Cymfony's Influence 2.0

We've Been Blended!!!

Forrester's Josh Bernoff has created a "Will it Blend?" video with tchotckes from social media vendors. Cymfony is honored to be among the elite company of Bazaarvoice, Facebook, MySpace, Mzinga, and several others.

Enjoy!

McKinsey Study: Change Organizations/Processes and Be Happy!

McKinsey's second annual "Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise" has lots of interesting data but what caught my eye was that companies which have changed some aspect of their organization/processes or created new positions for social media are more satisfied with their social media efforts than others. My take: this is a new example of the old "paving the cowpaths" story...

If you just try to plunk a new technology on top of old patterns of doing business, you will be disappointed. It is also an old technology story, too: remember ERP and CRM?

This year is a transitional year in business: before 2007, social media was viewed as a fad, a curiousity, or something only unemployed kids with time on their hands did. In 2007, we saw companies at least dabble and experiment. In the "Social Media in Business" study Cymfony did earlier this year, we saw that many companies were continuing these experiments and some beginning to build out and expand them. This is a healthy trend and a necessary progression. We are definitely seeing more companies create social media positions and budgets as they start to look toward 2009.

Social media in business has been an obsession of mine all year. In addition to our study, we also sponsored an Aberdeen study to find out. Check out our Social Media In Business page to download the reports and listen to the podcasts. If you think your company is moving too slowly, all this data can help you make the business case for the budget and staff to accelerate!

Join our Social Media in Business Facebook group to discuss what changes organizations are making and learn from your peers!

VISA 42% Share of Olympic Sponsor Discussion? NOT!

Our respected competitor, Collective Intellect, blogged that in their tracking of social media discussion of Olympic sponsors, VISA had a commanding 42% share. That looked fishy to us, so we did our own analysis and found VISA has a 16% share. To us, it looks like CI made 3 significant errors. The moral of the story: in social media analysis you must carefully define and execute the project or you get bad results.

Error #1: we suspected that CI defined the VISA brand incorrectly. It is tricky to get right because a simplistic definition will pick up references to a visa -- a government-issued travel documentation -- not just VISA the credit card. When we dumbed down our definition of the VISA brand we came up with a 51% share of voice, more in line with their results.

When we use Cymfony's more sophisticated methodology to limit content to the brand VISA, it is still one of the most-discussed sponsors, but now is essentially tied with Coca-Cola.

Error #2: This error becomes even more apparent when you evaluate sentiment for the brand. Our friends at CI stated in a Mediapost article about their results that the majority of posts including visa were negative. Our results show a slight positive skew and point to the incorrect definition of the VISA brand as the problem.

To dissect this effect, we used 3 definitions of visa: our sophisicated brand definition, the keyword "visa", and a definition of the travel document. Our keyword search on "visa" shows similar results to CI's: a negative skew. Using our brand VISA definition, discussion is 28% positive vs 20% negative. Isolating documents discussing visa the travel document shows that the skew is caused by the negative discussions surrounding the Chinese government's denial of visas to some athletes, reporters, and protesters.

Error #3: One other problem with their analysis is that they only tracked 7 of the 12 worldwide partners of the Olympics and two of the brands they did not track -- Samsung and Lenovo -- are both in the top 5 of social media discussion. Add all 5 other sponsors Collective Intellect didn't track and VISA's share drops more -- and we also see that Samsung becomes one of the top 3:

The Mediapost article cited some other findings that are erroneous, eg, that Pansonic has no negative posts. In our analysis, 20% of posts about Panasonic were negative.

But maybe I'll save detail on that for another post....

Our summer vacation is over....

OK, so it was more like a spring AND summer vacation when I didn't blog. But that doesn't mean things were quiet at Cymfony.

For instance, check out this interview with Cymfony President, Andrew Bernstein on our local Fox affiliate.

And this Boston Globe article in which I was quoted.

Watch this space for more news, announcements and cool stuff coming from us this fall!

59% say both don't get it

I had a great panel Wednesday at the Ad Age Digital Conference. Ad Age provided an audience polling system, so we asked the question: "Who's to blame for the slow page of development of marketing on social media: (1) Agencies that don't get it (2) Marketers that don't get it (3) Both agencies and marketers". 59% picked both.

See my prior post on the topic!

Getting Past who "Gets It"

Let's face it: agencies don't "get it". Marketers don't "get it". Senior management doesn't "get it". I'll confess, things are changing so fast I feel there is plenty that I don't get! Let's get over it and get together to get with it.

When we released our Social Media In Business report a few weeks ago, a number of publications like AdWeek and bloggers like Joseph Jaffee focused on one section and blared headlines that said "Agencies don't get it!"

Yesterday's report on the World Advertising Research Center's site quoted McDonald's corporate VP of global marketing telling attendees at The Economists' European Marketing Directors Summit that most of his marketing colleagues "don't even know that YouTube exists." (At least this gets me off the hook: many of my agency friends berated me for not asking clients whether they "get it" or not -- here's the answer!)

OK. OK. I'm sorry I started this.

The fact is we all have a lot to learn. And once we learn something, it all changes again as a new form of social media bursts on the scene.

So let's get together to share what we have learned, instead of pointing fingers. Come to our Social Media in Business Facebook group and join over four hundred of your peers to pool our collective knowledge!

Consumer Online Behavior: Community or Content as King

An Ad Age story is headlined "Content Trumps Community" and notes that only 7.5% of consumer time online is spent in community sites like Facebook, MySpace, etc. True enough, but the stats say social networks have less of an issue with the number of users and page view consumption than with their users' fleeting attention.

First, kudos to the Online Publishers Association for recognizing that community is its own category. That alone is a statement about how far "social media" has come in the last couple of years.

I've followed the OPA's Internet Activity Index for several years and I often quote it to show how the Internet is different from other media: other media are 100% about content, but the Internet has always been a balance of content and communications (email and IM), with a healthy dollop of commerce thrown in.

While the Ad Age article implies that the focus and attention paid to social networks is overblown compared to the time spent, I beg to disagree with my friend Ms. Klaasen on these grounds:

Time spent on social networks is 50% higher than search -- and we all know how big search is.
Contrary to Ms. Klaassen's observation that social network time is coming primarily from communications, content's share of time dropped 6 percentage points from December to January, making up the bulk of community's 7.5 percentage points. With this drop, content's share of time is lower that it was in January 2007.
Look also at page views per person: content dropped 225 pages, which suggests that in the reclassification, a number of sites formerly in the content group were moved to community. Communications, meanwhile, had 404 pages, the second highest number in the past 12 months.
Another interesting angle is that content sites show 480 pages per month per user while community sites show 380 pages. In other words, community sites already have 80% as many places to put ads in front of each user as content sites.
Only 59.5% of online users used community sites in January, while the other categories ranged from 78% - 93%. Given that these sites are only a couple of years old, that is a healthy number.
Even more important, and not reflected in any of these numbers, is the degree of influence this time has on users' brand perceptions and purchasing decisions. Word-of-mouth continues to be the leading influence and roughly twice the influence of online ads, which would imply that this 7.5% of time is likely to have disproportionately higher impact than content pages.

I don't think social media's issue is with having sufficient space to sell -- the audience will continue to grow, and if the past is any indication of the future the number of pages per user will grow as well.

I wrote a while ago that social networks have a difficult tightrope to walk, between monetizing their user's attention and alienating those very users.

These numbers also imply that the users' attention is so fleeting (users are cramming 380 pages into about 1/4 the time they spend on content sites) that creating an effective marketing communication/ad format is the real challenge. Like email and IM before it, banners and other display ad formats are probably not the answer; unlike those communications media, word-of-mouth marketing techniques can be employed to involve brands in the conversations taking place.

New Webinar to Discuss Findings of a Global Social Media Study

Feb 28 at 1pm (Eastern)
Register today at: www.SocialMediaInBusiness.com

We all know how important social media has become for consumers, but we still see companies struggle with the best ways to use social media in brand and product marketing.

In our continuing efforts to help companies leverage the benefits of social media, we decided to conduct a study on how businesses around the world are planning, implementing and evaluating social media tools and practices. TNS interviewed over 70 business executives from leading companies in the US, Canada and Europe about their experiences with social media and we’ll discuss our analysis of their insights in this webinar.

Some of these insights include:

80% of the companies told us they are including social media in their marketing at some level. These companies are pleased with the results they’ve seen and they are very optimistic about the impact social media will have on their business in the future. But they had a lot to say about the barriers they face within their organization and the sophistication they are getting from their agency partners.

“Revolutionaries” (those who feel social media is a revolutionary opportunity that must be grasped with urgency) are twice as likely to see a lot of impact from monitoring social media to gain consumer insights than the “Wait-and-Sees”. (those who believe social media is important, but it should not absorb significant company resources).

The importance of social media will continue to increase. Close to two-thirds of global respondents, and 88% in the U.S, said reading and analyzing social media would have a lot of impact on the future of their businesses.

Jim Nail will review the results of these interviews and discuss strategies you can use to improve the success of social media initiatives in your business. This will be a fun and informative session so I hope you can attend.

Confessions of a Temporary PR Target

I spent the last several months immersed in the Super Bowl… and I don’t just mean following my team’s “pursuit of perfection”. I tracked advertiser strategies and pre-game promotions on www.SuperBowlAdvertisers.com to support our latest Super Bowl ad analysis reports.

What initially started as a little side project turned into a high visibility marketing vehicle for us. By the time the ticker tape rained down on celebrating Giants players, this blog had generated more unique visitors in a week than any of our blogs or even our corporate website ever had.

As the site’s traffic grew in the weeks before the game, I became a target for PR pitches. PR representatives from many of the advertisers in the game wanted me to write about their Super Bowl ad news. The experience was enlightening. Some of the communications were outstanding and demonstrated what “best in class” PR outreach looks like, and others proved that there is a big divide between those that get it and those that don’t. Considering I heard from the PR representation of some of the biggest brands in the world, I think I got a good view of the state of blogger outreach.

So, as any good blogger would do, I’d thought I’d turn my observations into a short list of recommendations for reaching out to bloggers effectively.

Make a personal commitment
I know it seems obvious, but I also know how difficult it can be. When you have to reach out to a long list of bloggers and journalists, it takes a lot of time to write a personalized message to each person. Invest the time, it pays off. One PR person who emailed me knew exactly what my blog was about and he knew exactly what I wanted to know. He gave it to me straight and he gave me exactly what I needed. I couldn’t login to Typepad fast enough to write about it.

You are in tune or you are just noise
One PR firm did a great job reaching out and talking to me directly, but they didn’t have anything relevant to say. There were no stories about the ad, why the company was advertising, what they hoped to achieve, and there were certainly no teasers available. There just wasn’t anything to write about.

The company enthusiastically sent me their ad, but it wasn’t until after the game. By that time the story had completely changed and the ad wasn’t news anymore. 97 million people saw it on TV the night before and millions were watching it again on YouTube and Myspace. The blog conversation moved on to stories about the impact of the ad. Too bad they had nothing to say about that.

The sting of spam can hurt you
My email address must have made it into a blogger contact database at one agency because I started getting emails about product announcements from their other clients. Of course, these clients had nothing to do with the Super Bowl now or anytime in the future. (You think they’d at least take a second and look at name of my blog before pressing send.)

That turned me off to anything that I received from that firm after that. That’s the thing about reaching out to bloggers. Their specialty is usually pretty niche so it is very obvious when you spam them with a form letter announcement.

Timing is everything
A lot of the messages I received had information I already knew (I do work for a buzz tracking company, you know), but a lot of it was hot off the press and I was excited to have an opportunity to help “break” the news. I know we aren’t talking CNN Headline News stuff here, but if I can contribute something to my marketplace first, I’ll get more site traffic and greater visibility for my company, our product and for myself. I don’t deny it - I’m also trying to make a name for myself here as well.

Of course you are going to save the good stuff for a mainstream media exclusive, but don’t underestimate the value of the small stuff for a budding blogger. Try feeding smaller news stories to a few bloggers right away. They’ll appreciate it and return the favor.

Helpful is helpful, pushy is not
I felt that the “Here’s some info I thought you’d be interested in since you are writing about the Super Bowl” followed up with a “and I’m happy to answer your questions …” worked a whole lot better than the “Here’s some great information, can you write about this today” approach.

Bloggers don’t work for your clients. Actually, there’s not a lot that keeps them from working aggressively against them if you push the wrong buttons.

Persistence pays
I skipped some stories because I didn’t feel the news was that important, or there might have been bigger stories demanding attention that day ….and also because I have a day job… and a family that needed some attention as well, but I always appreciated the dedication some reps had to their client.

One PR rep kept sending friendly reminders about his client’s campaign and he didn’t just try to pound a point again and again. He offered something new to the message each time. His persistence also told me that me that he saw value in my site.

Misleading is a big mistake
One PR rep did everything summarized above, but he was a little misleading. He never outright lied, but he led me to believe teasers of the company’s ad were on their new corporate blog. It wasn’t there, and it wouldn’t be for several days. The funny thing was when the goods finally did appear I never heard a thing from them. It was obvious he was pushing this new blog and he wanted to hook me into it so I’d tell people to read it daily for news on the ad. I felt manipulated and never wrote about it.

I ended up wasted a lot of time with this rep and that stupid blog. A little part of me wanted to blast him on the site, even though it may not have been the most professional thing to do. In a world where stirring up a little controversy can get you notoriety, you can’t certainly count on restraint from all bloggers.

There is nothing revolutionary here, but it surprising how many top-tier PR firms don’t get it. By the way, I will say that the one PR rep who blew me away was Chris Thilk from MWW Group. Thanks for making my job easier Chris.

Is Prediction Even the Point of Social Media?

On his personal blog, Forrester's Peter Kim writes, "Many [brand monitoring] vendors say they can predict future events based on chatter levels." Everyone wants a crystal ball to ensure correct decisions, but is that a realistic expectation when we are dealing with fundamentally unpredictable entities like human beings? Or is the point to be able to follow more closely the erratic path they invariably take?

I read Peter's post early this morning, then the question of predictability came up on a Blog Council webinar where I presented with David Rabjohns of Motivequest and Ann Green of Millward Brown. David had shown their Cooper Mini case study, and the work he had done with the Kellog School of Management which statistically correlated levels of advocacy detected in social media to sales of the cute little cars. He mentioned his experience across product categories that predictability is only reliable out to about 1 month in the future.

Why 1 month I wondered....

It is well known that the impact of a marketing event has a short half-life. Recall of TV ads decays quickly, and even the increased awareness from an 8-week flight wanes in a short period of time when the campaign is over. Competitors' messages come to the fore, economic conditions change, the seasons change...all sorts of things crowd the brand out of the consumer's mind.

So the benefit of social media is not so much in its predictive ability -- with this complex environment and consumers' serendipitous reaction to events, predictability is virtually impossible.

Social media's benefit is more in its ability to keep the marketer in tune with consumer moods in real-time, or, as I like to say, "at the speed of the market."

See Jim's Picks and Pans...

...of last night's Super Ad Bowl at our SuperBowlAdvertisers.com blog.

Cymfony Discusses Super Bowl Ads with Fox Business

Cymfony CMO Jim Nail was on Fox Business television today discussing this weekend’s Super Bowl ads and the impact advertisers hope to achieve. Here's the clip...

After responding to the initial question about the return advertisers hope to see with their ad investment, Jim discusses some interesting observations about the tone of this year’s ads. It’s become apparent that many advertisers have left the rock ‘em, sock ‘em attitude behind in favor of themes about charity, social responsibility and family values.

We spoke to Stuart Elliott of the New York Times about this earlier this week and he wrote about it his article “This Year’s Super Bowl Ads to Be Gentle and Sweet”. Many of the ad execs quoted in his article agreed that advertisers are approaching the Super Bowl differently this year. David Lubars, the chairman and chief creative officer at BBDO North America, said “no dying this year” and “we have several commercials that are all fun and nice”

Why the change of heart? Are we getting our fair share of blood and guts in political ads? (That's Jim's line from the NY Times article)

We expanded on this idea in this post on our www.SuperBowlAdvertisers.com blog.

Super Bowl ads bad for stock price? I doubt it.

The SportsBiz blog on CNBC speculated that a 20% drop in the stock of sports apparel maker Under Armor was caused by the company's announcement that they will advertise on the Super Bowl. I know it has been a slow news year for Super Bowl advertising, but this blogger should stick to sports, and forget about the business...

We noted this news earlier today on our SuperBowlAdvertisers.com blog. Digging into it shows there is more to the story than the Super Bowl ad. The company announced 2007 results and discussed 2008 outlook in a press release yesterday. The main points are:

The company confirmed previously forecast overall revenue and profit growth for the year.
But the company announced front-loading the marketing expenses in the first half of the year to support the launch of their Performance Trainer shoes. The Super Bowl ad is one element of this acceleration of marketing expenses.
The Performance Trainer shoes hit the store in May, so sales of those shoes won't hit the books until H2.
Wachovia immediately downgraded the stock to "market perform" citing "...the slowdown at retail...and the uncertainty of launching the cross trainers" as reasons to "step to the sidelines on the stock."
CreditSuisse maintained their "outperform" rating, noting that "Marketing is a critical investment for any brand company..."

So the bean counters are nervous about the company spending a bunch of money now and promising future revenues from an unproven product in an uncertain economy. The Super Bowl is the least of the concerns.

Doritos Super Bowl contest -- what do last year's winners say?

On Monday, Doritos announced the three finalists for this year's Crash the Super Bowl contest. I took that opportunity to talk to last year's winners, Dale Backus and Wes Philips of 5 Point Productions. The full podcast is on our SuperBowlAdvertisers.com blog.

I talked with Dale and Wes right after their success last year, so I used this as an excuse to catch up on how that success drove their business this year, what they think of changing to more of an American Idol type contest vs. last year's ad contest -- and, of course, which of the finalists they were going to vote for.

We also spoke with a reporter at Ad Age yesterday, so a story should be out soon. Dale and Wes revealed one other bit of history I hadn't known before: they had only started 5 Point Productions a month or so before entering the contest.

Take a few minutes to listen to the podcast -- Dale and Wes tell the story of how they used word of mouth marketing to drive the voting that made them a finalist and have some advice for Doritos about how to overcome some of the potential limitations the music video format may have in delivering strong brand messaging for Doritos.

Corporate Blogging: From the Discovery to Discipline

Cymfony and Porter-Novelli just presented the 2007 update of the Corporate Blog survey we initiated last year. We christened last year "The Discovery Age". Changes in the past year have brought more discipline to the management of some aspects of the corporate blog, while evaluation and monitoring lag.

First the progress. Management of corporate blogs has evolved quite a bit in the last year. PR has stepped up to lead most aspects of the corporate blog process. PR depts and agencies have implemented formal processes and guidelines on the management, writing and review of blog posts to ensure quality and consistency.

Fortunately, this has not appeared to censor or restrict participation. In fact, more employees across the company are now involved in contributing posts, and nobody is writing the posts for them. They generally have broad guidelines, not strict rule of what can and can't be published. Few require legal or departmental approvals. This is important to preserve the authenticity and honesty that corporate blogs need to be successful. PR seems to get it.

What they don’t seem to get is the strategic evaluation and analysis. For example, almost three-quarters of respondents felt the blog increased the company's visibility, but half were unsure if the blog was successful. The most popular measurement of success is blog traffic and not any measure of influence or business impact.

This is even more apparent when it comes to monitoring other blogs. Monitoring the blogosphere for mentions of their company is usually very infrequent (avg 5.1 times a month), manual (most rely on Google alerts) and lack strategic analysis of the findings. Only 26% have any sort of influential blogger outreach efforts in place.

Peter Hirsch, a Partner at Porter Novelli, and I had an interesting discussion about these results and what companies can do to improve their programs in our webinar. I encourage you to view the recording on our site. If you don’t have the time now, search “Cymfony” next time you are in iTunes and listen to an audio portion of the session.

Bubble 2.0 -- set to music

If you've developed a bad case of angst around whether there is a new bubble or not, kick back and lighten up with this video.

Social Networks' 2008 Tightrope Walk

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble....

My musings on whether social media has become a bubble has stirred up a bit of buzz.

But here's the real issue: in order to develop a solid revenue model, social networks must walk a very thin line between pleasing marketers without alienating their users. The models and examples exist today; the question is: will media companies and marketers resist the urge for the quick hit and exercise the retraint, wisdom, and patience to build a mutually beneficial relationship with their audience?

Paul LaMonica at CNN Money picked up on it earlier this week and so when I was in New York we had a wide-ranging discussion which he wrote up here.

The blog Socialized, took it the wrong way, and thought I was an idiot. I corrected her interpretation and she kindly put up a new post to draw attention to my comments.

To save you all the trouble of wading through all the various links and comments, here is a succinct summary of my key points.

The bubble is in VC funding and start up companies, not in consumer behavior. I elaborated on this in this post and as I told Paul the trend of consumers using social media is "unequivocal, inexorable, and irreversible." Just as consumers kept using the Internet after the 2000 bubble burst, they will keep using social media no matter how much money the VCs lose or how much doom-and-gloom comes from the media. Smart marketers will keep their eyes on their audience.
The social media business model creates greater tension than other media businesses. Any media business has to manage the tension between editorial and advertising. But here the tension is especially acute. One of the drivers of social media's growth is that consumers are sick of the ad clutter in other media. In addition, the value of social media is personal relationship, not information. Ads that are relevant to the editorial are more accepted (think cosmetics ads in Cosmo or shotgun ads in Field & Stream. What kind of ad is relevant to insert between two people building a personal rapport?
Marketers are likely to push the model the wrong way. In marketers' embryonic understanding of the social media ethos, they will ask -- and push for -- what they know: guaranteed placements and impressions/GRPs or some other measure or audience size. Banner ads everywhere....lists of members they can ping to invite to friend their brand profile. Facebook is facing a mini-rebellion from their members with a 50,000-strong group called "Petition: Facebook, stop invading my privacy." (As an aside I was invited to join this group -- by a friend who is a senior marketer at a CPG company!)

To me this is reminiscent of the pop-up ad phase of online advertising: advertisers wanted more intrusive units than 468x60 banners, sites obliged them, felt huge backlash from their audience, and dialed down, or even eliminated pop-ups altogether. Kudos to Facebook for listening to their users and rapidly amending policies that meet resistance, as they have done with the Beacon Opt-out policy.

But social networks have a better alternative than retreat: educate marketers on the right way to become part of the social media environment. The panel I did at AdTech this month had great case studies from Coke, Digitas (representing Delta), MySpace and YouTube that begin to provide models other advertisers can follow to be successful.

And, thanks to MySpace, Isobar, and Carat, there is great research that has defined the "Momentum Effect" as the ROI driver in social media. This is a MUST READ report for marketers entering this space (get it here) (Disclosure/mini-plug: my colleagues at TNS were one of three partners is executing the research, along with TRU and Marketing Evolution).

Will social networks have the backbone to turn down revenue is marketers demand types of placements that will alienat users? Will marketers learn to give up control and learn to become the kind of friend that social network users will welcome?

This will be the real story of 2008, not Bubble 2.0.

Memo to Bob Parsons: You are so wrong!

Dear Bob:

I read that you have decided that it is not worth it to promote GoDaddy's Super Bowl ad ahead of the game as you have in the past. I say, the strategy of promoting early isn't wrong -- your execution last year was flawed! Tune in to my webinar tomorrow with the Advertising Research Foundation and I'll show you the proof!

Bob,

A recent Brandweek article, quoted you as saying that you won't promote GoDaddy's ad as aggressively before the game as in year's past:

What we learned is that doesn’t really pay off because people are going to watch anyhow. So while that might work for other occasions, that doesn’t work for the Super Bowl.

Our analysis (to be published in the December Journal of Advertising Research) shows that advertisers who promote their ad aggressively before the game (whom we dubbed "Play Action Advertisers") got 10 times the coverage and consumer discussion as those who didn't.

10 times!!

We calculated that Doritos got a minimum of 40 million impressions even before the coin toss. That's almost half of the audience that the game gets. Stick that in your ROI calculator!

And those who showed their ad online before the game got 4 times the coverage of those who announced early, but did not show their ad. You can download an abstract of this (and some other analysis we did at our site

Bob: The lesson you should take away from last year is that you can't do the same thing two years in a row. It was boring and seemed a lot more contrived than the 2006 effort. (see my 2006 post in which I awarded you the "They Really Get It" Award). Scroll down to the bottom of this post to read my review of your brilliant strategy.

So promote your ad aggressively ahead of the game -- if your really have something new to say!

PS. I take back what I said about questioning your reason for being on the Super Bowl at all, both in last year's and my 2005 review (where I gave you the "Load up the Cannon with Gerbils" Award). I recently started a blog about my other obssession -- LED lighting -- at http://ledlightsathome.com . When I decided to do it, GoDaddy was top of mind and you got my $14 to register the domain (actually more like $80 because I also registered a few variations thereof).

(cross-posted at www.superbowladvertisers.com )

The Road to Super Bowl XLII

With the Patriots steamrolling through the NFL this season, many people here in the Boston area are thinking a lot about the Super Bowl coming up this February. But here at Cymfony, the Super Bowl has become a year-round obsession – but for a different reason: It is the perfect example of Influence 2.0.

We tracked discussion of last year’s game and conducted several studies on the audience impact of the media coverage and consumer discussion of last year’s Super Bowl advertisers. Over the past month, these studies have been published in a variety of publications.

Visibility vs Surprise: Which Drives the Greatest Discussion of Super Bowl Ads? To be published in the 12/07 issue of the “Journal of Advertising Research” from the ARF.

What This Year’s Super Bowl Advertisers Can Learn from Doritos. Published in the 11/07 issue of Media Magazine

Is There No Such Thing as Bad News? - How controversy drives word-of-mouth around Super Bowl advertising and how it can bite the brand. Published in 11/07 “Measuring Word of Mouth Vol. 3” from the Word of Mouth Marketing Association

I encourage you to buy the WOMMA and JAR publications for the full story (and other great research as well). We've also compiled some of the insights from each of these studies in a brief informational abstract that is available for download on our site now.

The gist of our findings: Last year's success of advertisers like Doritos and Nationwide changes Super Bowl advertising -- it's no longer about great buzz after the game, pre-game media coverage is just as important, maybe more so.

(Disclosure: shameless plug coming) In response to this change, we are stepping up our analysis and launching a new product: the Super Bowl Advertising Audience Impact Report. Check it out at www.cymfony.com/superbowl.asp Clients will get a timely, in-depth analysis of the media coverage and consumer discussion of Super Bowl advertisers each week leading up to and immediately following the game on February 3.

This report will address:

How much coverage is each advertiser generating?
Which ads are consumers discussing online? What are they saying?
What is the quality and tone of the coverage?
How is the event impacting consumer engagement with the brand?
How are pre-game promotional strategies influencing coverage?

After the post-game coverage peaks on Monday after the game, our Super Bowl analysts will lead a detailed online briefing Tuesday afternoon to discuss the ad winners and losers as reported by consumers and the media. This will all get wrapped up in a comprehensive report a couple weeks later when the coverage is complete.

Some of us around here are as excited about this new report as we are about the steamrolling Patriots. (OK, we admit it, we're social media geeks!)

Some Sanity Comes to the Hype Cycle

The PQ Media forecast of the size of Word Of Mouth Marketing injects some needed discipline into the crazy projections floating around about the growth of WOM. Putting this study side-by-side with some other reports and it becomes clear that social media is about a $1 billion industry.

My post about whether social media is climbing the hype curve brought Paul Chaney by who wanted to stir up more discussion about the state of adoption of these new tools.

There have been a plethora of studies on how much money marketers are spending in these emerging areas which are zeroing in on the billion-dollar number.

There may be some definitional differences between "word of mouth", "social media" and "conversational" marketing in these studies. But let's set those aside for the moment and try to triangulate these different data points to get close to a real number.

PQ Media says marketers will spend $1.35 billion on WOM this year. Disclosure: I'm on the Board of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association which participated in the PQ Media study.
An eMarketer report quoted by Jim Tobin on his Ignite Social Media blog says that "social media marketing" is 7.8% of online marketing spending. eMarketer's online advertising report pegs spending at $21.4 billion -- so social media's 7.8% share of this equals $1.67 billion.
Forrester pegs online advertising at $18.4 billion and social media at $600 million.

While the range from $600 million to $1.6 billion might drive the statistical purists crazy, as an ex-analyst I look at it and say it's all in the same ballpark. The differences are likely due to 1) the different definitions that I set aside 2) the emerging nature of the market which makes it devilshly hard to come up with any numbers 3) different assumption each analyst necessarily makes.

So, let's call the size of social media marketing spending a billion. As Everett Dirksen was famous for saying, "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money."

Social media is reaching the point of being a real item in the marketing mix. I'm willing to accept this wide range of numbers because that high-level conclusion jibes perfectly with my experience in talking to our clients and sales prospects.

And as I said in this post, marketers need to keep their eyes on consumers, not the VC world, and gear their spending accordingly.