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.

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!

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!

As you can imagine the topic of what to eat and drink is a hot one among athletes.  RelevantMind looked at what over 400,000 runners, cyclists, skiers, triathletes, climbers and more had to say. We looked at a number of different dimensions and here are some of our top-level findings.

This is the leader board showing percentage mindshare of conversations over the last 3 months:

The list of companies includes top brands as well as companies with a full page ad in one of several magazines including Bicycling, Runner’s World and Rock & Ice.  Gatorade is the clear leader, with Gu, Clif, Powerbar and Hammer Nutrition all having over 10% mindshare.  Met-Rx, Myoplex, Twinlab and Nature’s Path all have full page ads in one or more of the magazines we looked at, but as you can see they aren’t getting a share of the conversation.

We also wanted to look what things the community talked about when discussing nutrition.  We looked at a specific set of terms related to nutrition:

 It is clear and not too surprising that “Taste” and “Natural” aren’t nearly important to athletes as the more performance oriented characteristics.  This is the kind of data that can be really helpful in crafting campaign messaging targeted at a specific consumer or community type.

 This is just a small slice of the overall data RelevantMind has.  We also dive into trending over time, sentiment, influencers, specific conversations and more.  We’ll include some of our other reporting in upcoming posts.

In the coming weeks we will be launching a series of white papers and sector reports.  These look at the active dialogue going on regarding specific types of products. What are teens saying about denim, cars, TV shows and movies?  What do athletes say about sports nutrition, bicycles, shoes, and heart rate monitors?  And so on…

Our blog will cover high-level findings on which brands have the highest mindshare, and which trends or keywords are most important.  Our white papers will go further in depth, including sentiment, trending, conversation and influencer analysis plus a lot of useful insights from the data.

What we think is special about these reports and papers is that the source is so broad.  When we say “athletes” we don’t just mean popular bloggers or small samples intended to represent the broader demographic.  RelevantMind means the whole community, tuning into literally hundreds of thousands of people.  These people don’t just represent a market, they are the market.

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.

A recent Burson-Marsteller survey found 15% of the Fortune 500 have blogs. I had to read this one twice.  I was frankly surprised by this, though probably shouldn’t be.  Actually I should, since Burson’s Chief Digital Strategist Erin Byrne was also surprised:

“When I thought about it, I thought that the number would have been higher, and I think the reason…why it still isn’t higher is that companies are still grappling with how they participate in the conversation when they don’t have control over the message.”


As you would guess the 15% is heavily weighted to companies in the general tech sector, with retailing also well represented.  Still the number is low  - really low considering that blogging is a pretty basic building block of a social media strategy. 

At RelevantMind we spend a lot of time dealing with the strategies impacting the broader social engagement landscape.  I’d somewhat disagree with Erin though – blogging is one of the more structured and controllable forms of social media. I think the reason behind the lack of adoption isn’t that blogging in and of itself is that daunting.  But an effective blogging strategy needs both commitment and internal evangelism.  It may be (relatively) controllable, but it is opening the door to the whole social media engagement world.

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.

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.

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!