Cymfony's Influence 2.0

Free Webinar: The ROI of Blogging

Next Tuesday, October 3rd, from 1:00pm-2:00pm EST we will be hosting a webinar on the ROI of Blogging with Charlene Li of Forrester Research.  This webinar will help you gain an understanding about the benefits, costs, and most importantly, the risks of blogging.   Sign up now

Quips and Quotes from Advertising Week in NY

Read on for the three most memorable moments, IMHO, from New York this week...

Best bit of trivia: Mike Hughes, president of The Martin Agency, revealed that the Geico gekko character is named Gary.

Best one-liner: Bob DeSena, director of Active Engagement at Mediaedge:cia stated during the Mediapost Forecast 2007 conference's Engagement Debate, "Women 18-29 is a good target for college-age males, but not for marketers."

Most revealing: Mark Tutsell, Chief Creative Officer of Leo Burnett said at the ARF/AAAA Engagement conference panel "Big Ideas Instead of Ads": "Our agency creates probably 25,000 ads globally each year and maybe a dozen are truly memorable."

Advertising Advertising Week

Time to Disengage from Engagement

It was clear from the panel on engagement metrics at the Mediapost Forecast 2007 conference that the industry's attempts to use "consumer engagement" as a tool have gotten ahead of the Advertising Research Foundation's process of defining and codifying the concept.

The panel was billed as a debate, and it delivered. Representing the media buying community were the well-known and always colorful Erwin Ephron, along with Dave Smith, president of Mediasmith. Representing the group championing and developing the concept were Joe Plummer Chief Research Officer of the ARF and Bob DeSena Director of Active Engagement at Mediaedge:cia.

The debate boiled down to this: the media buyers want to operationalize the engagement concept with the kinds of specific metrics and processes that have guided the reach/frequency/GRP model of ad buying. But the initiative was only announced last July and the work is ongoing.

Dave Smith noted that every presentation by media companies includes a pitch that their property is more "engaging" than others while media research companies like Simmons are pitching engagement metrics that don't fit into the current process. To top it off, Dave noted pressure from clients asking what his company is doing about engagement.

It is to these media sellers, researchers and clients that my title is directed: they should disengage the hype machines.

Joe Plummer readily admitted "we have a long way to go and we need to hurry up" and noted that there are five research initiatives in process to explore and validate different approaches that could be taken. Joe continued, "We are changing the way the industry thinks about advertising about advertising from one mental model to another. There is a lot of trial and error to evaluate the role of ideas like Net Promoter, co-creation of meaning and others."

This kind of change takes time, experimentation, and a lot of creative thought. Everyone should engage in the process to get the best thinking and ideas into the mix to be tested and validated.

Advertising Market Research Consumer Engagement

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Foundations of a breakaway brand: Trust, Community, Dialogue

iPod, Viking, and Converse topped the list of fastest growing brands determined by strategic brand and design consultancy, Landor Associates. The list isn't so surprising. The drivers behind this growth will surprise a lot of marketers.

In an interview with Fortune Magazine, Hayes Roth, chief marketing officer for Landor, summed up the factors behind these brands' growth this way:

"Today it's all about trust, community, and creating a dialogue with your customer that shares real knowledge."

These sound like soft, fluffy, "feel-good" characteristics that are a tough sell to a CEO, much less a CFO. But the Landor study showed that iPod added $4.5 billion in bottom-line value; Viking added $147 million; Converse added $298 million.

Now that makes a C-level exec feel good!

The Landor site provides more depth on these factors:

Building on a foundation of trust

This year's brands earned their customers' confidence by living up to their promises; in turn, their customers trusted and followed the brands as they diversified and moved into new spaces.

Cultivating brand communities

Leadership brands capitalize on the basic need for human connection by allowing enthusiastic customers to borrow the brand image to express a collective voice: the voice of a brand community.

Empowering customers with knowledge

The ten brands in this year's list are arming their customers with information; by proactively educating customers, a brand can better manage its image and get valuable feedback in return.

The article also quotes Michelle Roehm, associate professor at Wake Forest University, who says, "It's no longer, 'What can we blast out there about ourselves?' Brand theory now asks, How can we connect with the community in a really meaningful way?"

I'm definitely feeling an acceleration in the shift away from what John Stichweh Coca-Cola's Director of Worldwide Interactive Marketing called "Holistic Harrassment" (aka, integrated marketing, 360-degree marketing) to a more respectful, engagement-oriented relationship with consumers.

I'm not sure we can even call it marketing anymore. I am sure that companies need to rediscover the true purpose of marketing: to discover and satisfy the want, needs, and motivations of consumers.

Brand Landor Associates Strategy

FORRESTER RANKS CYMFONY A LEADER

While we at Cymfony are of course honored by Forrester’s highest ranking, we are more pleased by the validation that this WAVE report gives to the space.

Indulge me while I recount 5 years building one of the best brand monitoring and analysis companies in the business.  When I joined Cymfony in 2001, I found terrific text mining technology looking for some applications. We decided to focus on marketing services and communications as it was a fragmented market, corporate accountability and measurement was gaining prominence and I thought there was a great opportunity to add technology and automated tools to human insight in delivering the best solution for the marketing. Our first product, Brand Dashboard won awards but was more focused on tactical measurement and message discovery in mainstream media. A few years later some of our clients requested we deliver a product focused on a new space, on line media which became user generated media. We delivered another product called Digital consumer Insight which also garnered multiple awards. Then our customers started asking for a product that delivered both tactical and strategic analysis looking at both user generated media and mainstream media. Hence about 1 ½ years ago, we released the Orchestra Platform and Dashboard.

It’s great to get recognition from Forrester that to quote, “tactics such as clipping services, field agents and ad hoc research simple can’t keep pace” and free monitoring tools are limited: “the time required to use these tools is prohibitive, and they do not provide comprehensive coverage.” The big win for Cymfony is that demand and recognition of the value for comprehensive, integrated analysis and discovery tools has rapidly grown in the last nine months. Providing threat awareness, gaining deep consumer insight as well as measuring campaigns and corporate reputation has made Cymfony a leader in the space. I have to thank the team involved for their hard work, determination and foresight in developing, delivering and servicing great products for our customers. There are some strong people we have lost among the way but it is the dedication and hard work of our team, investors and partners that has allowed us to become a leader in this space. Now on to the next generation of influence 2.0………..

Facebook's Quick About Face

I'll give CEO Mark Zuckerberg a B- for his response to the situation. Read on to see how I think he could improve his grade.

I've been out of the loop due to traveling (my godson received his wings as a Naval aviator on Friday -- a great day!). So I'm just catching up on all that happened.

Here are the components of the grade:

Initial response: C.

Mr. Zuckerberg's 9/5 blog post acknowledges that "many of you aren't immediate fans of the new features" but first highlights that some consider the new features "overwhelming and cluttered". Hmmm. I didn't see any protest groups popping up about the clutter. He goes on to defend the features and invites feedback, but the general tone is defensive and doesn't reassure readers that Facebook will incorporate the feedback into the product.

Ultimate Response: A

"Coding nonstop for two days" to bring out features to correct the deficiencies was exactly the right thing to do. Mr. Zuckerberg's 9/8 post hits exactly the right tone: Admitting where Facebook messed up and that the company missed key principles that they believed in is the kind of honesty that always disarms critics.

Speed of Response: A

Getting the initial response up on 9/5 as the protests grew was exactly right. Fixing it within 3 days was even better.

Learning the bigger lesson: B-

That lesson is: involve your customers in your development process. Mr. Zuckerberg took one good step in inviting members to a group called the "Free Flow of Information on the Internet" to talk to him and other Facebook executives. Basically this is the right thing to do but 1) the name sounds more like a lobbying group than a customer feedback group. Also, it sounds like he will be pushing his view of what Free Flow means. 2) He gives no indication that this is more than a one time event meant to address one specific problem.

Remedial action

To raise future grades, Facebook needs a permanent way to gather member feedback, an internal process that proactively seeks it, assesses it , then incorporates it into development. Study  QuickBooks community section, especially Better Because of You to see how Intuit solicits and uses their customer suggestions. For extra credit, get tutoring from a company like Communispace that specializes in building and managing customer communities.

Lots of Unhappy Faces at Facebook

In case anyone had any doubts about the power of the social web, the controversy about Facebook's plan to send RSS updates of members' updates should put it to rest. Here are some initial issues the incident raises....

290,000 members joining a protest group demanding a change of this policy...a promised boycott of Facebook next week...and no Cesar Chavez leading it. This is truly a grass roots reaction. (For those of you too young to remember Cesar Chavez and the Grape Boycott of the '60's and '70's, check out Wikipedia.)

This controversy will likely continue to grow and evolve over the next few days and I'll update my thoughts about it. But here are some initial thoughts and questions that I hope to explore more over the coming days.

• Is this about poor communications on Facebook's part or the boundaries of privacy? From my read, the RSS feeds only go to a small circle of friends, the people who most likely come to  the friend's site on a regular basis anyway. Mark explains this pretty clearly in his post. Is RSS so cutting edge that even these presumably sophisticated users don't fully understand it? Or did this cross some line which even these people who live their lives very publicly don't want to cross?
• What was Facebook's product development process? Did they get any user input before hand? Or are they developing these features in an engineering silo because they are "cool" as Ruchi Sangvhi says in her blog post announcing them.
• And why didn't Facebook have a blog long ago? They just started their blog on August 22; thank goodness they did so they have a platform to respond to the uproar. Mark Zuckerberg did a nice job on jumping on it with his Tuesday post. But nothing since. I think the members would like to know what his thinking is two days later, even if it is just to stay "we understand concern is growing and we're looking at some options." But they probably could have avoided this whole issue if their blog had been active during the development process and they pinged their members for feedback.
• Why didn't Facebook learn from eBay's mistakes? Several years ago, eBay had similar user backlash to changes in policies and fees. eBay has since developed a philosophy that while they own the platform, the community should be empowered in large part to govern itself.

Blogs Come to Network Evening TV News

CBS Evening News is taking consumer-generated media to the airwaves.

In yet another example of how the worlds of consumer-generated media and traditional media are melding, CBS is explicitly out to change the "voice of God" style typical of network news shows by incorporating opinions from "average" people. They have debuted a new segment called "Free Speech" which, according to a story on MSNBC, will:

• Feature "average" people
• Be a short opinion piece
• Cover everything from the day's hot news story to personal bugaboos
• Feature "distinctive voices"

Last night's segment featured Morgan Spurlock, the author of "Supersize Me" -- admittedly not Joe Average, but not one of the typical media pundits, commentators or consultants who usually show up on the networks. His 1 minute 35-second segment adamantly rejects what he calls the "smackdown hype" of the current media environment in the personal, idiosyncratic, colorful stlye that is the meat-and-potatoes of a good blog, and a far cry from the typical big media company op-ed.

Sounds a lot like the characterstics of a blog to me. In fact, CBS would do well to recruit from blogs for future segments. I'm available anytime....

CBS Evening News Katie Couric Television Evening News Consumer-generated media