Cymfony's Influence 2.0

Forbes says "Fight Back"

Although Forbes (free subscription required) is taking a lot of heat for the controversial article “Attack of the Blogs,” the sidebar “Fighting Back” is also an interesting read.  It's important to note that fear is not the only driver for companies to consider monitoring blogs and other forms of user created content.  Other reasons include understanding consumer behavior, competitive intelligence, market research and message analysis.  So yes, there are also opportunities to discover.

Blog Bits - Week of October 24th

Jeremy Pepper from POP! PR Jots addresses an article written in the New York Times on “the whole new era of customer evangelism with blogs.”  While Pepper was reading the article it made him think about the differences between “corporate evangelist blogs, true consumer evangelist blogs and the old school days of enthusiast websites that seem more and more relevant today.”  The article mentioned many blogs including Hacking Netflix, Tracking Trader Joe’s, The BarqsMan and McChronicles and pointed out that some of the companies (Barq’s parent company - Coca-Cola) did not even know about the blog, The BarqsMan, and others are tracking the conversations such as McDonald’s with McChronicles.  Pepper points out that in-house corporate PR people or PR firms should be doing what McDonald’s is doing - “tracking conversations, and jumping in when needed, or hey, even offering previews of new products and offerings… you know, the old school PR skill of working with media, being that bridge.”  Pepper continues his post with talking about how there is a fine line between the corporate blog and the customer blog. 

As noted on MarketingVox, “A best-guess extrapolation of blog-related surveys and data suggests that work time spent reading and posting to blogs this year will consume 2.2 percent of U.S. labor force hours, and work time spent on blogs unrelated to work will take up 1.65 percent of those hours, reports AdAge (via MediaBuyerPlanner).”  About one in four people in the labor force visits blogs and on average spends 3.5 hours during the work week engaging with them.  Although this report my be a concern to corporation’s HR departments – it validates that more and more people are starting to read, post and create blogs and corporations should be tracking what they are saying.

Blog Business World’s Wayne Hurlbert posts on how Article Submissions are a powerful technique for adding additional readers to your blog.  “Articles also provide powerful inbound links to your blogs or website, adding strength in the search engines.”  Hurlbert points out that both sides benefit when writing and submitting an article, “By writing informative & interesting articles, on your topics of interest, free long term publicity for you and your blog are achieved…Website owners are constantly seeking fresh and informative content for their own site visitors and your articles can provide them content.  In return for your free article, your blog or website received a return link.”  Hurlbert also addresses that many questions arise on where to send your articles for submission and includes a link to a website with many article submission sites. 

Media Trends

In a recent issue of PRWeek, reporter Erica Iacono explores 10 media trends to watch.  The tag-line for the piece states "from the rise of transparency to the decline of newsprint, every PR pro needs to remain on top of the ever-changing media landscape."  Coincidentally, we just finished an interview with MarketingNews about the years best marketing practices - after having the conversation with the reporter, we chatted afterward about a few cross over pr "trends" and solid marketing best practices of the year. 

According to PRWeek, some of the trends to watch include:

• Portability of video content - such as video content on cell phones (did you see the new Sprint commercials yet?) This technology is already hot in Japan and parts of Europe, now making its way to the US.
• Blogs - whether its corporate blogs, blog influence or monitoring blogs, its all still hot hot hot!
• Media transparency - As mainstream media has suffered credibility issues over the past few years, the media is going to be looking for ways to involve and listen to readers, while being much more transparent. The piece points to the Public Eye Blog which has a mission to bring transparency to the editorial operations of CBS News.
• Business woes for newspapers - layoffs, circulations scandals, low readership - time to take some action.
• Digitalization of print media - this one ties into business woes for newspapers.  Online content as always been an nice to have or in addition to the print pubs, going forward the opposite might prove true.
• Source agnostic/disintermediation - meaning the consumer is going to care less and less about where they are getting their information
• Refining media measurement - the description of this trend talks more about TV measurement practices but PR measurement in general should still be consider a critical component to a communications or marketing strategy.

There are a few other trends cited in the article as well so definitely worth a quick read.

In working with a number of F1000 clients, Cymfony has an insiders view of some marketing departments best practices. Two that jumped to the surface based on the conversation today with the MarektingNews reporter included transparency and monitoring/measurement.  Whether your a media organization or a consumer packaged goods company, transparency is the new key to gaining credibility.  (Rathergate taught us that all too well).

Included in the latter is the fact that there are huge amounts of information available, information overload if you will.  Figuring out a way to organize and  benchmark activities, thoughts, opinions, such as what people are saying or who they are saying it too, can help marketing departments determine where to focus their time and to be more effective.  I'm bias but having a program in place to monitor and analyze online discussion is certainly a best practice today to help marketers guide communications strategies and marketing programs.

Brand Engagement as a Metric?

Gary Stein wrote a very timely article for ClickZ yesterday entitled "Consumer Engagement: Breaking the Perfect Measurement Myth".  I say timely because I was recently in a meeting  with a few internal folks and advisers were we were discussing an engagement metric.  Specifically what is the right methodology or best way to measure brand engagement as a metric?  Can it be done correctly?  As Gary points out and we agreed, measuring engagement is difficult but not impossible.  As does the Association of National Advertisers, American Association of Advertising Agencies and the Advertising Research Foundation who issued this press release not to long ago to encourage industry-wide adoption of "consumer engagement" as a media measurement metric to complement traditional measures of consumer exposure.

"The goal of marketing measurement is to capture what the community does with and thinks about your products, not how well campaign mechanics preform.  Shifting an organization away from this traditional mindset is difficult, partially because individuals want to see their work succeed.  But engagement can become a corporate goal, or at least a marketing department goal: a single point everyone focus on and contributes their work and expertise toward."

In traditional marketing measurement ROI or marketing mix models companies try to answer questions such as, what's the ROI of my Ad?   We all hope and expect ads to drive sales.  But ads can do something else, they can drive emotion to a brand.  Take the Subservient Chicken from Burger King for example (btw, you can buy a halloween mask of the chicken on this site?!?).  It's considered a successful viral ad campaign spread primarily by word of mouth.  Again, the question becomes, can you show analysis based on the promotion of this ad to the growth of the brand?  A critical piece in this case is being able to measure the message that's getting through - and then take a closer look to see if it's driving behavior.  Are people going to Burger King because of the chicken?  Or is Burger King now considered a cool, hip company because of the ad? 

Gary shares a great example in the article:  Data shows that people are still watching a large amount of TV.  But picture a family who has the TV on in the morning when they're getting ready to start the day.  The TV is on for a couple of hours, but is anyone really watching?  The mother might check out an interview with the star of a new movie, the dad a new luxury car ad.  "Imagine, though, the data from that experience. The TV's on for two hours, but there's no objective way to know only 20 minutes of actual consumption occurred, spread across a four-member family."

Later that day, the mother sees an ad for the movie the star is going to be in, a few hours later she reads a blog post that says the movie is way to violent for kids and recommends another movie.  The mother then might do a search on each movie while clicking on reviews and show times.  The consumer moves from awareness to action and several media pieces play key roles.

The point is that integrating multiple data sources and examining how each element generated value in the engagement chain is key.  In the example above, the PR team played a role in getting the star on the show, another team placed the search ad - the search ad may have captured more clicks but the consumer searches having already established awareness.

As you can see measuring engagement is sure to be a complex model with many moving parts but it's quickly becoming a metric that many marketers will need to consider.  Especially as the consumer gains more control.  As a final note and call to action, Gary suggests that "you can being measuring engagement simply by thinking about each individual connection as part of an interlocking chain.  Incremental steps can also be taken, such as correlating SEM data with site performance data. Use blog search engines or buzz services to monitor discussions about your products and its relation to other products."

What Do You Do Again, Dear? A Cymfony Update

Almost everyone reading this blog knows that Cymfony is a market intelligence and media analysis company.  But I can tell you first hand that my own mother has a hard time understanding what that means.  Comparatively, prospective clients who approach Cymfony sometimes don't know exactly what Cymfony can do for them.  They come to us knowing that they need to be implementing a global PR measurement program, or that they need to analyze user created content or blogs, or that they need to keep track of what their competitors are doing to stay ahead of the curve.  They know Cymfony can help but they don't always know how to ask or what they really need.  Additionally, prospective customers and clients come from various areas of the corporation and with different needs. 

With the recent launch of the new Orchestra platform, Cymfony has enhanced the "look and feel" and expanded the functionality of its automated dashboard solution and is providing even more in-house strategic consulting services.  Over the next few months we are going to be updating our materials to further explain what Cymfony can do and all of the features and benefits of Cymfony's offerings in a clear and consistent manner.  I've been told too many times that Cymfony is the real deal, doing amazing work but that we haven't really been able to explain all of our capabilities.  We want to change that.

For example, a big difference from Cymfony's Brand Dashboard or Digital Consumer Insight products is that Orchestra provides a real time side-by-side analysis of mainstream media (MSM) and consumer generated media (CGM).  But what does that mean and why is it important?  Well, for one it provides the user with improved visibility into both CGM and MSM environments.  For instance, by tracking and analyzing the impact of perceptions from online audiences to mainstream publications you can have an early warning system to proactively manage or mitigate issues - such as the Kryptonite case study illustrated all too well.  And this is only the beginning.  Analyzing CGM and MSM under one platform is an important new service for anyone involved in:

• Media Strategy and analysis
• Managing Corporate Reputation
• Competitive Intelligence
• Market Research
• Customer Behavior Analysis
• Product Launches
• Product Monitoring and Analysis
• Campaign and Event Analysis

Helping marketers, pr and communications professionals, brand managers, competitive intelligence professionals or anyone involved in the areas above to monitor, benchmark, analyze, discover and report is what we do best.  So, over the next few months we'll be using this blog from time to time as another tool to provide a more in-depth view of Cymfony and its services.

marketing, public relations, blogs

Blog Bits - Week of October 17th

Market Sentinel points us to a survey by Guidewire Group that was done for the BlogOn 2005 Conference.  The survey is on US corporations embracing blogging as a way of reaching their target markets.  Here are some facts from the survey:

· Companies use external blogs for public relations and marketing and demonstration of thought leadership (61%)
· 40% of survey respondents have a blogging CEO
· 20% of respondents expect blogs to generate income
· 58% expect them to improve rankings in search engine results

The biggest challenges in corporate blogging are:

· Maintaining enthusiasm (42%)
· Encouraging adoption (36%)
· Technological problems (30%)

Sam Whitmore posts on  “The Big Picture”, a visual tool for navigating related news.com articles.  It is a ‘CNET News.com special feature, connecting the dots between stories, companies and topics within the news.com site.  This is an interesting tool, allowing for a visual demonstration of how stories and people relate to each other.

Kevin Dugan, who presented at the Cincinanti Chapter of PRSA this past week, has made his powerpoint presentation available online, “The Lifecycle of a Media Relations Pitch.”   All too often, public relations practitioners focus solely on the middle of the pitch, but this presentation will go through all three of them. Dugan adds, “Having presented it, I will throw out two important caveats. 1) The notes are ROUGH background vs. a strict script. 2) The verbiage is biased towards print media vs. electronic or online. However, as these are the basics, they still apply to all forms of media IMHO. Any and all feedback is appreciated.”

CGM for CRM

I know, you’re thinking “Oooh! Acronyms!”, and yes, I’m excited by acronyms too. They’re even alliterative acronyms. CGM, as you’re probably aware, stands for Consumer Generated Media, which I sometimes rename participatory media. (What to call the aggregate of blogs, discussion boards, forums, usenet groups, etc. is the fodder for another post.) CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. And the overlap is the big C. Consumers are, by definition, customers.

Largely due to this overlap, CRM vendors, and more abstractly, people responsible for customer satisfaction within a corporation, are starting to think about how to integrate CGM into the bigger picture of customer relationships.

While CGM might be thought of as outside the realm of traditional CRM, with increasing frequency customers are not even bothering to contact a company with their problems. Fearing the trap of labyrinthine phone systems, or the futility of attempting to explain an issue to someone who barely speaks English, individuals are relying more and more on the internet community for assistance. Not only is this generating increasing traffic levels about a given product or service, but it is also taking a large part of the customer experience out of a company’s direct control.

As a result, forward thinking organizations are starting to expand the concept of customer relationship beyond a direct feedback system and into the greater ecosystem, anywhere customers or potential customers may have touch-points with brands.

Forget the Lawyers, Learn to Join the Conversation

The BlogOn Social Media Summit ended yesterday with mixed reviews in the blogosphere, primarily because of the poor WiFi connections.  As an exhibitor, Cymfony was fortunate not to have any problems and we were thrilled to be selected as one of the 6 companies to conduct a live on-stage demonstration.  Julie Woods opened the show with the first demo of Orchestra, Cymfony's new product that integrates mainstream and consumer generated media in one converged web-based platform.  Unfortunately, I didn't make it to the show but Steve Hall over at Adrants did a bang up job in summarizing the event.  Steve suggests that there were four key messages to come out of two day event:

• LISTEN to the ongoing conversation, enabled by blogs, chat rooms, forums, IM, Wikis, podcasting, social networks and innumerable other methods with which consumers can achieve a voice as powerful and widespread as marketers
• JOIN the conversation by participating in these new media
• Do not attempt to CONTROL the conversation with bullhorn marketing communications methods of old
• No LAWYERS.  If a marketer has an issue with a person denigrating the brand, speak with that person like a normal human being and find out why that person is saying what he is saying. Don't slap a ceases and desist on his ass because all he'll do is post that cease and desist on his blog making the brand look even more stupid, idiotic and out of touch with reality.

No surprises here. Just look at a recent public case study Cymfony put together regarding FedEx vs. fedexfurniture.com incident.  You can read about it here.  Besides FedEx not LISTENING to the conversation they also never chose to JOIN while also trying to CONTROL content by bringing in the big dog LAWYERS to stop it.  How's that for hitting the nail on the head?

marketing, Blogging, media

Convergence of Mainstream and User-Generated Media

As we talk about convergence between mainstream media and user-generated media, there are other “convergences” starting to accelerate that are changing the way companies market products, interact with stakeholders and assess their corporate perception.

First, we see that marketing and PR functions are converging. What does this mean? Historically, PR is often more tactical where the strategic and creative side were often more usually associated with marketing or executive management. PR was often criticized for always wanting a “seat at the table” and getting involved in setting strategy not just implementation and tactics.  The lines are getting blurred – and for good reason.  Both areas are responsible for building brands and maintaining them. Through convergence, both areas can actually help each other and gain business benefits.

I just met with a large advertising agency in NYC while I was attending BlogOn Social Media summit. We had a discussion regarding this very issue.  This leading agency sees their business changing quite dramatically. Agencies can no longer take 6-9 months to research, brainstorm and plan a campaign. They need more real-time or near real-time tools to help them react to changing consumer perceptions and “go to market” with their position. 

Is this the tip of the iceberg or is there a slow, but fundamental change? I’m not overstating the significance when I say, I believe that the dramatic changes in media are causing cataclysmic changes. It will not be overnight, but the way firms market is changing. For examples, the media buyers at agencies often are not just commodity buyers but very strategic in how the allocate their buys to various media sources depending upon goals of the campaign. Similarly, PR agencies that we work with are spending time evaluating competitive positioning and even asking to be included in meetings with sales teams or engineers to discuss product road maps.

This means that  marketing and public relations need to work as an integrated collaborative team, where both respond quickly to issues and set response plans in motion. It is not only the PR professionals who have to deal with crisis in reputation, it is the marketing team as well.  We have seen this countless times with issues regarding FedEx, Kryptonite, Starbucks and many other household brands. It is not just satisfying demands for marketing/PR ROI, but rather demonstrating how to best build and maintain brands in the general marketplace, especially in user-generated media (i.e. consumers, experts and societal participants).

Certainly the real-time focus on most media is also having an effect that is driving convergence, but I think there is a move away from one preferred media to a variety of sources – both online, in print, or our portable devices, etc. Television is no longer the end all and be all (remember when the evening news was “must see” TV?).  Thus, marketers need to think about goals and find resources to help them deliver.  An important part is the ability to rethink and change campaigns and tactics “on the fly” based on user feedback, internal resources, as well as sales responses.
I believe the PR/marketing convergences and the ways that mainstream and consumer generated media are coming together will only accelerate in the coming months and years.

Blog Bits - Week of October 10th

Jeremy Pepper of POP! PR got a sneak preview of the first chapter of Jeremy Wright’s  book, Blog Marketing, which  the is now also available on Wright’s site…  Pepper says that if the rest of the book is a good as the first chapter “Wright might just have a winner in his hand.”    Pepper said,  “The chapter begins with a cute story about a business looking into blogging, and Wright goes into an analogy about being a fly on the wall of your customers:”
Now imagine that you could use this up-to-the-minute information to determine what your customers want, how they want it, what they will ultimately buy, and what they’re willing to pay for it. This is the power of the blog.
According to Pepper “this book is not going to blow away people that have been blogging for any amount of time but it will help marketing departments that are thinking of tipping their toes into the blogosphere some food for thought.”

Adam Zand posts on Tech PR Gems the Top 100 Blogs according to CNET News.com.  “With more than 14 million blogs in existence and another 80,000 being created each day, how is a person supposed to find the ones worth reading?”  Some of the categories include:  cutting edge, digital lifestyle, media & search and many more….

Look who is jumping on the CGM Bandwagon, none other than music industry connoisseur, MTV. The newly available, MTVU is trying to harness consumer-generated media with its new mtvU Uber. It is now part of MTV’s 24-hour college network, seen on over 730 campuses which will now be available to everyone through mtvU Uber. It will also showcase a powerful line-up of original programming driven by new music, short-form series, and the best student-produced short films, music videos, animation and webisodes. “We are handing over an entire channel on-line to college students and everyone who wants new music," said Stephen Friedman, GM, mtvU.”

CGM for Market Research

Some of the most challenging questions I get asked come from the market research space. Researchers want to understand everything about who’s posting.

“Are they in my target market?” (Hard to tell.)
“What are their demographics?” (No way to know for certain. We can take a stab a psychographics though.)
“Where are they located?” (Difficult to pin down.)
And perhaps most importantly, after listening to some of my answers to the previous questions, “How can I make any recommendations with confidence without knowing any of that?”

To be completely forthright, it’s not an easy question to answer, but there is in fact an answer.  

Unlike traditional market research methods, such as telephone surveys and focus groups, the quantifiable analysis of vast bodies of unstructured, unsolicited consumer feedback is a relatively new concept. It lacks the forty or fifty years of rising sophistication accumulated in classic research practices; it might even be better described as an art than a science. CGM analysis techniques are improving rapidly, with significant enhancements in metadata extraction over the years. Links can now be tracked, advanced mathematics used to perform relative influence calculations, more information about the person posting can be gathered, locations better identified, and likely most noteworthy, the active posting base has expanded greatly, with a much wider cross-section of individuals participating in the medium. That said, even with all these advances and the diversification of the user-base, the analysis is still are not as refined as it could be; CGM analysis still can’t yet tell you if the prevailing opinion expressed online is representative of your target market, or only present in a different group.

The key to using CGM analysis data with confidence is thus to recognize that it’s a compliment complement (thanks Paul) to traditional market research, and not a replacement for it. CGM analysis can surface previously unknown issues, provide deep insight into the buying cycle, and generate very rapid real-world feedback, along with a whole host of other things. While it can’t confirm a hypothesis, it can generate one, and that may be its greatest feature.

There is however one other very important thing to keep in mind which bridges market research, PR, and traditional marketing functions. Sometimes, many of the traditional research questions just don’t matter. You may sell to 20-year-old white women from Kansas, and the poster may be a octogenarian man from California, but if your potential consumers type your product name into Google, and the octogenarian’s commentary comes back first, that commentary is going to have a strong impact on product perception. Due to the interconnected nature of weblogs and message boards, and the way search engines determine link rank, CGM postings often have disproportionably high standings in search results.  Combine this with the ever growing the number of people doing pre-purchase research on the internet, and suddenly CGM’s weight grows appreciably, and the whole concept of target market needs to be revaluated.

In short, smart market researchers will use CGM analysis for it’s strengths, even if the results don’t fit neatly into a traditional model, and shouldn’t forget that opinions on the internet do more than reflect consumer perception, they influence it.

market research, marketing, public relations, media, blogging

The Open Source Revolution Takes Shape - Consumers Are Gaining Control

I just buzzed through my daily update from Adrants, which by the way, is a great way to keep informed and a source of entertainment.  I was struck by a post on an essay written by Bob Garfield of AdAge.  According to Adrants summary, Garfield talks about the recent growing trends of consumer generated media, conversational marketing and what he calls The Open Source Revolution.  Of course, I had to check it out.  INSIDE THE NEW WORLD OF LISTENOMICS - How the Open Source Revolution Impacts Your Brands is a long read but well worth it.  Adrants translation = Advertisers Hijacked by Consumers. "Marketers and agencies who do not acknowledge the open source nature of consumer participation in brand conversations will fail miserably."  My translation = Consumers are gaining more and more control. Marketers better start to listen up!

marketing

Another Benefit to Reading Blogs - My Eyes and Ears When I'm Not There

It's that time of year again when I'm trying to decide how many conferences I should/can attend and which will provide the most benefit (whether personally or professionally).  I suspect I'm not alone on this one.  For example, over the past couple of weeks I was interested in attending the Forrester Consumer Forum,  WOMMA conference (Word of Mouth vs. Advertising Conference) and OMMA East all in NYC but didn't make it due to 5 (yes 5) other conferences that Cymfony partnered with during the same period.  But thanks to the Internet, consumer generated media and MSM I am finding some great sites that offer insights straight from the attendees perspective.  WOMMA's conference wrap-up page provides a summary of media and blog coverage of some of these events. Another short but informative summary published by InformationWeek about the Consumer Forum '05 offered stats delivered during the opening of the conference and Forrester's recent research reports on business intelligence.  Chris Charron, Forrester research director is quoted as saying:

"Technology has given consumers an option to tune business out, and tune each other in... On the flip side, technology has given businesses an opportunity to gain greater customer insights at a lower cost."

According Forrester via the InformationWeek article, blogs, RSS feeds and social networking are gaining in popularity (Ah, yes, I think we can all agree on this one).  But only blogs have reached the 1-in-10 barrier, meaning 1-in-10 consumer are reading blogs.  The key findings include:

• The amount of blog readership has doubled from 2004 - up to 10% in 2005. 
• RSS use tripled in 2005 to 6%. 
• Social network sites (such as Friendster.com and MySpace.com) has increased from 4% last year to 6 percent in 2005. 

My first thought is that 2005 hasn't even come to a close yet.  I'm curious to know if these stats will increase by year end. There are some additional more in-depth summaries of the conference that can be found by doing a quick search on technorati by typing "Forrester Consumer Forum".

The most talked about session came when senior analyst Charlene Li took that stage.  DMNews reported that Charlene immediately asked the question "what do blogs, rss and search engines have in common?"  Her answer? "They require marketers to give up a degree of control."  She went on to say that computing has changed customer behavior and brand loyalty for good - yet marketers haven't tapped the power of consumer-to-consumer connections.  As widely reported, Li talked about five rules for marketers interested in running blogs and other social computing tools.  Here's a quick list but check out the DMNews article "Forrester's Li:  Marketers Must Give UP Some Control" for more info:

1. Engage in conversations
2. Enjoy the conversations
3. Make customer tell marketers what they want
4. Place the ability in the hands of the users
5. Marketers should admit mistakes

"How do you measure the benefits of public relations and branding? How do you measure loyalty?  - It's not how many people have you sold," Li said, "but how many people have you influenced?" 

Granted, reading an event summary in CGM or MSM is not the same as actually being there but I'm really enjoying the fact that I don't necessarily have to attend every event to find interesting material.  And online discussion (or CGM) offers individual perspectives that can open your mind to a different take on a specific speaker or conference session.  I also find CGM useful in pointing me to some really great articles that I may not always find in a traditional search. 

Blog Bits - Week of October 3rd

The week Steve Rubel is calling the marketing troops together to "Go the Distance." "The marketing community has got 75% of social media mastery under its belt. They conceptually get its importance, how it evolves marketing from a monologue into a dialogue and the importance of listening. What they don't get is the last 25% - how to put this into action immediately."  He also presents there ideas as to how to deal with this situation.

1) Hands-on Workshops: PRSA, Ragan, the IABC, PR Week and other organizations need to start running hands-on workshops - not just panels with bloggers.

2) Integration: Let's not do what we did back in the 1990s where we had lots of agencies with interactive divisions that had no connection to the mother ship.  We need integration.

3) Encouragement: There's no easier way to get people learning about blogs, wikis, podcasets, RSS, tagging, etc. than to get them to try it. Hill and Knowlton's effort is exemplary.  But it's a first step. We need to get more agency heads blogging.

Katie Paine wrote a brief report on the Third Annual Measurement Summit held in Durham New Hampshire from September 28th to October 1st.  There were more than 100 attendees, and from her report it sounds like it was a great time and sharing/networking opportunity.  "The talks were, as usual, very high level and there was much more of a focus on marketing and branding than on media relations." Our Vice President of Professional Services and Customer Support, Patricia Fennessey, also attended and spoke at the conference, and looks forward to attending the Fourth Annual Measurement Summit!

A new Blogger Survey 2005 with a total of 821 respondents is out!  It was designed to "better understand blogger's attitudes towards corporations and PR firms as well as help clients understand why and how they should engage the blogosphere." With a variety of viewing options like, survey charts, free-form answers, geographic data and language data, you can see a variety of responses to questions ranging from, "What is the primary reason you blog?" to "if you know a message is sent to you from a PR firm, how much are you likely to trust it on a scale between 1 and 10, where 1 is 'not at all' and 10 is 'complete trust'? (the average response was a 4.60) Another interesting section is the free-form answers where there are 872 written responses to the question: How do companies and their firm's PR representative generally interact with you?

A Boon For Online Privacy

Due to the nature of CGM analysis, we are regularly asked questions regarding blogger/poster privacy. Sometimes these questions arise out of a desire to peel-back the semi-anonymity the Internet provides, and sometimes these questions come from the other side, from people or companies concerned with the implications (though to be forthright, the concern stems more from potential impact on corporate reputation than from any moral objections) of privacy breaches.

I have always stated that we will never use information not publicly available, and would dissuade anyone from trying to track down users for any reason other than to redress problems the bloggers/posters identified. But I know not every company takes this sort of position, and as a result was quite pleased when I saw this.

The Delaware Supreme Court just overturned a ruling by a lower court, stating, essentially, that a strong legal standard of harm must be established before forcibly piercing the veil of anonymity, and by doing so at least partially safeguarded the right to free anonymous speech on the Internet.

It’s heartening to see that at least some courts still see value in extending real-world rights to electronic mediums.

PR Machine's Got it Going On

I've never personally meet Robb Hecht, author of the PRMachine blog but I have to tell you, I just love his site (does that make me a groupie?).  I've been sending folks to his blog to use it as a resource for a few months now.  PRMachine is a PR persons dream come true providing links to everything from recent corporate blogging guidelines to blog surveys to speaking services to industry associations all on one page (granted you have to scroll down quite a bit but it's easily separated into well titled categories).  Great blog and PR resource.

public relations

Using Online Communities for Customer Insight

The American Marketing Association held its 2005 Marketing Research Conference here in Boston last week.  I made it over on the last day and had the chance to sit in on a session called "Online Consumer Insights: Lessons From the Front Line".  The conference session described as - When companies and consumers engage in an online dialog, it's a win-win situation for marketers and customers.  Several leading manufacturers share their experiences in leveraging an ongoing online relationship to conduct research, provide information, develop insights and successfully guide management decisions - was essentially about using company sponsored online communities to help guide market research.  Representatives including Joyce Ann Lindbloom-Salisbury of General Motors, Mike Troutman of Eastman Kodak Company and Lynne Kerger of the Chicago Tribune spoke on the panel with Thomas Brailsford of Hallmark as the moderator. 

As market researchers by profession, a common goal among the speakers is to continue to find ways to conduct research on behalf of their companies faster and cheaper.  The panel openly discussed how using online communities has helped them to establish a direct dialog and relationship with the consumers representatives in each online community.  The companies all had different parameters, uses and measures when setting up or interacting with their community.  Some even found other benefits in working with the communities.

GM, for example, realized early on that consumers don't always want to talk about what GM wants them to talk about.  Setting up the online community has helped them to learn to "ask the right questions", as Joyce Ann stated.  GM still conducts traditional market research such as panels and focus groups but has found that using the online communities allows GM immediate access to a segmented customer group.  Joyce Ann revealed that GM has had 9 branded communities over the last 3 years.  Some of the communities included:

• Hybrid car communities
• Women's communities
• Mobility communities (wheel chair or disabled consumers)
• Tech influential communities
• General Automotive communities

Kodak set up its first online community to open up an online dialog with a segmented consumer group.  For example, the first group consisted of consumers who had already made the switch from film to digital, they already owned a digital camera, already used online albums and used websites to share images.  Kodak gave them cell phone cameras and sent them on "field trips".  Kodak then asked members of the online community to perform tasks such as "print photos online".  The researchers then developed insights based on what the community talked about online.  Kodak admits that this type of research is not the "end all, be all" and that they learned a lot from their first test community group (and admits they could have done things better) but that it has helped them to be more strategic, efficient and cost effective in delivering research. 

Lynne Kerger told the crowd that the Chicago Tribune started to seriously look at online communities for market research because it needed a way to connect with consumers faster.  TV can measure how many people watched a show within hours, online news sites can measure viewership by click through, but the newspaper's research department faced very different challenges:

• The newspaper could only gather evidence of how readership was going every 3 months -
• "The product" (the newspaper) was produced daily and the actual production of the product was a huge challenge to make changes without data to back up why...
• And they have journalists and editors trained NOT to listen to others (form their own opinions)

By setting up online communities the research staff at the Trib had more immediate access of "facts" by asking questions such as "what sections did you read in Sunday's issue?"

Of course, listening to this panel raised many questions in my mind such as, aren't these "sponsored" community sites bias?  are these folks receiving incentives and if they are, doesn't that sway their opinions?  (BTW, I later found that incentives for all three companies were small, each very different but up to about $20 per month at the highest).  What about confidentiality within the group?  How do you recruit people into the group?

After a lengthy Q&A session many of my questions as well as others were addressed.  To summarize, all company representatives agreed that using online communities for insights is just one piece of the puzzle and does not have to be used as the sole source of consumer information.  I applaud these companies for looking beyond traditional market research and exploring different methods.  A final thought (disclosure, I'm going to promote Cymfony because its nagging at me...) I would urge companies to consider another option of looking beyond the sponsored online community site and dig a little deeper into blogosphere and consumer-generated media to explore unbiased or unfiltered discussion using tools such as Digital Consumer Insight. 

market research, Marketing, consumer behavior, online marketing