recommendations of free MP3s.

Today's Rule-Changer: BazaareVoice's ShareThisTM

Enter: The WOM Supermagnet, tunneling customers from product review spaces to product sales.

In an Oct 19th press release, BazaarVoice launched ShareThis, a new service complementing their enterprise social commerce platform. (BazaareVoice's software enabling product reviews is already in use by the likes of Dell, Macy's, Overstock.com, PETCO, QVC and Sears.) In a nutshell, ShareThis is an app that integrates onto a retailer's product page within the review summary, as well as with each specific reviews. Consumers can click on a ShareThis icon to publish any review - their own or some else- to Facebook, Digg or del.icio.us. The published review includes the retailer's logo and the review itself, as well a direct link back to the retailer's web site.

What Rules Will It Change?

Applications like ShareThis and other social media apps promise to change the boundary between reading reviews of a product and purchasing it, directly transporting a reader from awareness and education into the purchase experience.

And indeed there's a lot of market. Only 25 percent of online retailers have incorporated customer reviews on their e-commerce sites, according to a January 2007 Forrester Research report. (The low adoption is because many e-tailers fear losing control over their marketing messages.)

Exactly What will it Change?

We believe apps like ShareThis, or more realistically, the open source clones that will follow, have the capability to trigger a host of market changes.

Proliferation of Consumer-generated Product Reviews. It will become common for an online purchaser, post two weeks after a product purchase, to receive an email including a widget, inviting them to post a review, enticing other prospective purchasers to cross the line.
Review Sites lose Ad Revenue. Because of this fundamental sea change, there will be less necessity for sellers to solicit formal expert reviews, forcing a contraction in the advertising spending on formal review sites.
Ecclipse of Blog Punditry. In this not-so-distant future, with so many genuine customers now enabled to post their reviews, we anticipate lower influence for blog pundits who currently hold much sway in product reviews.
Rise of Authenticators. Related to the above, we believe there will be increasing necessity to establish the authenticity of posted reviews, hence we expect the market for 3rd party clearing houses providing authentication systems verifying the credibility of reviewers, making transparent the identity of 'paid for' commenters. (To a certain extent,we have already seen this emerge in systems like the Technorati 'authority ranking' of posters - still vastly unexploited yet.)
"Blink and It's Gone" Product Cycles. Finally, with the capability for the "real scoop' on a hot new product or service being so widely disseminated, sales cycles of products are expected to shorten. (The good news is faster uptake and market penetration; the flip-side is still newer, hotter competitor's products also come up on the radar more quickly).

But We Already Knew All This!

In some ways, there is nothing new here. The buzz is on that buzz is working. Readers of Gladwell's The Tipping Point are familiar with the concept of 'mavens', people who set cultural trends, who know what's cool before the rest of the world even knows it exists. Or 'connectors', people with immense rolodexes, who can spread a trend extremely widely and quickly. And of course, the sales power behind "people like me" reviews has been well appreciated since Amazon's succcessful software feature, "People who bought this book also bought...". Simply put, consumers have a keen interest in what people like them (or who'd they like to be) are buying.

In a social media network setting, the viral spread of purchasing excitement has in fact become a core goal on online retailers. The success of Woot.com and Stylehive.com amply demonstrates the point: When surrounded by a community of "think-alot-alikers", a pre-purchaser's uncertainty and doubt can be gloriously swept aside in a wave of enthusiasm, a rapid flow of information including knowing "what's truly cool", all culminating in a purchase partially motivated to be cool too. For what some of these retailers have learned is that there's a double cachet: Buy a cool product and you can turn your friends onto the product. (Voila- you're a maven!)

For marketers, what is different about the new conversational marketing tools and what promises an exciting new e-commerce future is simply this: The space and time between learning about a product and buying it is contracting rapidly.

Off The Grid PR

Entries in Word of Mouth (3)