Cymfony's Influence 2.0

Blu-Ray vs HD DVD Update: And the winner is....

Just about a year ago, we published a report on the social media discussions surrounding these next generation video formats, concluding that HD DVD had an edge. Much has changed. Now, the leader is....

...indifference. Media Magazine recently published our analysis, but here is a quick summary.

In the analysis we classified authors by their prevailing attitude: advocates for one or the other format, simply observing that one or the other is likely to win (but without any strong endorsement), or simply indifferent to the outcome.

The Indifferent segment is larger than the advocates for both formats combined. As we dug deeper, Blu-ray has a slight edge in technical features and movies available on the format, but HD DVD has a huge price advantage. It wouldn't take much to nudge the advantage back to HD DVD.

But the article didn't have enough space for two interesting, though less frequently expressed viewpoints:

1. A number of authors didn't see much advantage of these formats over the current generation of DVD's.
2. Others stated that in a few years we'll all be downloading all our content on demand in HD, so they were going to sit out this format war entirely.

Consumers are telling both formats that they have failed to provide a compelling reason for consumers to upgrade. Will they listen and change their strategies before technology moves on and these technologies follow digital audio tape recorders as too little, too late?

Top Reasons people say NO to Social Media

Last Thursday, at the Social Media Club Boston event, our Director of Professional Services, Pat Fennessey, talked about the Top 5 objections to social media that we hear at Cymfony.  Todd Van Hoosear posted a recap of these objections (with Pat's rebuttal to each of them) on Tech PR Gems.

iPods, Pacemakers, and a brewing crisis for Apple

A storm of coverage has erupted in the last 24 hours over reports that an iPod can cause a pacemaker to malfunction. Both the traditional media and social media are buzzing....

Mickey Khan of DMNews tipped me off to this story.

The first report appears to be in the Pioneer Press and then was quickly picked up by blog Ars Technica and is spreading globally to the UK, Germany, Australia, India. There are about 165 traditional media stories (as of noon eastern time) and about the same number of blog posts. And it is starting to rise on Digg, with 26 votes.

So far, no response on the Apple site (in fact the last press release about the iPod celebrates selling 100 million of the devices), either in the media info section or the support section.

I'll let you check out these stories and assess the facts behind it for yourself. This event raises some interesting questions that will play out in the next hours....

• Will this become the next example of the Influence 2.0 world damaging an iconic brand before it can organize a response?
• Or, as many bloggers suggest, is this no big deal because any electrical device can interfere with a pacemaker?
• Will Apple be forced to respond? If so, will their response make matters worse or reassure iPod lovers?

Stay tuned...

New Podcast - How to Mine the Blogosphere

Paul Dunay, of Buzz Marketing for Technology, recently conducted a podcast on “How to Mine the Blogosphere” with our CMO, Jim Nail.  In this podcast, Jim gives advice on what companies should think about when looking at online conversations and includes examples of what companies like Sony and Wal-Mart are discovering in the process. 

Before the kickoff, Doritos scores a touchdown

In the REAL contest (the battle of the Super Bowl ads to see which advertisers will get the most for their money), Doritos has already put a big lead on the board. From January 1 - February 2, coverage of their contest to have consumers create their Super Bowl ad has generated over 40 million impressions -- almost half the number the game will deliver.

Cymfony has been tracking coverage of Super Bowl advertising in television (thanks to our friends at Critical Mention!), Internet traditional media sites (sites like reuters.com, abcnews.com, msnbc.com and thousands of others) and social media sites (blogs, discussion boards, social network sites, etc.).

Here's one other stat: the social media sources deliver less than 5% of all the impressions generated. While the blogs and social networks are undeniably important, they still have a long way to go to match traditional media's impact. But this shouldn't be a surprise: according to Quantcast, Engadget gets between 30,000 - 40,000 unique visits per day. A broadcast on a local TV station like ABC 9 in Cincinnati delivers an audience of 65,653 while the online version of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper delivers 66,416 readers.

Beyond just the raw amount of exposure, Doritos wins on another dimension: almost half of the discussions of the Doritos ads are positive and almost none are negative. At Cymfony, we almost never see this strong of positive reaction for any brand.

    

By contrast, Nationwide's Kevin Federline ad also shows strong favorability, but in a more typical pattern, almost 17% of the discussion is negative (you can't please all the people all the time).

 

But while Nationwide also got a fair amount of coverage and discussion, K-Fed really can't please the blogosphere: just under 30% of discussion in the social media world is negative.

   

Read my picks of the best and worst of Super Bowl ads: First Quarter, Second Quarter, Third Quarter, Fourth Quarter.

Our Blu-ray/HD DVD report triggers skepticism...and we reply

It's been about two weeks since Cymfony published its finding that the next generation video format HD-DVD is taking an early edge over Blu-ray.  The findings themselves were interesting - which you can download here: but the truly interesting aspect of the study was the response to the analysis itself! 

A Blue Christmas for Blu-Ray has caused quite a stir in the blogosphere, industry forums and message boards. The report was picked up from coast to coast -- from the Washington Post to the San Jose Mercury News and in top-tier blogs like Engadget and arstechnica. Then it truly started to get interesting!

As the story evolved, some skeptics bashed the report, wondering who paid for /sponsored the research. We quickly updated the report with this disclaimer (which we should have included more prominently in the initial release):

Cymfony conducted this research as an independent study to evauate and measure the influence of online social media in the high definition video market. The research was not sponsored by any manufacturer or other ognazination affiliated with either HD DVD or Blu-ray products.

We went into the study with no preconceived notions or agendas. We picked the topic expecting it to capture attention due to the heightened awareness of the holiday high-tech consumer season and the importance of these new formats to their respective supporters. The depth of skepticism about Sony's ability to succeed in launching a new format and the perception of the company's "arrogance" surprised us.

We hit a nerve, spurred debate, and that's exciting -- that's what analyzing social media to discover unexpected insights is all about.

I can certainly understand that Blu-ray supporters wouldn't like our findings. And I can even understand their initial reaction to try to cast doubt on the findings.

But I hope on reflection they will begin to understand the bigger lesson we were trying to illustrate with this study: the value of listening. In today's market, consumers are in control and expressing their views; Cymfony is just the messenger. The real question is: are companies and brands ready to listen?  Can they learn to face criticism, respond positively then engage in the conversation productively?

Now that the initial shock has receded, I hope these companies and brand will ask themselves:

• Could this information have helped shape the product development and marketing strategies?
• Can these insights be incorporated into a mid-course correction, to address the doubts and concerns expresssed and make a more compelling story for Blu-ray's benefits?
• Should we create a forum on blu-raydisc.com and ecnourage these consumers to come directly to us to express themselves?
• What should we do to prove to the skeptics that we have heard them, taken action on their concerns, and are committed to making Blu-ray a must-have product?

These aren't questions just for Sony, the Blu-ray consortium, or their rivals backing HD DVD. These are questions all marketers must begin to wrestle with.

We welcome the conversation to continue. As such, we plan on conducting similar research on other topics next year, capturing the opinions of the consumer base within traditional and CGM forums.

What are your thoughts? What issues, brand, and areas of interest would you like to hear about?

Post a comment for me with your suggestions.

A Blue Christmas for Blu-ray

Consumers are talking about next generation video formats: Blu-ray and HD DVD. This new Cymfony report gives the edge to HD DVD, but not for the reasons you may think.

Here are a few highlights of the study, which you can download here:

• Talk is evenly divided between the two formats, but postive comments about HD DVD are 46% higher than positives about Blu-ray.
• Over twice as many post authors say they are impressed by HD DVD than are impressed with Blu-ray.
• Sony, a leader of the Blu-ray consortium, inspires skepticism and resentment among a significant segment of post authors. They cite a string of Sony-led formats (such as Betamax) that have failed and accuse the company of arrogance.

This was a surprise to me. Much of the mainstsream media coverage of these high-def formats talks about the "format wars", drawing the analogy to the videotape format battle between VHS and Betamax. Our research shows there's more going on with consumers: it's not that consumers are waiting for one format to win before they purchase, but they actively doubt Sony's ability to win the battle. Here's my favorite post:

"Sony, on the other hand, has a track record of starting format wars, and losing them too...but they just don't seem to learn their lesson because they're so greedy."

A key point is that most conversation is still among early adopter videophiles and gamers. So far, both audiences have similar downbeat assessments. This doesn't bode well for the word-of-mouth that is likely to guide mainstream consumers.

One point also came through clearly: people don't see much difference between these two formats, and don't discuss the higher storage capacity or "next generation interactivity" that Sony touts as Blu-ray advantages.

In the report we steered away from making recommendations, but let me make this suggestion to Sony here: issue a movie that really struts Blu-ray's stuff. The few movies out on Blu-ray have the usual extras: added scenes, director interviews, etc. and in some cases post authors note that the Blu-ray version has fewer extras than a standard DVD! This hardly provides a reason to throw out my DVD player that is only 3 years old...

Disclosure: Jon Fortt at Business 2.0 blogged about the report, expressing concern about who was behind it. The answer: nobody. We did this as an independent research project, none of the companies involved in either format paid for it, had any input to it, or even were aware we were doing it. None of the lead companies for either format are clients of Cymfony.

I think this is a good example of the insight companies can and should be tapping into to understand what is truly driving the success or failure of their marketing.

The real story of the State of the Blogosphere

David Sifry's latest State of the Blogosphere report notes that the blogosphere is maturing. Forget the 57 million total blogs. The interesting number is that there are more authoritative blogs than there are traditional outlets in any single medium.

It's time to stop citing that there are 57 million blogs -- it is a pretty meaningless number. Since 26 million are spam or abandoned, they don't count. I'm not even sure the 31 million active blogs (that have been updated at least once in the past 3 months) is a very meaningful number -- in the blog world this isn't very active. At best these numbers serve as a proxy for the growth of CGM. But with comScore and NetRatings traffic numbers for YouTube and MySpace, I think this number has outlived its usefulness.

The number that really caught my eye is:

• 30,488 high authority and very high authority blogs

For context there are about 13,000 radio stations, 9,000 TV stations, and 17,000 magazines in the US. (source: Forrester Research, "Left Brain Marketing")

In other words, authoritative blogs are  more numerous than any other single traditional medium. That alone is a number a marketer or public relations person needs to take seriously.

blogosphere CGM media

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.

I'm not writing another post about SoaP

Aside from the occasional editorial comment, I'll shut up and let the viewers tell New Line Cinema how to monetize SoaP further:  instead of a traditional post-release marketing strategy, New Line must continue to expand on the social media marketing strategy by:

1. Exploiting this campy B-movie with special fan showings,
2. spicing up the DVD with an audience participation track,
3. packaging "how to throw a home SoaP viewing" kits, and
4. Stocking offical Snakes Gear in the online store, like official SoaP rubber snakes, masks, and snake puppets.

Jim: Forget the movie -- the fun is in the social experience.

Zubkavich: Is it a "good" film? Hell, no! The core premise...is completely ridiculous and mind-numbingly stupid. Does it make for a fun B-movie worthy conflict? Yuppers."

Martini Republic: "...the enjoyment had only 50% to do with the movie itself, which is not up to par with the director's previous effort. The beauty of the evening ... was the fun of listening to a sarcastic, cynical, ruthless audience."

A Bunch of Us: "I think the cash I laid down was the best Hamiltons I ever spent. The movie in and of itself won't be good unless you see it in a crowded theatre....the best parts were the really the crowd antics:

• There were dudes running around with snake masks on before the movie began, and started alternating crowd chants of "snakes!" vs. "planes!"
• Whenever there was a lull in the film, everyone hissed. Like snakes.
• When Sam Jackson delivered THEE line, the crowd went nuts. People stood up and cheering and whistling, and people threw rubber snakes at the screen.

Jim: Give us more of this social experience

BrillBuilding: "Hisses and snarky jokes were already going strong by the time the trailers rolled around...When the snake-timer counts down and the snakes were free...those who brought their own snake toys threw them into the air for what seemed like a solid two minutes....There was certainly a Rocky Horror aspect to all of this."

AimlesslyWandering: "I would only recommend this movie if they have a fan showing after this weekend, like a Rocky Horror midnight showing. I would assume that these will start in the very near future."

Jim: Give us cool snake merchandise (PS. the stuff in the official online store is pretty lame in comparison to what fans came up with on their own)

Queencallipygos: "I met my friends...and [they] presented each of us with a snake hand puppet, complete with a little squeezy thing inside the mouth to make it flip out a rubber tonge and hiss...someone else seeing the movie came up, looked at the size of the line, and saw us standing ther giggling and playing with snake puppets. 'Wow,' I heard one of them mutter, 'and I thought we were obsessed.' "

Jim: Watching the DVD won't cut it...

Kungfurodeo: "Good mindless fun, with or without the hype, and I did jump in my seat a couple of times. I don't think I'll ever watch it again -- seeing it in my living room will never compare to a packed Staten Island theater filled with 15 year olds."

Zubkavich: "Home video viewing will take the wind out of this thing's sails like nothing else."

Jim: ...unless they add special features to it

Bigmaki: "I just don't see it playing nearly as well on DVD as it does with a (mostly)full theater. I'd put money on an "audience participation" track of some sort whenever that DVD does come out."

A Bunch of Us: "The movie in and of itself won't be good unless you see it in a crowded theatre, or alternatively, on DVD with your drinking buddies (playing one of the drinking games that will inevitably pop up on the internet)."

new line cinema SoaP marketing strategy social media

New Line Cinema: Stop Your SoaP Griping!

New Line Cinema's apparent disappointment with the box office take of Snakes on A Plane shows they have missed the point of WOM.

Since everyone else in the blogosphere has written a post about SoaP, I have restrained myself. Until I saw this article in the New York Times with the headline "Snakes: A Letdown After Hype on the Web." The following facts in the article pushed me over the edge:

• "The film was still the No. 1 draw at the box office during the weekend."
• "It basically performed like a normal horror movie." said David Tuckerman, president for theatrical distribution for New Line.
• The article notes they only spent $20 million on marketing
• Box office was $15.2 million on the opening weekend.

So let me get this right -- New Line spent about half the marketing budget they normally would ( Hollywood Reporter notes $36.5 million is average), drove the same amount of revenue they would expect from this type of movie, and still grabbed the #1 slot for the weekend.

And they're disappointed?

They make a consciously low-budget, B-movie and are surprised when the alchemy of WOM doesn't turn this lead into gold. Duh!

Count your profits, go home, and plan the WOM campaign for your next movie! (and fire half of your marketing staff since you don't need them anymore).

work of mouth new line cinema Snakes on A Plane

Five indicators that 2007 will be the Year of the Corporate Blog

2006 was the year for early adopters of corporate blogs. Based on these five indicators, 2007 is shaping up to be a year in which major companies kickstart their blogging initiatives.

The summer vacation/doldrums have kept me away from blogging for a while. And, I confess, I'm cheating with this post that was in iMediaConnection about a week ago! But in case you missed it there....

Here it is: 

2006 has seen unabated growth in blogs. Just since February, the blogosphere has grown from 27.2 millions blogs to 50.1 million, continuing the trajectory that David Sifry has cited that the blogosphere doubles every 6 months. Companies like Boeing, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Intuit continue to use blogs effectively from high-level corporate communications vehicles to intimate conversations with their customers and other partners.

But these pioneers remain the exception among Fortune 500 companies. Dell is a notable addition to the list of corporate bloggers this year, but today’s count at the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki shows only 30 companies, or 6 percent of the list of the premier companies in the

United States

have public blogs. A Jupiter report in June confirmed that smaller companies surpassed larger companies in their embrace of word of mouth strategies and communication tools.

Recently, I’ve seen 5 indicators that lead me to believe that 2007 will be a breakthrough year for corporate blogging.

Indicator #1: Mainstream industries join the corporate blog list. Nike, Starwood Hotels, McDonald’s, and Wells Fargo Bank have joined the technology and Internet companies who first embraced the blogosphere. Microsoft, Oracle and Google have clear business reasons to adopt new technologies. The fact that these new entrants offering distinctly non-digital products have begun to see the value of blogs will encourage their peers and competitors to join.

Indicator #2: Corporate blogging topics are diversifying. McDonald’s “Open for Discussion” blog presents the fast food chain’s corporate social responsibility initiatives from their employment practices, packaging and purchasing. Starwood Hotels’ “The Lobby” taps a group of travel writers to post items like travel tips, news about new mobile devices, and information about their hotels. Wells Fargo Bank took advantage of the 100^th anniversary of the

San Francisco

earthquake (and the role the bank played in helping the city recover) to launch its “Guided by History Blog”. The blog addresses emergency preparedness, and given this year’s extremes of rainfall, temperature and predictions for the hurricane season their choice of topics is very timely.

Many of the early corporate blogs including GM’s “Fast Lane” and Boeing’s “Randy’s Journal” involved executives discussing corporate strategy. Understandably, some companies may not want to take this approach. The range of topics in these new examples will stimulate creative thinking about topics that best fit a company’s goals and strategies.

Indicator #3: Interest in best practices continues to grow. We recently had direct experience with the level of interest in the market for blogging knowledge. Cymfony teamed up with one of our PR agency partners, Porter Novelli, to survey business bloggers to learn more about their experiences with this emerging communication tool. For the webinar presenting the research findings, well over 300 people registered and 82% of those attended! We also conducted a poll of the attendees and while 36% of them currently have blogs, 66% indicated they were at least somewhat likely to have a blog in 2007. In the survey itself, 89% of respondents agreed that blogs will grow in importance over the next 3 years.

Indicator #4: Positive results decrease the Fear Factor. Many companies I’ve talked to are reluctant to engage in the blogosphere for fear that they will receive negative comments and criticism. The results of our research indicate negative experiences are the exception, not the rule. Of the 42% of companies who said a blog post had impacted their company, over 90% said the impact was positive. Three-quarters of respondents further indicated that blogs had achieved their initial goals and cited increased media coverage, web site traffic, and sales leads. The lure of these benefits will bolster blogging while the decreasing fear will fade as a deterrent.

Indicator #5: Social media can be a source of market insight. Just as fear of criticism is subsiding, so is the belief that monitoring the blogosphere is only about detecting potential attacks on the company. The top three reasons for monitoring blogs were to discover emerging trends, gain competitive insight, and to understand the word-of-mouth about their company. Since crises are (fortunately) rare events for companies, alone they are not sufficient reason to devote resources to blog monitoring. But staying in tune with market trends and competitive moves are vital daily activities for companies.

2006 was the year for the early adopters of corporate blogs. Based on these indicators, 2007 is shaping up to be the year that the fast followers will kickstart corporate blogging. This wave will spur greater experimentation with topics, audiences, and formats, leading more companies to jump into the blogosphere.

Will all this change the freewheeling nature of blogs? I doubt it. The blogosphere thrives on diversity of voices. But this time next year the voice of business, currently almost absent from the dialogue, will have a more prominent presence.

Cymfony and Sphere -- a perfect pair!

Cymfony and Sphere share the same vision that traditional and social media are converging. We're really excited about our partnership!

Sphere is the hot new blog search engine that is getting rave reviews. They have great relevance scoring technology and great spam detection. If you haven't used them, check it out. I think you'll really like the results you get.

You also have to try their "bookmarklet" called Sphere It! Download it onto your toolbar, go to a news article, click it and it brings up the relevant blogs to that article. Or go to Time.com, who has already embedded Sphere It! at the beginning of top stories.

Cymfony innovated the monitoring and measurement platform that combines both traditional and social media content, so Sphere is a great partner for us. We'll use this relationship to develop even more sophisticated ways to track how the traditional and social media world influence each other -- and help our clients track the influence they are having on the market.

PS. Sorry to have "gone dark" on you for the last two weeks. This is the first of several exciting things we've been working on. You'll see more over the next couple of weeks....

blogs social media partnerships

Survey: Corporate Blogging Best Practices

Take this survey to help create a benchmark for how much time, effort, and resources companies are devoting to monitoring the blogosphere and to creating their own blogs.

In the past couple of years, a lot has been written about why companies should have blogs, and why they need to tune in to consumer-generated media, as well as examples of the benefits of doing a good job and the horror stories when things go bad. But I haven't seen much if anything about how to do it. How many blogs should a company have? What tools do they use to monitor blogs? How much time does all this take?

Cymfony has teamed up with Porter-Novelli to field this survey with Russell Research to gather the answers to these questions. Please take 10 minutes or so to share your experience. Your answers will be anonymous and you will receive a summary of the results to thank you for participating.

And check back here over the next month for topline results and an announcement of a webinar reviewing the detailed findings.

Thanks! To get started click on this link: Corporate Blogs: Best Practice

Technorati tags:

Corporate blog Corporate Blogging Business Blogging Professional blogging Blogging Blogs

Giving Voice to Passionate Customers

Cory Treffiletti of Carat Fusion wrote an interesting article about the richness of user generated content in today’s OnlineSPIN newsletter from Media Post (registration required). Cory provides links to content created by passionate consumers about some of their favorite brands. In some cases, the content is hosted on websites sponsored by the brand’s owner such as the Catalog of Pain Short Films website hosted by McNeil Consumer & Specialty Pharmaceuticals, maker of Tylenol.

Even when there is an obvious connection to a corporate sponsor through contests or hosting, if the content is clearly user-created and uncensored by the corporation, the positive brand effect on viewers can be tremendous. Finding ways to give your most loyal customers a platform to share their creative ideas is a great way to reward them and build even stronger brand loyalty. It can also have an added effect of creating new communities of loyal fans and maybe even some brand converts.

Marketers should become active daily readers of blogs, discussion boards and user groups to identify customers who are talking about their brands. Even if some commentary is negative, you can gain valuable insight on what needs to be done to improve the brand experience. While you’re at it, you’ll probably learn a thing or two that you didn’t know about your competitors.

Tags:marketing, branding

Marketers Need to Reach Consumers Through New Media

The New York Times published an article today on media convergence providing a strong argument for companies that are not actively listening to online consumer discussions to get started today. It’s already late. Traditional media is falling far behind the wave of innovation in digital media that is driving the growth of consumer created content from blogs to podcasts to videos and online TV programs. Millions of consumers are forgoing traditional media to create and exchange digital content directly with each other – without advertising support. Over 50 million people have created personal pages on MySpace.com over the last two years sharing their likes, dislikes and desires. They are directly influencing their friends’ perception about what to buy, or what not to buy, leaving many advertisers almost completely out of the influence cycle.

"There is this primordial soup brewing of more bandwidth, more storage, more devices and more people creating content which is inherently digital," said Ted Leonsis, the vice chairman of America Online. "The lightning that struck is that the people have rapidly adopted all this even faster than we in the industry conceived, and bypassed the traditional media."

As Gadgets Get It Together, Media Makers Fall Behind

By SAUL HANSELL

Published: January 25, 2006

New York Times

Marketers need to stay on top of this dynamic media universe in order to listen to consumer commentary and understand what mediums are most effective in reaching their target market segments. Even if you are not yet reaching consumers through the new digital media, you can learn a tremendous amount by analyzing consumer discussions and then engaging with people online.

Questions for marketers:

• What do consumers think about your product?
• What do they want? (features, related products, services, information, help…)
• What is the best medium for sharing information about your product?
• What are other innovative companies doing to reach like audiences?
• What new media can you provide to happy customers that will get them to talk about your products and connect people to your website/video/blog/podcast/tv program etc.
• What can you do to satisfy disappointed customers and reverse negativity?

Consumers are providing answers to these questions for free everyday online.

Tools for Searching, Monitoring and Analyzing Blogs

Cymfony's Julie Woods recently spoke at a Boston-based conference called "The Pulse of Technology" for local small to mid-size businesses.  She was asked to talk about how companies of this size were using blogs.  Realizing that more than half of the attendees were not going to be familiar with blogging, Julie and I decided to start with the basics and pulled together a hand out for the attendees entitled "Tools for Searching, Monitoring and Analyzing Blogs."  Based on a number of conversations we've had this year, there still seems to be confusion around the different tools and services used for searching blogs vs. creating blogs vs. monitoring/analyzing blogs (and other types of user created content for that matter) so I thought I share a high level portion of the hand out that includes some of the hundreds of tools now available.

Tools for Searching Blogs

• PubSub - Unlike traditional search engines that store indexed news and blog content, PubSub is an ad-supported matching service that allows users to enter terms to be matched against any new content created on the 16 million+ sources that PubSub watches. PubSub matches your terms against the new content and notifies you when there is a match. PubSub is used by many marketers and product managers to track mentions of their brands and competitors. As a free service, it provides a very useful competitive intelligence tool for anyone who wants to keep a pulse on a diverse range of topics and companies.
• Google Blog Search - is a newer Google search technology that is primarily focused on blogs. Any site that publishes content via an RSS or Atom site feed can be searched by Google Blog Search. That includes news sites as well as blogs in English and many other languages. The search interface is very easy to use but it’s important to use the “Advanced Search” option to limit content to filter searches by language, titles, authors and more. When your results are returned, an additional link is provided that allows you to switch between displaying the results with either the most relevant or the most recent results at the top.
• Yahoo! Blog Search - Yahoo! News now provides access to blogs as well as news. In addition to blog posts, they are providing links to Flickr photos and My Web, which is a large grassroots media network. Another new service from Yahoo! allows users to search podcast, which are self-published audio programs often created by bloggers. You can download podcasts into your computer or MP3 player. You can also subscribe to podcasts to quickly receive new episodes of programs when they are published.
• Podscope, is an online service from TVEyes that searches every word within a podcast using audio indexing technology. TVEyes is a leader in broadcast search. This service is available free today in a beta version.
• Technorati is a real-time blog search engine that determines the relevance of a site by the number of other sites that link to it. Technorati automatically receives notification from weblogs as soon as they are updated, so it can track the thousands of updates per hour that occur in the blogosphere, and monitor the communities (who's linking to whom) underlying these conversations. Technorati currently tracks over 23.9 million sites and over 1.8 billion links. Technorati is one of the oldest blog search engines with a massive archive of historical blog posts. Technorati is very useful for marketers that want to understand how the perception of products and issues has changed over time. While some links may be expired or irrelevant (and now spam blogs have become an issue), the tool provides a very useful starting point for performing blog research.
• IceRocket  - is a search engine providing new ways for to find blog and news content. There are no ads displayed on IceRocket results. IceRocket also provides several tools that help marketer’s track links from site to site, identify quick trends in online discussion and uncover current blog topics.
• Feedster is a search engine and advertising network that indexes over 19 million syndicated feeds per hour. This includes millions of blogs and over 75,000 professionally published news sources such as CNET and The New York Times. Feedster searches for the most recently updated news and information so the service is very useful for finding breaking news from both blogs and news services.

Tools for Creating Blogs

• Blogger is a free blogging service owned by Google. Blogger provides templates to help you quickly set up a blog and share it with others. As one of the first blogging services, there are millions of Blogger sites but many are not updated actively. However, many individual bloggers have started with Blogger as their first blog-hosting platform.
• LiveJournal from SixApart is a free blogging service for creating personal journals. The service hosts over 2 million journals. According to SixApart, LiveJournal's innovations include friend pages -- pages that enable users to easily view the recent journal updates of their LiveJournal friends. Additionally, with LiveJournal, users can have custom control over who can view their journal posts as well as join interest-based communities. LiveJournal is a good service for people who want to start blogging with friends about everyday topics. 
• Typepad is another personal weblogging service from Six Apart that is used by many companies as well. Typepad allows you to create a blog for yourself or to share. Blogs can take on any form from personal journals to corporate blogs with multiple authors. You can easily set up a Typepad account for free. For a small fee, Typepad provides a professional edition that allows you to have more control over design elements of your blog as well as comments and other features. The Typepad website also provides many useful links to resources about blogs and blogging.
• Movable Type - Also from Six Apart is a blog service called Movable Type that provides more advanced site design and development capabilities. For instance, Movable Type has the ability to store entries in a SQL database or create applications to solicit and receive input from visitors. Movable Type is a good option for marketers who have multiple audiences and blogs to support however it requires more advanced technical knowledge for installation and configuration.
• WordPress is a semantic personal publishing platform that has a reputation for being very easy to work with for developers of more sophisticated blogs. In addition, WordPress provides many useful features for customizing your blog as well as managing comment spam that can be a huge problem. WordPress is a free service, however you can donate both money and time to assist with hosting, documentation development and other costs of supporting the service.

Tools for Monitoring/Analyzing Blogs

• Bloglines is a free online service for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, and blogs. Most people use Bloglines as a blog aggregation tool to track updates from their favorite blog sites. This can reduce the amount of time you need to spend searching blogs to see if there have been any updates. The new posts are listed with links back to the original content. You can set up a Bloglines account for free and start monitoring blogs and news immediately. Bloglines also provides recommendations of top blogs to help you get started.
• NewsGator Online is a free news aggregation service that feeds content from news and blogs into Microsoft Outlook. If you spend a great deal of time using Outlook every day, this service can be very useful for monitoring industry news and key blogs without leaving Outlook.
• BlogSquirrel is a blog searching and clipping service from CyberAlert. BlogSquirrel’s online services reach over 5 million blogs each day. While the service is not free, many people like the idea of having a low-cost service organize and search for a set of mentions of their brands that can be combined into a Digital Clip Book and delivered via email daily.
• BlogPulse is a blog search engine by Intelliseek that also provides quick buzz tracking and trend charting tools. Like Technorati, BlogPulse has access to historical blog mentions for the millions of blog sites they have access to. This tool is useful for a quick glimpse of online discussion trends however it does not filter out duplicate or irrelevant mentions to a level required for marketing research and analysis.
• Memeorandum is a specialized news and blog search aggregator focused on politics and technology. It has a very clean user interface similar to Google News that shows hot topics and related posts grouped together. You can even choose to view related discussions on topics.  This tool can be useful to marketers who need to know what the hot topics are in politics, current affairs and technology at any given moment. It leverages many of the other blog and news search tools to gather content.
• Orchestra - Cymfony has been providing media analysis solutions to Fortune 2000 clients for several years. We started integrating blog content into an automated and custom research solutions in 2004. Because of the tremendous impact of blogs on journalists and traditional media, the firm now offers an integrated media analysis dashboard application that automatically monitors and analyzes mainstream media (MSM) as well as blogs, usenet groups, online forums and other forms of social and consumer-generated media (CGM) under one converged Web-based service platform. Cymfony also provides guidance from experts on the blogosphere to assist companies and agencies with blog analysis strategy, product launches, event analysis, reputation monitoring and customized research. Large corporations and agencies as well as medium-sized companies with highly visible brands are the most common users of Cymfony’s products and services.

NOTE:  There are certainly more tools and services available in each of these catagories.  This is just a general list and resource to help get started.

blog analysis, consumer generated media, blog marketing, blog monitoring

Blogs Overhyped in 2005? Marketers Still Need to Care

In the Dec. issue of CMO magazine editor Rob O'Regan suggests that blogging is the most overhyped phenomenon of 2005.  It's true that it was hard to miss the rise of blogging in 2005 but as we all know, weblogs, travel logs, online diaries, forums, etc. have been around for years.  Blogging seemed to get a kick in the pants early this year based on many factors such as the ease of publishing and fascination of the media (including the the many public doocings) and never died down.  There is no doubt that blogging took off in 2005 and I don't believe its popularity is going to wane anytime soon.

In his monthly commentary Rob writes that "despite the hype—or maybe because of it—I'm not fully convinced of the value of blogs."  Of course, this leads to another debate entirely, but even skeptics like Rob agree that blogs have to be on the minds of CMOs and marketers in general.  Why?  Because they can have a direct impact on a company's reputation. 

At the very least marketers need to understand what is being said about their company online. Additionally there are opportunities everywhere in the blogosphere such as product promotion, tracking message adoption, trendspotting, connecting with customers and gaining customer feedback.  And don't forget monitoring for threats, negative comments or incorrect statements/perceptions.   "Smart CMOs won't shoot the messenger; they will invest resources to understand why they have formed a negative opinion of their company and then address the problem."  I couldn't have said it better myself Rob!

Hey PR Peeps, Have You Heard of Blogs?

Yesterday Steve Rubel posted (with permission) a bylined article he wrote for PRWeek on the importance of PR folks getting up to speed on new media. The article is essentially a "do-over" of an earlier post from Oct., which raised some eyebrows from fellow bloggers like BL Ochman.  In summary Steve explains, "For all of the hype about blogs and citizen's media, the PR community still has a long way to go before we can say that we've learned the bare minimum to stay afloat in these new waters." 

Over the past 6 years I have had the pleasure (and some pain) of working with a number of pr agencies both large and small.  These days when speaking with former colleagues and pr friends I am often surprised by the lack of understanding of new tools available.  I think Steve is helping to shed light on an area that certainly needs to be addressed. Organizations and agencies alike need to understand not only the power of blogging but also other forms of social media. 

So as you can guess I applaud Steve's piece but there is one area that I want to clarify.  As most people reading this already know, Cymfony is a firm that provides media analysis around consumer-generated media and MSM.  Orchestra, Cymfony's market intelligence dashboard provides automated data on areas such as buzz, message analysis, competitive analysis, etc.  As Steve points out in the post, companies are turning to Cymfony to understand CGM and what is being said about them online to help manage corporate reputation.  And he is right, we do provide data but there is one critical component missing - we also provide reporting and analysis on the data.  Early on we realized that many of our clients needed help in answering some general questions about the blogosphere and CGM.   We began to grow our consulting and strategic services practice (CSS).  Today we offer an entire suite of analysis services, leveraging expert business analysts.  Cymfony's consulting practice offers guidance and reports on areas such as:

• CGM strategy
• PR measurement
• Product launch tracking
• Marketing effectiveness
• Campaign and event evaluation
• Customer service audits
• Threat awareness
• Corporate reputation
• Consumer opinions and trends

Of course, it is still important for the PR agency or professional to play an integrated role in determining and executing on a CGM strategy.  As with almost anything that's new, education and guidance is critical.  The PR profession as well as corporations interested in new media are no different.  The difference is pr folks should be embarcing this new medium as quickly as possible to do what they do best, help guide and run successful programs on behalf of their clients. 

On a side note, Steve offers three ideas to get started from his blog post that I'd like to share since I predict they will happen in 2006:

Hands-on workshops - PRSA, Ragan, the IABC, and other organizations need to start running hands-on industry workshops - not just panels with bloggers.

Integration - PR agencies are beefing up the ranks in their interactive divisions, but they often remain in a separate fiefdom. We must have every traditional PR pro thinking about how they might use these tools in their current campaigns. Give blogs, RSS, and podcasts just as much thought as press releases and pitch letters. New media is everyone's job.

Encouragement- There's no easier way to get people learning about social media than by getting your own workers to dabble in it. We need to get more agency heads blogging or podcasting, and we must encourage their teams to do the same.

PR, marketing, Public Relations

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.

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.