Middle East Media Coverage may be one-sided but…

A lot has been written about the lopsided Western Media coverage of the worsening conflict in the Middle East.  A couple of examples are this blog post by Sam Dealey at  U.S. News and World Report and here at the Huffington Post.

We often see overall media coverage of issues that doesn’t reflect what people are really talking about.  So a journalist friend of ours wondered – is the debate reflected as intensely in public debate?  The short answer is “yes”.  Here is the public discussion activity for “Israel”, “Gaza” and “Palestine” over the the last three months.  You can see the big increase when the conflict started:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Israel had over 75% of the mentions for the December, but looking at only January you see a more balanced discussion with Hamas and Palestine getting almost 40% of the posts:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And this discussion is one of the most distributed ones we have seen with huge activity on communities as diverse as MySpace, Irandefense.net, Digital Spy, Bodybuiding.com (really!!), Investor Village and of course Twitter.  What’s striking is just how broad and global the discussion is.  And whatever the media bias, there is no doubt that this kind of global public discourse is very healthy.

DirecTV – great customer service to start the year off right

It’s great to start the year off with a really positive experience.  I have been a customer of DirecTV since about 1998.  Originally I joined because it was the only way to get Formula 1 racing here, and I’ve been a customer ever since.  Note I didn’t say “loyal” customer.  I love the idea of satellite mind you, it just seems so Jetsons.  But up until now, if cable came along with a good enough offer I might have been tempted.

The loyalty factor went way up a couple of weeks ago when their customer service team reversed a long standing billing error.  They did it gracefully and without complaint, even though the relatively small error went back years and compounded to a pretty significant number.  And they threw in a free service upgrade to say sorry for their mistake.

I decided to use RelevantMind to see if that positive experience showed up in online communities, compared to DISH Network.  Did it ever!

Here is the conversation volume versus Dish Network for October through December:

The sentiment around DirecTV  is very positive.  And based on my experience, if they keep up the good customer service they’ll continue to enjoy the lion’s share of online conversations.  Good work and thanks!

Nissan 370Z Launch

A friend of ours is looking for a new sports car and asked us to take a look at the conversations happening around the new Nissan370Z. This is a challenging time to launch a new car and our friend’s question was whether the positive press reviews (it made the NY Times top ten list) translated to enthusiast community interest.

The short answer is that it has. Here is a look at volume in November, notice the big spike around the launch:

 

The really good news if you are Nissan is that daily post volume is up, way up in fact. Through December 25th the daily volume is over 100 posts a day on more than 250 different communities – almost double what it was in October. And what were they talking about?

 

Probably not a big surprise that performance, power, and taking it to the track trump ride and comfort!

Are they talking about me?

Well, the question we usually get is more along the lines of “Are they talking about my brand? How about specific products?“. 

At RelevantMind our emphasis is on user communities (primarily forums and discussion groups) as opposed to other forms of social media like blogs and micro-blogs, wikis, photo and video sharing, etc.  There are many reasons for our focus but a big one is the sheer volume of conversations.  More volume means more data points and that can make all the difference, especially as you get to the product level.

Let’s take a quick look at the difference in blog versus community volume at the brand and product level.

First we looked at the topic de jour  - the iPhone.  We know it isn’t a brand but it is about the most blogged about topic over the last 3 months.  Here is how things stack up:

The volume advantage is about 3:1.  We see similar results around other hot topics like the presidential election.  Next we looked the brand level for Garmin, maker of excellent GPS units:

Now the advantage is 5:1.  If your brand doesn’t have a big base of professionally reviewed/blogged products like consumer electronics does this difference can be a lot higher.  

 Finally, let’s look at the product level.  Here is the new Garmin 705 cycling GPS unit (high on my personal “want” list):

 

Here the difference is a whopping 46:1 – now that is significant!

Social media engagement is all about connecting with your market in a positive way.  If they aren’t talking about you then it is important to look at why not, and what you can do to change things.  But it is also important to look for the conversation in the right places.

 

 

The Evangelists with two (important) hats…

Last week Marshall Kirkpatrick on ReadWriteWeb, authored a great post called “Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers?”.  While focused on the startup world, this applies in a big way to any company trying to figure out how to start engaging effectively.  Their definition of Community Manager

“A community manager is someone who communicates with a company’s users/customers, development team and executives and other stake holders in order to clarify and amplify the work of all parties. They probably provide customer service, highlight best use-cases of a product, make first contact in some potential business partnerships and increase the public visibility of the company they work for.”

Too often the user-facing roles are disconnected from the internal stakeholders, and this tends to get worse the bigger the company.  We’ve all seen it – account management, sales and customer service representing the “voice of the customer”, engineering, production, finance, etc. as the “voice of internal requirements”.

The Community Manager provides the critical link by evangelizing the company externally and the customers internally.  This is a key senior role, one that requires passion, great communication skills and a thorough knowledge of product development and marketing.  

The role may go by many names from Product Evangelist to Chief Communicator to Community Evangelist and so on.  We think that the important thing is that, whatever you call it, the role is seen as both internal and externally critical.

Consumers take on engagement

Over the past few weeks, I’ve done a lot of talking about “engagement” – what it really means, who’s missing/driving the boat, why it’s important, etc. But the results of a recent survey by ExpoTV.com, Brand Engagement: What Consumers Really Think, show that online engagement with consumers needs to be a top priority for companies because consumers are asking for ongoing engagement, especially regarding product design. According to results, listening drives loyalty.

“Eighty-nine percent of survey respondents said that they would feel more loyal or significantly more loyal to a brand they liked who invited them to participate in a feedback group. And, 63% of respondents would even feel loyal to a brand they were unfamiliar with that reached out to hear their opinion.”

This got me thinking about the brands towards which I am most loyal. I could only think of one that attempts to listen to me – Apple. Apple makes the effort to engage with me throughout the entire product life-cycle. The other products/brands to which I’m loyal – Anthropologie, Prada, Coke – to name a few. I’m just as “loyal” to these brand, as I am to Apple. But there is a significant difference in how I talk about these brands – which is critical from a word of mouth standpoint.

For instance, when someone asks me why I only drink Coke my answer = I’m from Atlanta and it’s the home of Coke. Prada = because Prada shoes don’t hurt my feet and are well suited for city walking. Anthropologie = they have affordable style that fits my body type. Not very exciting comments.

But when someone asks me how I feel about Apple or my Macbook, iPhone, iPod, I’ve got an earful for them. Each of these three products makes doing everyday things (like work, working out, walking the dog, waiting for friends, finding the right directions, etc) easier and more enjoyable. And Apple has done a great job of listening to how people work and live to make sure of that. And because they’re listening to me and others like me, I (and they) feel more personally attached to their brand/products – which drives me to purchase more of and only Apple products when possible.  Sure, I prefer Prada shoes because of how they fit my feet. But I insist on buying Apple products because of how they fit my life and I’ll passionately tell anyone who is willing to listen.

Is Facebook bigger than we think?

Standford Professor, BJ Fogg thinks so. In fact, he thinks it will have as monumental an impact on persuasion as the radio did over 100 years ago and told Fast Company why in a recent interview.

My favorite snipet:

“You have to focus on creating a spectacular product or service, and your market will find you. The people it resonates with will share it with others, and it will be distributed. It’s a big leap of faith for marketers to think they’re not going to have an active role in marketing. Once you figure out where it’s going, then you can start putting resources into continuing to go into that market or expanding into others.”

Check out the full article here!

Visa has gone social

Today Visa threw their virtual hat into the social media marketing ring by launching the Visa Business Network on Facebook. According to the press release, the network is designed to provide small-business owners with tools and tips on attracting new customers, trimming costs and other ways to make more money. Businesses that belong to the Visa network on Facebook (the social networking site already has over 80,000 business profiles) will also be able to communicate with each other to share ideas or even negotiate deals. Additionally, they will also have access to the business network’s resource center, which will provide resources such as Google Business Apps and articles by The Wall Street Journal and Entrepreneur addressing questions posed by the community.

To promote the network, Visa is giving a $100 advertising credit on Facebook to each of the first 20,000 U.S. businesses that download the Web application needed to join. I couldn’t resist. I added the app to the RelevantMind Page which added us the network and placed The Visa “Click to Connect” banner at the bottom of the page. Not too intrusive and good branding for Visa. Upon download I got an email with the details for redeeming my $100 ad credit, but I was more excited about connecting and access to the resource center.

However, after clicking around to find the actual network, I realized you can’t access the network community until you add the application to your profile page. I guess Visa wants to connect specific users to the community versus a company with multiple users. But I don’t see why you can’t register for the network when you add the app to your business page – seeming as you are more than likely trying to promote that business and you have to fill out a new profile anyway.

Regardless of the experience, the access to the network content was worth adding the app to my profile page. I’m anxious to play around with it some more to see how useful the podcasts and articles are. Only time will tell the effects this network will have on the Businesses’ growth, Visa’s brand, and Facebook’s revenue stream. But in order for the program to be a true success, everyone within the community (Visa, Facebook, Sponsoring partners, and the network) will have to win – which should be the goal of all social media programs.

Hey Corporation X, it’s not all about you anymore!

It’s all about your customers. And that is scary, isn’t it?

Other than the overwhelming breadth of the social media landscape, the next big fear for companies wanting to dabble in social influence marketing comes with the realization that they will have to listen and react to the conversation. It’s always a touchy moment when a client realizes that engagement doesn’t mean forcing your message onto consumers on Facebook or via Tweets. Engagement is about having a conversation – and, for businesses, it means doing more listening than talking. This is a hard pill to swallow, as no one likes to talk more than those in marketing. And, of course, there’s also the risk of losing control of the “brand message” that they’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars crafting. But what’s the ROI on that message if it doesn’t resonate with your target audience?

In yesterday’s post – Five Plugged-in Dudes Get Fired Up About New Media at Pub Club -  Amanda Gravel, author of Social Honeycomb, offers some great commentary on the new era of corporate messaging. Quoting Mike Volpe, she says, “Mike really hit the nail on the head as he explained that there’s simply no such thing as the crafted, corporate message working anymore and that “the message” is what people are saying, regardless of what you put in a PR plan or what your client’s legal team approves.”

He’s right. We should altogether replace the term corporate messaging with community messaging since those that are “on message” will be the ones that realize it’s no longer about the corporation and are crafting their message by listening and engaging the community.

What is really the social media game-changer?

It seems the clients and prospects we’ve been working with aren’t the only ones who put all their social media eggs in the blog basket. In “Beyond the Blog,” the BusinessWeek (BW) cover story a few weeks ago, the publisher offers a “mea culpa” claiming the big time media publisher missed the boat by putting too much emphasis on blogs as the largest game-changing outlet within the social media landscape, stating “we focused on blogs as a new form of printing press, one that turned Gutenberg’s economics on its head, making everyone a potential publisher. This captured our attention, not least because this publishing revolution was already starting to rattle the skyscrapers in our media-heavy, Manhattan neighborhood.”

This makes sense. To BW, and all other publishers and media companies, the blog phenomenon changed the game, making 24/7 access and reporting a must have versus a nice to have. These days every major reporter (and almost every major company) has a blog, despite the fact that readership numbers aren’t very impressive.

In the article, BW points out that while blogs are important, only a small amount of consumers participate, citing a recent study from Forrester Research that states only a quarter of the U.S. adult online population reads a blog once a month.

That seems like a lot of work for very little return. And for the past two years I’ve wondered how companies can rely on a blog as their social media strategy. Again, I’m not knocking blogs here. (It would be ironic of me to knock the power of blogs on the blog for which I am one of the most frequent contributors.) I’m was just pleased that Business Week (my favorite magazine) finally realized that blogs, while definitely a player, are only one of many tools in the social media toolkit.

But the more I thought about the article, I began to feel like BW has once again missed the point. There will always be a new outlet popping up that is the “game changer” at one point or another. Yesterday it was the blog, today everyone is all a buzz about Twitter. But the winner won’t be the company or person that learns to monetize one of these outlets. The winner will be the company or person who learns how to maximize the value of the community conversations begin generated within these outlets.

When writing this blog post, I went back to check some facts/quotes to make sure I had it right. In doing so, I realized I’d missed something. In a special section within the article, BW asked two prominent bloggers to give their take on how old media will adjust to the new rules of social media.

Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine says, “next, I think, BusinessWeek’s readers will see that social media are changing their fundamental relationship with customers to be less about serving and more about collaborating. No, I don’t mean that every product will be the product of a committee. But customers who want to talk will, and smart companies will not just listen but will engage them in decisions. This will have an impact not just on PR and image but on product design, marketing, sales, customer service—the whole company. Three years from now, I predict BusinessWeek’s cover won’t be about blogs or tools but about companies as communities.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. That’s definitely the cover story I’m anxious to see.