A timely post from AdAge this week reminds us of the continuing importance of the humble online product review: with all the fuss about Twitter and Facebook, it can be easy to forget that the specificity and focus of reviews can be a godsend to brands trying to tease quality feedback out of social media. Initially I baulked at the description of reviews as a ‘marketing tool’, but thankfully the companies interviewed in the article are all using the comments to listen and actually effect change from within, rather than trying to spam or intervene. Of course, however:
“Even if reviews offer structured data, it’s not easy to make them an integral part of a company’s internal process and the ones who do have well-defined methods… Even before Samsung added reviews to its site, it launched an internal process for disseminating that information, said Kris Narayanan, director-marketing at Samsung Electronics America, and that included getting it in the hands of product managers and marketing managers as well as the service and support group. And in some cases, they’ll make sure they filter into the R&D group.”
It’s not easy, but it’s worth it. Getting understanding and buy-in from all areas of a business is essential. Talking with each department face-to-face about their hopes, fears and priorities means that reports and insights can be tailored to be relevant to them, and helps identify individuals who can take responsibility for pushing through change as a result. When each group then sees how their efforts feed back into a greater mechanism of consumer-led change and dialogue spreading across the company, it inspires real belief and investment in the approach.
During a series of such interviews last week, one comment reminded me how important the small changes can be within a company. Most brands have one or two big problem areas or weaknesses which they expect to be attacked online and know they will have to work on long-term, but tackling and resolving a number of more minor niggles each week can make a huge difference to both consumers and employees. Prioritising is important, but sometimes you need to start with the small stuff so that change starts to happen immediately, building faith that greater transformation is possible - and worth waiting for.
Now Twitter isn’t the most beautiful of sites ordinarily and, as if to address this, there is a creative elite who take the fundamentals of the micro-blogging site and repackage the whole thing with style in mind. Among the six are a few I’d seen before, notably Twistori, a site I have lost time to; it’s addictive beyond belief. Especially when you start trying to get your own tweet on there.
As the Iranian protests remind us just how powerful - and threatening - a medium social media can be, questions around what an open and democratic society means in the age of Web 2.0 have never been more timely. So Barcamp Transparency, created and organised by our own ethicist Sylwia (who you can find tweeting here or blogging here) and sponsored by 1000heads, promises to prompt some seriously interesting discussion and debate.
On Sunday 26th July in the University of Oxford Club, participants from all sorts of backgrounds and interests will collaborate to find ways to improve transparency in government, social media ethics and cyber activism. Attendance is free and all we ask is that you bring plenty of ideas and a willingness to tackle big questions in a bold and informed way. You can reserve tickets for both the Oxford event and the parallel virtual event here - because for those who can’t make it we’ll be discussing the same issues at 7pm on July 24th in this dedicated FriendFeed room, with further specific rooms for discussions on open government, cyber-activism and social media ethics.
Transparency, open dialogue and ethics have always been at heart of everything we do at 1000heads, and the issues and implications are only getting more urgent and complex. We can’t wait to get your take on it, and we’ll be feeding back the opinions, case studies and suggestions that emerge as the debate gets underway.
Date: Wednesday 24th to Saturday 28th June. Location: the sun-soaked Spanish city of Malaga. Event: four days of workshops, keynote speeches, case studies and seriously good socialising with 154 representatives from the world’s best and most interesting museums, galleries and art spaces. Communicating the Museum 2009, organised by Corinne Estrada from Agenda and Damien Whitmore from The V&A, aimed to show cultural institutions why and how to use social networks to transform their relationships with their visitors - and I was in the thick of it, complete with tinto de verano, sunburned shoulders and a massive cold which almost prevented me from speaking at all.
I squeezed out just enough volume on Thursday lunchtime to join a panel of experts discussing ‘How to Be Performant: Budgets, Content and Resources’ - the measurement and ROI of social media marketing. As the majority of the audience came from cash-strapped and publicly funded institutions, concerns around value and investment were understandable; but it was great to see participants gradually alter their perception of word of mouth as a cheap and trend-led free-for-all, to a skilled and sustained strategy based on quality, not quantity. One marketing head nailed it in a eureka moment: “we’re basically saying do less, but better.”
My keynote speech on ‘Shattering the Museum Monologue: listening to, engaging with and measuring word of mouth as the future of museum advocacy’ wasn’t scheduled until the very end of the conference (by which time the projector was having some major tantrums) but I was delighted that most people not only seemed to stay awake but had some brilliant questions and insights about the 1000heads approach, and our work on the Cold War Modern exhibition with The V&A. For any participants who would like an aide memoire or anyone else interested in getting a glimpse of what I covered, you can download the presentation here.
More importantly, away from the limelight, I learned so much from listening to everyone else across the four days. Unsurprisingly, the big barrier for these publicly funded institutions is internal structure and buy-in, particularly from curators afraid of relinquishing intellectual control over their content. But there is also some amazing work going on out there which is completely focused around giving excellent visitor experiences, backed up by social media technologies. At the blue sky thinking end of the spectrum, I loved the work Shelley Bernstein and Will Cary are doing at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Their 1stFans social media membership scheme is persuading a whole new audience that the museum is an innovative, interactive and social space, by both listening to their needs and engaging in dialogue around their passions using an exclusive Twitter feed as well as a number of other projects using video, blogging, and events in the museum itself. For an example of their genius Twitter collaboration with artist An Xiao, watch below.
For the best impression of how the conference unfolded in real time, and to see how people are digesting the aftermath, check out the #ctm09 hashtag stream on Twitter, where both participants and remote observers have been weighing in with comments and questions. I can’t wait to continue some of the conversations I started in Malaga. It was so evident that these are people who really, really love what they do - and who are eager to find a way to finally give a voice to their visitors who feel the same way.
Steven Hodson has followed up his post at Shooting at Bubbles about TweetPsych with a piece for the Inquisitr on the same subject. It basically sees him getting a little twitchy about being profiled in a psychoanalytical fashion by the content of his Twitter feed.
In Steven’s words, the site “analyzes your last 1,000 tweets where a custom mix of Regressive Imagery Dictionary (RID), Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and some of creator Dan Zerralla’s own Twitter analysis framework as well as a Porter stemming algorithm to come up with a profile of the type of person you are.” These are words that he describes as psycho-babble, certainly a fair assessment. All you really need to know about the site is this – enter your username and be given in return a psychological breakdown.
It’s an interesting concept, being broken down by the content of 140 character snippets. Dan’s recently added psychological matches, with the process returning five matches to your mental state and also the option to create a psychological profile. This allows you to enter a URL and find 50 matches cerebrally similar to the ‘psycho-graphic’ profile TweetPsych makes of the site. Ideal for finding followers?
Now, I found TweetPsych all rather fun, and discovering I swear more than I should wasn’t exactly a revelation. Nevertheless before you delve, heed Steven’s concerns; “this is treading a pretty touchy area and one I’m not sure I like the idea of entering, even if just for yucks.”
Back in the day, bloggers were heralded as the new journalists, and subjected to all kinds of spammy PR approaches that didn’t respect their unique culture and aims. Nowadays, marketers are much more skilled at approaching them in a more personalised and mutually beneficial way, but the new fear is whether bloggers are the ones brands should be pursuing after all. Measurements of blog influence are becoming increasingly nonsensical, but it can be even harder to define the influence of those using other venues.
As always, a good rule of thumb is to look behind the tools to the individuals using them. Bloggers still have a unique and defined position in social media, and microblogging isn’t just an ‘evolution’ of blogging. Historically, bloggers have identified themselves in a more self-conscious way than tweeters, or social networkers, or forum members. They invest more time and space in constructing their own view of the world, in a more sustained and permanent way. They encourage people to migrate to their own property, rather than co-existing on one shared platform, and maintain a more rigid hierarchy of author and commentor as opposed to conversational free-for-all.
This doesn’t mean that blogging is in danger now that we’re all more semiotically promiscuous than we were when blogs first came on the scene. Just as in real life we sometimes want an in-depth discussion about Socrates on the sofa, and at other times we want to toss out a truism about Madonna at the bar, there will always be space for all forms of self-expression on the web. Brands need to always look at who is talking and what their passions are, and then tailor their word of mouth strategies to engage with different people at different stages of the campaign. A link to a twitpic of an exclusive new product has a different appeal, audience, and home on the net than a detailed review of a two-hour hands-on trial session organised by a brand.
We’ll probably be writing a nostalgic piece about Twitter in a couple of years, but I can guarantee that people will still be talking, sharing, recommending, on all the different platforms at their disposal, just as they always have. The fuss about ‘hot’ and ‘obsolete’ platforms is actually driven by anxiety over measurement - how marketers can keep a handle on the influence and effects of new tools. That’s understandable, but that fear shouldn’t stop brands from embracing and utilising all platforms in a flexible and inclusive way.
I’m delighted to end the week with the announcement that Tourism New South Wales have appointed 1000heads to help them build a word of mouth and social media strategy to promote the area, currently focusing on Sydney. Following on from our work in Australia with STA Travel, we relish the opportunity to add to our global network of clients who are investing in sustained, two-way conversations with their consumers - particularly within a region that has so much to offer. And I’m not just talking about sunshine. There’s some seriously good stuff going on in Sydney, and we can’t wait to get passionate people experiencing it, sharing it, and helping to shape it.
So if you’re interested in Sydney, word of mouth, social media, or all three, come and talk to us at Bondi on Thames, an all day event next Wednesday 24th June on London’s Southbank where pale, rained-upon Brits can get a slice of Sydney beach lifestyle, complete with frisbee, volleyball, treasure hunts and a chance to win a trip to the real Bondi. Drop us a tweet or an email so we know to look out for you; bikinis optional, but definitely preferred.
It’s a bold statement to suggest that Steven Stills, ranked #28 in Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time, was incorrect in his belief that if you can’t be with the one you love, then love the one you’re with. Nevertheless, Seth Godin has applied this to the world of word of mouth, found it not to be the case, and made a point that’s on the money.
Founder of BzzAgent, Dave Balter, created the term ‘scalejacking‘ which is what got Seth thinking (and quoting lyrics). To ’scalejack’ is, as he explains, the craving for numbers - a “churn and burn mentality” by marketers when it comes to getting the masses on board for their latest bright idea.
“Marketers were raised on the scale of mass - TV, radio, newspapers [...]. The internet turns this upside down. The internet is about who, not how many. The internet lets you take really good care of 100 people instead of harassing 2,000.”
In social media as in the real world, people love to moan. We thrive on it. Bitching is the lynchpin of many a female relationship; griping the glue of many a session down the pub. I remind clients of this when they panic at the sight of social media users laying into them with glee. It’s natural; it’s inevitable; and, most importantly, it’s an incredible asset for companies that want to offer the products and services their customers are crying out for.
Last night’s episode of I’m Running Sainsbury’s, the Channel 4 series in which employees try to improve the supermarket giant, showed the power of harnessing negative WOM in the right way (you can watch it again here). Realising that customers are much happier if they are freely allowed to complain - so long as they also feel listened to, and see that their comments have practical effect - Checkout Manager Niall Dobson set up an in-branch surgery to actually encourage shoppers to moan more, not less. Niall, it turned out, did good.
The principle - don’t fear negative WOM but embrace and use it - holds true online, but the difference is that social media is not a branch of your company, or a customer services department. Yes, you could use a brand Twitter feed or Facebook page to pick up on or deal with individual enquiries, but people usually don’t want brands to barge into their own venues and spaces - when they do, it often degenerates into an argument or escalates the problem. This is why we tell our clients: don’t try and change the conversation, change yourselves. Once you’ve done that, more positive conversation will follow, as long as you’re listening, adapting, and then proactively engaging people with your improvement and growth.
The good thing is that people who are complaining are in fact people who still care about your brand. If nobody’s talking about you - or if the conversation is all boring, emotionally neutral, repurposed press releases or technical specs - that’s when you need to worry.
If you read just one post this week, make it Lingering, Benjamin Kunkel’s brilliantly written and thoughtful essay on the ways in which social media is changing our behaviour. Kunkel grapples with what he calls the semiotic promiscuity fostered by the web, whereby truckloads of ever ’shorter, more frequent, more spontaneous, and more casual’ content seduce us with ‘novelty, variety, excitement’ so that ’shallow and ephemeral relationships supplant deeper and more lasting ones’. It’s a fear shared by Joseph Jaffe, who has been mourning the death of the blog and the hegemony of Twitter on Marketing Profs Daily Fix.
The sentiments will ring true for a lot of people (although Andrew Seal of Conversational Reading has been quick to publish a rebuttal). The question is how we can make this landscape work for us. At 1000heads, we have found that fostering deeper and lasting relationships with consumers - and taking their experiences, passions and encounters offline - is an essential precursor to the quick-fire amplification of content online. Nailing meaningful engagement with social media users in a personal, experiential way has all the more impact because it is becoming so rare. Get that right, and then plug it back into that semiotically promiscuous online world, and the deeper, individual engagement powers a whole lot of instant, varied, exciting, quickly spread and easily digested content too.
Kunkel’s post is actually a review of three excellent recent books examining the space, and he’s right - it sometimes takes the longer think piece of a full text to drill down into really interesting ideas. So rather than just skimming your Google Reader, I’d advise investing in one or two - and Blog Talk Radio’s weekly Word of Mouth Book Club podcast is a good source for discovering and discussing the latest releases.
Having said that, some online content is definitely better left in the form of ‘op-eds, diary entries, aperçus, allusions, screeds, and scrawls of graffiti.’ Rob Matthews’ physical Wikipedia would definitely collapse my Ikea shelves.
