Category: Interactive Marketing

WOMMA: Word of Mouth Marketing Association

I’m bummed I missed this call by WOMMA to address the issue of disclosure in marketing initiatives focused on social media and viral. Call it the Lonelygirl13 effect, but I think the days of sneaky viral — kicked off by the Subservient Chicken are behind us. Fingerskilz, the Lenovo Tapes are examples of PC vendors releasing viral without overtly tagging it as a corporate campaign. Is that wrong? Would it impede the spread? Probably. But the tide has turned and people are quoting the Who, “We won’t get fooled again.

Those tactics — hiding the origin of a campaign, sockpuppeting, etc. — done.

From the WOMMA notice:

“A foundational building block of that ethics code, which we believe is as relevant as ever to evolving social media, is what is known as the “Honesty ROI.” This includes the following:* Honesty of Relationship: You say who you’re speaking for
* Honesty of Opinion: You say what you believe
* Honesty of Identity: You never obscure your identity

We especially call out the “honesty of identity” provision, which speaks most clearly to the new forms of social media that are quickly unfolding. “Disclosure of identity,” the code notes, “is vital to establishing trust and credibility. We do not blur identification in a manner that might confuse or mislead consumers as to the true identity of the individual with whom they are communicating, or instruct or imply that others should do so.”

Thanks to ConsumerGeneratedMedia.com for the pointer. 

Last winter, shortly after joining Lenovo, an old friend, Mitch Ratcliffe, pinged me to see what I was up to in the role of VP of Global Web Marketing. A lot of former journalism colleagues were surprised to see me join a “vendor,” but most, like Sam Whitmore, saw the point that everyone is media in this day and age.

Mitch, who is a perpetual fountain of cool ideas (Audible, On24 to name a couple), asked if I’d be interested in checking out his latest project, a tool for monitoring blogs. Being more a blogger than a blog monitor, I was mildly interest, but had arrived at Lenovo with blog management — both our own and the sentiment externally — in my portfolio of responsibilities. As I’ve blogged before, I monitor blog discussions about Lenovo and ThinkPad through a simple RSS feed on those terms out of Technorati into Bloglines, doing the same with Google’s blog search. This is cheap (free) and powerful enough that I can satisfy my curiosity many times during a day without waiting for an analyst or third party to alert me.

The crucial thing in blog monitoring is to get everything, not just what someone else feels is critical, but the whole feed, all the time so one can make one’s own decisions.

Mitch was involved with a Bay Area startup called BuzzLogic. I signed onto the beta program, was briefed in a teleconference by the execs,and given an account to start tracking things with.

Buzzlogic does a few things differently. First off, I won’t go into a tedious description of blog search. That topic has been pounded to death by others and crawler and spider technology doesn’t interest me very much. What does capture my attention is cartography and dashboards, both of which BuzzLogics delivers on top of a very capable blog search mechanism.

Mapping a discussion is a very interesting and powerful tool for tracking down the spread of an online meme or rumor. Tracking back to the source of an original concept isn’t very easy. Example: I may detect in a regular blog search, a post that quotes or references a news article or an original blog post. Getting to the source — where the idea was born — isn’t easy, not very precise. But more interesting is the role that “amplifiers” play along the way.

Amplification is an interesting concept, but one that is very important as you try to ration one’s finite resources in paying attention, and in some cases, reaching out to bloggers with an audience and a platform to spread a meme. Amplifiers may not make the news, but they can give it legs, and in many cases are as important as the original source poster, who may not have the audience and reach, but has the original meme. Case in point, Boing Boing — if Boing Boing points at a blog post, as it did this morning with a blogger who reverse engineered his favorite New York Pizza — they essentially hold up a megaphone to a small voice and instantly turn it into a very loud one.

Buzzlogic’s mapping capabilities allow one to graphically map the interconnection of posts, trackbacks and comments and follow that spread, over time, through the blogosphere. Right there they have a winner.

But place on top of that a dashboard that permits an operator to encapsulate a blog event and build from it a report suitable for forwarding to a busy exec who needs an at-a-glance window into an incident.

I used BuzzLogic to identify Rick Klau’s problems with his ThinkPad, reached out to him based on the hit, but was able to follow the aftermath as he posted about his experience and that in turn was picked up by other bloggers.

BuzzLogic has a winner, one that promises to do for brand communications and customer satisfaction, public relations and press relations what web metrics has done for online advertising. It builds amazingly precise and quantifiable measures of impact and influence into a world once characterized by clipping services that delivered stacks of “press” hits to PR managers.

I think BuzzLogic is the first blog monitor with the capability to truly enable my vision of proactive customer relations — where the operator can use the discoveries from the tool to drive change internally and externally in nearly real time. I wish them the best of luck with their debut at Demo this week, I think this is a service with a strong, strong potential for success.

BuzzLogic is seeking other beta testers. You can apply here at buzzlogic.com

[full disclosure: I am not paid by Buzzlogic, have received no consulting fees, options or shares.]

[update: Dan Farber at ZDNet has better details.]

The Dynamics of Viral Marketing

Excellent post by Eric Kintz at HP:

#1 – Viral marketing does not spread well. In epidemics, high connectors are very critical nodes of the network and allow the virus to spread. In recommendations networks, a few very large cascades exist but most recommendation chains terminate after just a few steps.#2 – The probability of viral infection decreases with repeated interaction. Providing excessive incentives for customers to recommend actually weakens the credibility of those links. The probability of purchasing a product increases with the number of recommendations received, but quickly saturates to a constant and relatively low probability.

#3 – Viral effectiveness varies depending on price and category. Social context has a high influence on the potency of viral infection. Technical or religious books for example had more successful recommendations than general interest topics. Smaller and more tightly knit groups tend to be more conducive to viral marketing.

Edge Perspectives with John Hagel: Mastering New Marketing Practices

I’m a Hagel fan. This is from a great post on the “new” marketing.

“* Attract – create incentives for people to seek you out.
* Assist – the most powerful way to attract people is to be as helpful and engaging with them as possible – this requires a deep understanding of the various contexts in which people might use your products and a willingness to “co-create” products with customers.
* Affiliate – mobilize third parties, including other customers, to become even more helpful to the people you interact with.”

I guess there is some moral to the story to the news that octagenarian boss Sumner Redstone gave Viacom CEO Tom Freston the heave-ho for not moving aggressively enough into the Internet. Sheesh. Take any media company (with the exception of News Corp. which is blessed with Fox Interactive chief Ross Levinsohn) and you’ll see an org chart still dominated by dodos who don’t get the online joke.

I don’t think Freston, per se, was anti-Internet. Heck, MTV.com has done great work in that regard but got its ass handed to it by AOL during that big charity concert a year or so ago. But now it’s Bubble 2.0 time and corporate boards are demanding that their executives be on the acquisiton prowl for social network plays, tagged content services, and rich media sites.

There are days when I really miss the big online media game, but for the time being I need to sharpen my chops on the buyside — going back into production would be a step backwards — before yearning for the biz dev end of the business.