Cymfony's Influence 2.0

The Rapid Monetization of CGM

It is inevitable, and it is by and large a good thing. If someone creates a compelling piece of video that ends up attracting hundreds of thousands of views, the YouTubes of the world that host the video make a lot of money off ad impressions and click revenue. It only makes sense for companies to share the wealth. That’s why I love sites like Revver that pay 50% of any click revenue generated from the video back to the video owner.

New tools are enabling video creators to embed tags in videos that link to an ecommerce site where the featured product can be purchased.  This product linking practice, called “plinking” is great for streamed clips of TV shows. I’d love to click on the NBC.com stream of “Friday Night Lights” to buy Coach Taylor’s sunglasses. (I’m not getting paid for that link, I just love that show and want more people to watch it so NBC keeps it on the air.) 

Product placement has long been a part of commercial television and movies, so this is a great way for brands to capitalize on the emotion generated around a product and increase the return from that placement investment. 

But when it comes to plinking in consumer-generated videos, this doesn’t feel quite as good. This goes against the whole spirit of consumer-generated media. The beauty of CGM today is that is it “real” and free from corporate biases. We love seeing the honest and unfiltered ideas, opinions, and emotions that people are thinking about.  When a video creator is trying to make money off product in a video, they instantly lose that inherent “CGM credibility”. How would you feel watching a video clip celebrating only products that offered the creator the highest rev-share?

You’ll view it like you view any other big-media generated commercial today.

There is no doubt this will fuel the creative juices for consumer-generated advertisements, which is great news for brands. We’ll all have a lot of laughs watching people doing funny stuff to sell the latest iPod, but where will the line be drawn? How far will these e-commerce influences go? What if I referenced “Monday Night Football” here instead of “Friday Night Lights” just because I could make more money from ESPN than NBC for this link?  What if that famous AOL customer service call video pushed a link to sign up for Verizon DSL link in your face, or if that sleeping Comcast rep video ended with a Satellite TV offer? How much sincerity and credibility will consumer-generated video lose when everyone has the same biases as the good old fashion TV commercial?

Plinking is going to take consumer-generated video-osphere in some new directions. With money-making opportunities more immediately available, the quest for dollars will drive an increase in the quality and quantity of these videos as more professional efforts are applied to the creative and production processes. At the same time, the door will be wide open for anyone with a video camera to try to sell you something. Now those rambling video blog monologues will really have something to opine about - the jeans they are wearing, the music playing in the background, the poster on the wall, etc. Whatever gets you to click and buy something.

One thing we know for sure, world of influence for companies is going to get a whole lot more complicated. 

Tell me what you think. How do you think plinking will impact videos?  …and can anyone please suggest a better term than “consumer-generated video-osphere”? Now with Google firmly in control, maybe we’ll just call it the Tubeosphere.

 

Virtual Ethnography Webinar Rescheduled

We’ve had to reschedule Cymfony’s November 1st Virtual Ethnography Webinar.  The Webinar will now take place on Wednesday, December 6th at 1:00pm EST.

If you've already signed up you will receive an email notification of this change as well as a reminder several days prior to this new date.

We apologize for the inconvenience and we hope that everyone can still make it. 

If you haven't signed up and would like to, click here to register. 

ARF BabyCenter Virtual Ethnography CGM

Free ARF Webinar

Next Wednesday, November 1st, 1:00pm EST Cymfony’s CMO, Jim Nail, will co-present an Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) Webinar “Drawing Insights from Consumer-Generated Online Content – Virtual Ethnography,” with Jessica Lilie of BabyCenter.

Register Now!

Come learn:
• How new media are a voluntary, spontaneous, and authentic voice of the customer
• Techniques for turning massive volumes of blog and discussion posts into a meaningful data set
• How qualitative data analysis can lead to actionable customer insights
• How to use consumer-generated media analysis in conjunction with other research data to complete the picture of the target consumer

To register for this FREE webinar click on the link below:

https://cymfony.webex.com/cymfony/onstage/g.php?d=309445739&t=a

Hope you can join us!

ARF BabyCenter Virtual Ethnography CGM

Don't miss this WOMMA event!

Register now for the single best conference on word of mouth marketing on Dec 12th-13th in Washington DC.  Over 70 experts will be presenting practical “how to” instructions on word of mouth, viral, buzz and blog marketing at WOMMA’s Word of Mouth Marketing Summit

Enter discount code: guestofcymfony to recieve $75 off of your registeration! 

Visit  http://www.womma.org/summit2/ for more information and to register. 

WOMMA

The REALLY BIG story of the Wal-Mart/Edelman fake blog situation

Plenty of people have been criticizing Edelman, so I've been sitting it out. It is now time to take a step back and look at the big implication: The PR and marketing professions must commit themselves to changing course now, or they will crash into the mountain of consumer control.

Let's face it, this could probably have happened to any big PR firm or company that is blogging these days. The fact that it happened at Edelman, one of the self-declared leaders in using social media with some of the highest-profile bloggers out there, says as much or more about the chasm the profession will have to cross as it does about any one individual company.

For a generation or more, PR has been about spin. Finding a clever story angle is what PR people are trained to do. Marketing is the same, except they call it "positioning". Each new strategy starts from the basic premise of how to magnify the positives and deny any potential negatives. Exaggeration, careful selection of facts, and creating enticing ways to present the messages are not only accepted, but the fabric of every day work. In advertising, they are limited only by truth in advertising laws.

But consumer mistrust of advertising and media make these unspoken assumptions obsolete and dangerous to the health of companies and their marketing/PR partners. Before we launch a campaign, we must begin to put its concept through a new filter. After we ask "Is it on strategy" and "Is it compelling to the audience?", we must now ask "Is it ethical?". And we must train everyone in our organizations, down to the entry level assistant account executive, media relations manager, and marketing associate to ask this question.

The WOMMA Ethics code is a great start on specific areas of honesty in relationship, opinion, and identity. (Disclosure: I am a member of the Board of Directors of WOMMA). Now it -- or some similar guidelines -- must be incorporated into the curricula, training programs, and OJT learning that takes place every day.

Marketing and PR have been on autopilot for decades. The collision warning system just alarmed us that we're heading straight into the side of a mountain.

What are you doing to change the course of your organization?

edelman walmart micropersuasion richard+edelman flog public+relations wal-marting+across+america

Selling the Social Way

The market research firm Compete just released a study on the effectiveness of social commerce, or s-commerce as they are calling it.  By launching e-commerce initiatives that weave best practices from social networks, companies can use consumer participation to increase sales.

The idea of social commerce isn’t new. Amazon gets a lot of credit for pioneering social commerce with the way they’ve embraced customer reviews, but one of the best definitions I’ve seen came from Steve Rubel’s Micropersuasion blog last year. He states “Social commerce can take several forms, but in sum it means creating places where people can collaborate online, get advice from trusted individuals, find goods and services and then purchase them. It shrinks the research and purchasing cycle by creating a single destination powered by the power of many.”   

Shrinking that purchasing cycle in an age where consumers are turning to each other on social sites and away from the media is an opportunity that marketers will need to seize, but it has to be done right.  Compete’s point in the study is that social marketing isn’t about where you market your product, it is how you do it.  Google is going to make is easy as ever to place ads on MySpace and YouTube, but that doesn’t make you a social marketer.  Your ad interaction rates and ROI won’t be any different than any other ad placement.

And it isn’t about tying to create your own branded Myspace-like network since consumers will quickly see the marketing through the trees. Besides, consumers can only participate in so many social networks. (Compete says that consumers will stay involved in 3 network sites before they start losing interest.) 

In their press release, Compete identified three steps marketers need to follow as they begin s-commerce initiatives.

1. Research consumers, while they research you and your rivals.

2. Create a channel to connect consumers and your brand.

3. Engage consumers in a conversation: listen, learn and leverage.

Steps 1 and 2 are not unlike the strategies smart search engine marketers are doing today with optimized keywords and landing pages, but it is what you do when you have their attention at step 3 that makes all the difference. How do you engage them? You do it using customer forums, product blogs and other user-generated content initiatives.

Cymfony highlighted some of the companies doing this successfully in our “Making the Case for Social Media Strategy” paper earlier this year. 

 

ANA Masters of Marketing -- Quotable Quotes, Part 2

Mini Cooper's Jim McDowell and Burger King's Russ Klein had some memorable quotes...

Jim McDowell on how Mini creates community among their owners: "We fuel it by not controlling it."

Russ Klein on emerging media: "The lack of measurement of emerging media keeps other marketers on the sidelines. I hope they stay there."

ANA Masters of Marketing -- Quotable Quotes

This morning's sessions included some thought provoking nuggests from P&G's AG Lafley, Kaplan Thaler Group's Linda kaplan Thaler, Wal-Mart's Stephen Quinn and Charles Schwab's Becky Saeger that shed light on the conference's theme: "Reinvention & Innovation"

AG Lafley on how to deal with the fact that the consumer is in control of media and advertising consumption: "We've learned a paradox that the more in control we are, the more out of touch we are with our customers."

Linda Kaplan Thaler on why "being nice" is the next wave of consumer marketing: "Being mean is so last millenium. It only takes one person to take a company down."

Stephen Quinn on marketing's role in making sure that every consumer touchpoint delivers a consistent brand experience, especially in the store: "Marketing has to tell the brand story so compellingly that the associates know intuitively what to do, how to manage the touchpoints, what merchandise to buy, and how to treat the customer."

Becky Saeger on what it took to revive the Charles Schwab brand: "There is a reinvention paradox: Reinvention requires staying true to who you are."

Masters of Marketing Kick Off -- Marketer of the Year

The ANA's Masters of Marketing conference kicked off naming Jim Farley of Toyota Grand Marketer of the year. Well deserved and a good choice, but I was pulling for Yellow Tail wines.

The Scion brand has been extremely successful and was a tough marketing challenge to make Toyota appealing to young car buyers.

But, IMHO, Yellow Tail pulled off a bigger coup. First they found a niche of affordable, unpretentious beverage that wine had been unable to penetrate. Leveraging the somewhat rebellious image of Australia to make wine acceptable in that niche and coupling that with packaging that made the brand fun, cool, and understandable. And lest I forget, delivering a product that is quite good quality for the price. That's a really strong marketing package.

Other nominees were:

Comcast -- The Comcastic campaign is OK, but it is just that: a campaign, a tagline. Not the breadth of marketing thinking of Scion and Yellow Tail.

Lunesta -- Ditto above. The glow-in-the-dark butterfly image is certainly a strong mnemonic device in the ad, and the category faced a lot of challenges. But is it more than just an ad?

City of London -- I just didn't get this one....

Walt Disney -- Certainly a good come-back story.

Vans -- probably the next strongest contender, successfully balancing the demands of expanding distribution and demand for their footwear while retaining the image of being hip, niche and cool.

Wal-Mart -- A modest repositioning which for a company of Wal-Mart's size has lots of challenges. A case of some good work that doesn't seemed to have helped their financials.

You Tube -- Was marketing really involved here? A very cool product that clearly struck a chord with a large segment of the population. I don't want to downplay the importance of being in tune with the market, but this seems to me more a case of being first to stumble into a market no one else had found yet, and being as surprised as anyone by its success.

Rachael Ray -- Great line extensions that stay true to her core values and personality. But going from one show to two to four and then rolling out a magazine and some books seems like a pretty well-trod path with little truly innovative in the approach.

Poll Results from our ROI of Blogging Webinar

Cymfony sponsored a webinar with Forrester’s Charlene Li this week to present the findings from her latest report, the “ROI of Blogging”. Charlene discussed some interesting ideas on calculating the benefits, costs and risks of a corporate blogging initiative in order to determine your blog’s ROI. We’ll make the report available on our website for a few weeks as soon as the report is complete. Watch this space for the announcement. To cure your Forrester fix in the meantime, you can download their 2006 Brand Monitoring Wave report from our site right now.

 With a fantastic turnout of almost 500 people at our webinar, we had a great audience of PR professionals to conduct our own informal survey.  We presented an optional poll before the webinar began and about 240 people completed it. Here are some of the results:

• This audience was fairly blog savvy as 30% of them already have a corporate blog.
• Of the 70% who don’t have a blog now, most are developing strategies and researching best practices right now.  70% of them stated they are at least somewhat likely to have a blog in the next year.
• Even with a blog savvy crowd, they are amazingly unsophisticated in their blog monitoring practices. The largest group, 23%, relies on the most basic method of monitoring - manual searches on traditional search engines like Google.  16% search manually on a blog search engine like Technorati, 20% keep a list of specific blogs to follow and only 20% track with an RSS aggregator. A smaller group are using automated services like Cymfony.
  
• On the bright site, about 30% monitor at least once a day. But 37% of them are monitoring several times a month or less.
• Discovery was the reason most people in this informal study monitor blogs. 35% are monitoring to learn about trends in the market and 20% for competitive insight. Internally focused topics like tracking buzz about their own company (12%) and managing reputation issues (11%) were less of a priority.

These findings support the fact that corporate blogging is still in its early stages. But interest levels are very high as companies develop their strategies for participating and monitoring the blogosphere. It looks like 2007 is going to be a very big year for the blog businesses.

Time for Creatives to Engage with Consumer Engagement

In my post on September 28, I said that media companies and clients should disengage from the consumer engagement discussion because their use of the term had gotten far ahead of the ARF’s development of it. The opposite is true for ad agency creatives: two core concepts should lead more directly to Big Idea for their clients’ brands.

An all-star panel of major ad agency creative directors at the ARF/AAAA Engagement Conference revealed that they still rely on inspiration, intuition, and luck to find the Big Ideas for their clients. Such it has always been and agencies struggle for ways to increase the percentage of truly great ads. Consumer engagement may help in two ways:

1. Consumer engagement is a new “mental model” in which advertising works first on a subconscious, emotional level and only later on a rational level, according to ARF Chief Research Officer Joe Plummer.
2. The concept of “brand co-creation” details what exactly is going on at this subconscious level. Gerald Zaltman, a member of Harvard University's Mind, Brain, and Behavior Interfaculty Initiative, demonstrated how consumers respond to an ad by attaching metaphors and associations that give the brand more personally relevant meaning. Using a Heineken beer ad, he demonstrated his technique for drawing out these subconscious elements.

These new ways of thinking could lead to a more disciplined approach to increase the likelihood of unearthing one of these Big Ideas.

Why is this so important? As the panelists described the Big Ideas they had created, such as the Staples Easy Button, the Geico Gekko, and the Burger King king character, they admitted to a large dose of luck, accident, and serendipity.

Don't get me wrong, I believe inspiration is real. And David Ogilvy, a great proponent of research-based advertising, advised that after learning everything you possibly can about a product, its customer, markets, etc. one should go for walk or garden or any other sort of activity that would let a big idea bubble up from the subconscious.

These creative directors operated similarly, mentioning the input they use from focus groups, quantitative studies, direct consumer observation, and current culture immersion. But all these techniques rely on too superficial, rational responses from consumers or are too removed from the engagement moment to reliably deliver the Big Idea.

If engagement is indeed the new "mental model" that drives marketing planning, techniques like Zaltman's that apply a more rigorous, disciplined approach should help marketers find what makes consumers tick.

Even so, it will still take a keen eye and a true empathy with the consumer to pluck a core idea out of the many different associations, symbols and metaphors offered by consumers. But at least the odds will be in marketers' favor.

Consumer Engagement Agency Creative Director Advertising