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!

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.

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!

Do we really need a standard for measuring return on conversations?

For at least the past few years there has been constant buzz about online advertising measurement standards. The chatter still continues though it’s exacerbated by the additional demand for defining a social media measurement standard. Even though RelevantMind is technically in the “measurement” business, I’m not so sure there is a need for the IAB to define new standards for measurement.

Would a new standard make it easier for our sales to sell our product? Yes
Would a new standard help the majority of our customers better justify an ROI? Probably Not

Thinking about this leads me to the bigger question – Are we looking for a standard for measurement because the online advertising industry needs a standardized pricing model or are we looking for a standard that enables our clients to recognize a return on their efforts?

I’m afraid it is more likely the former, because it would be almost impossible to determine a standard for measuring all social media efforts. Why? Because not all social media communication efforts come from marketers or are directly related to sales.

The folks in customer service, product development, corporate brand, etc. we work with aren’t solely focused on sales. Of course, they’re focused on things that relate to sales, but in some cases the measurement priorities of these groups are very far before or after the sale in the funnel. (sidenote: I also think the days of the traditional sales funnel are over – but more on that another day)

This is why we take the time to better understand our clients’ objectives when kicking off an initiative – I’ve been calling this our objective-focused approach. But today I found a much better term when reading Tim Leberecht’s post, Big ideas, smaller audiences, and too many (or the wrong) metrics.

“’There is more and more emphasis by advertisers for greater return-on-objectives in campaigns, particularly in the digital space where the accountability data is so readily available,’ said Grant Prentice, Starcom USA’s director of connections research and analytics.”

Return on Objectives. It’s actually the perfect compliment for ROI (though I’m not so sure ROO rolls off the tongue as nicely). And if companies are focused on a ROO (see, sounds funny) when approaching social media then the standards of measurement will differ, but be driven by their needs as opposed to the advertising outlets’.

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.

Shocking – it isn’t a highway after all!

Om Malik over at GigaOm wrote an interesting post today “Shocking:  New Facts about P2P and Broadband Usage“.  In it he cites some stats from Arbor Networks and makes the following comment:

• 10 percent of subscribers consume 80 percent of bandwidth.
• 0.5 percent of subscribers consume about 40 percent of total bandwidth
• 80 percent of subscribers use less than 10 percent of bandwidth

 

  This supports the arguments made by some of the larger ISPs, including Comcast. In a recent interview, Comcast Cable CTO Tony Werner told me his company would try and deal with the tiny number of subscribers who use most of the bandwidth by slowing down their connections during peak times.         

    

  I don’t agree with the premise that the stats make a case for the ISP’s.   In fact I think just the opposite.    ISP’s like to use the highway analogy (I thought it was a  bunch of tubes) .  The reasoning goes that since bandwidth is a limited resource, like the lanes on a highway, certain entities should be given preference (access to the fast lane) while individual bandwidth hogs are regulated to the slow lane.  Unless they pay of course.  

Simple, easy to understand and with an emotional appeal.  Too bad it is wrong.  When you drive your car you degrade my experience of driving my car.  No cars on my road = good.  Many cars= bad.    If you’ve been asleep for the past 5 or so years (arguably the ISP’s have) than you may not have noticed the web went all social.  People, (i.e. users bound for the ISP slow lane), create cool content, share, mashup and generally make the whole thing a vibrant community instead of a video billboard.    My web experience is enhanced the more people that use it! Not like a highway at all, is it? 

 Aha, says my ISP – “but what about P2P?”.   And there is the really shocking part of the stats.  Turns out, at least according to Arbor, that only 20% of the total traffic is P2P (arguably a portion of which is people creating content collaboratively).  The rest is you and me creating sharing and generally making the web a richer experience. 

We see this all the time in the user communities we look at for clients –  it tends to be the 10 or 20% of the community that heavily engage that makes the whole community vibrant and alive. Yep, they use some bandwidth to do it. I think that’s a small price to pay for creativity.   I guess what it comes down to is – do you want  YouTube?  Or do you want Clown Co Hulu? 

Do Social Shopping Sites Have Enough Traction to Stick Around?

Today iMedia Connection featured an article “Get in on the Social Shopping Craze” by Denise Zimmerman. It was interesting to read as it explores some of the same concepts we’ve been talking about with our clients and on the RelevantMind blog.This article provides a good commentary on  the social shopping landscape, but it sites Forrester as having the opinion that social shopping lacks staying power because low traffic numbers will impede its growth and market value. I could be taking this statement out of context. And I have yet to read this research, so I’m wondering how the research giant is defining social shopping as it relates to this claim. I rarely disagree with Forrester, so I imagine they aren’t including social shopping sites like Polyvore into this category as we’ve seen in our research that those sites are catching up to retail sites in terms of traffic volume. I’ll dig a little deeper and let you know what I find out. 

Amazon + Facebook = Strong Social Shopping Relationship

The news this week made it really easy to bring the discussion back to my social shopping series with all of the talk about Amazon’s social shopping deal with Facebook. Amazon is now offering two new applications to Facebook users – Amazon Giver and Amazon Grapevine.

Amazon Giver helps you buy gifts for friends off of their Amazon.com Wish Lists or from gift recommendations based on their Facebook profile interests and favorites.

Amazon Grapevine helps you get the word out to your friends about what you are doing on Amazon.com. Let your friends know when you add items to your public Wish List, write reviews, or tag products on Amazon.

I’ve downloaded both apps and I’m excited to test them out from a user-experience stand point, though I’m sure they’re pretty tight since Amazon rarely misses the mark. What I’m most interested in is the recommendations feature. Apparently the system uses its recommendation engine to allow users to view product recommendations generated by Amazon based upon what the other person has listed as their likes and interests on their own Facebook profile.

This is huge and depending on the integration, the Facebook application may solve my number one issue on Amazon.com – relevancy. Naturally, the recommendations on Amazon.com come from items I’ve browsed and purchased – which includes items for me AND friends and family.  Recommending I pre-order the new National Album – relevant. Recommending I buy a collection of children’s books – not so relevant. However, if properly implemented, the recommendations from Facebook should be relevant my interests and, therefore, relevant to my purchase intent.

Let’s test it out. Find me on Facebook and buy me something based on the recommendations! I’ll let you know if I like it.