Bride 2.0

Although I read blogs for a living, the thought of consulting blogs and message boards to plan my wedding was far from my mind.  That is, until I read a post that referenced a wedding blog in passing.  Now my wedding includes lots of ideas I picked up from other bridal survivors.  One example is table numbers.  I never knew how creative you could get with labeling the tables.  Instead of large numbers or cardboard signs, we will be displaying notebooks at all of the tables.  Not only will the notebooks function as table numbers, but they will also provide guests with a place to record notes to the bride and groom (idea credited to oncewed.com).

This led me to contemplate where else social media would be valuable, and why this would be true.  I settled on: Any industry where a consumer would become emotionally involved.   At Cymfony, we have seen it time and time again, when there is something on the line, whether it be money, a new car, or the perfect tablescape, consumers turn to social media to give or get advice.  Additionally, as they become more prolific, blogs and message boards are gaining a more authoritative reputation.  These aren’t unintelligible rants, but thoughtful opinion.

What I get from bridal blogs that I don’t get from wedding magazines or official websites is advice without strings attached.  I know that when I click through to see how something is done I’m going to get a series of pictures taken in someone’s living room, not an online marketplace.  I have a trust in these women, I feel that they are only there to help me and are looking for nothing in return.  It’s almost like they are my cousin sharing a wedding planning notebook from her wedding last year.

                This changes the media – marketer – consumer landscape.  We are no longer a captive audience looking to follow the methods and ways as spelled out by the publishing house.  Just as banner ads have lost their efficacy in online marketing, so too have magazines and company websites when dealing with matters of emotional importance.

Posted by Kate Kurtin on June 26, 2009 at 04:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Notes from OMMA Social Panel: Authentic Conversations

I just finished a great discussion about how marketers can create authentic conversations in social media here at OMMA Social. Here are the highlights....

Alan Wolk, of the Toad Stool, made an interestesting analogy: "DM was to web 1.0 and PR is to Web 2.0".

Ro Choy of Rock You, addressed the common barrier that many companies are afraid of negative comments, "The more authentic, the less negative comments you get."

Michael Sanchez of CafeMom, responded to an audience question about the potential to "frack" your brand with dispersed, short comments and conversations across the spectrum of social media, saying, "Social media gives you more opportunities to get the communication right."

Craig Engler made a parallel comment as a result of his experience dealing with some criticism that popped up in social media when the SciFi Channel launched their new branding as SyFy: "When you explain what you are doing, people understand and often change their tune."

One of the questions we kicked around was "Why is being authentic so hard?" It occurred to me during the conversation that, as marketers, our first instinct is to focus on making the topic and message authentic for the brand image and personality. But this is only 1 of 3 dimensions of authenticity that need to be right:

• Be genuine to the medium: social media's unique and compelling differences from other media are self expression and community. Any brand participation in social media must make space for these characteristics.

• Get the voice right: corporate speak is definitely out. Having an individual like your CEO is great. Having people across your organization can be better. Just have a conversation and if you can't answer a question because you don't know the answer or for business/legal reasons you can't answer, just say that you can't answer the question.

Posted by Jim Nail on June 23, 2009 at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

On Travel: Lower Price vs. Higher Quality

Even in this economy, the cheaper option doesn’t always score high on preference measures.

Hi, I’m Cathy, an Analyst here at Cymfony.  I take the lead on technology clients, but with my marketing background in travel, I recently had the opportunity to work on a study for a travel client and came across an interesting angle on consumer sentiment towards price points. 

Anyone can tell you that consumers are becoming more price sensitive than ever in these economic times.  Across common goods and services, “budget” brands and wholesalers are gaining traction; “premium” brands are struggling.  In social media, positive sentiment is stronger for budget brands. “Value” is the most resonant discussion theme in message forums, indicating prioritization of cost over inherent product attributes.  

Does this mean all companies should work towards significantly lowering price points to compete in the marketplace?  The answer seems to be, “Not necessarily.  In social media, “premium” brands equated with high quality AND high price still trump “budget” brands when it comes to measures of consumer preference.  Looking closely at what people are saying, customers still strongly prefer a better product or a higher quality experience in spite of tough times compounding the price barrier.  While discussion suggest that the pragmatic mind gravitates to cost as a priority, many posts indicate that raw emotions crave goods and services of the highest quality.  Clearly, there is opportunity to tap emotions that are not “selling out” to cheaper alternatives.  

Consumers are price-watching across the board but have their eagle eyes on premium brands. Furthermore, conversations indicate that they are more keen on opening the wallet if they believe they are getting a sweet-ENED deal on a better product.  We see statements like “I’ve tried them.  It was more expensive but I had a good experience, so when there was a price drop, I immediately took advantage” or “I heard good things about them, so I’m just waiting for a discount.”  An itty bitty savings can potentially multiply desirability for a premium product (more so than a huge discount on a low end product) and push the consumer over the edge to close the sale. Savvy marketers believe this in their gut. Now social media analysis validates this belief in the voice of the consumer.

Posted by Cathy Buena on June 5, 2009 at 02:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Transforming Research, Step 3: Storytelling -- or tailoring?

  At the October 29 ARF Transforming Research conference, there was a strong theme that market researchers should weave interesting stories about how consumers interact with brands rather than present reams of data to induce a Powerpoint coma. But storytelling risks creating a fiction that loses touch with the carefully gathered facts in our research. Perhaps the better way to think about it is tailoring...

I've been meaning to write this entry for a while then this weekend a program on NPR's "Speaking of Faith", spurred me to do it. A cancer doctor spoke of her evolution from speaking with patients about the facts of their disease to listening to their life stories and how the cancer has affected them. She eventually followed this into a psychotherapy practice.

What does this have to do with the market research industry? One line in the interview really caught my ear when she said that the facts of the disease don't mean anything about the person and their struggle. Their stories held greater truth about the person than what stage the disease was at, how tumors grew or shrank, what the various tests tracked, etc

Isn't this the same with market research, especially when we are trying to understand concepts like brand engagement? The facts - the demos, market share, even time spent with a medium or a web site - don't really say anything about the nature of engagement. For that we need a different level of understanding, one that is more qualitative, one that looks not just at the interaction between the brand and the person, but broadens the view of that interaction in the context of the person's life.

That's the power of ethnography. And that is the kind of story that social media analysis at its best delivers.

The challenge for market researchers is to prevent the "story" from crossing the line into fiction. While stories need to put data in the background and bring the narrative to the fore, they must remain true to that data. To be storytellers, researchers must leave the safety and security of the survey tabulation and create a three dimensional being.

But perhaps storytelling isn't the right way to think about it. After all, Homer was free to create characters like Hector and Achilles, whether they existed or not because his concern was to communicate his ideals of courage, loyalty, patriotism, etc. He could shape his characters to make his point.

Researchers, on the other hand, must first draw the characters, then figure out the "point": the person's motivations, the relationship with the brand, the likely behavior.

So perhaps we should think of the evolution of research more like being a tailor. We have a set of measures -- waist, chest, sleeve length, inseam -- and we must now make a suit that fits the person. If we deviate too far from the measures, the suit won't fit. But if we stick to the measures and carefully stitch them together, the end result is something far more compelling than the numbers alone would suggest!

Posted by Jim Nail on December 1, 2008 at 05:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Cymfony's Super Bowl Analysis is a Double Award Winner!

  Pardon me while I toot our horn and go blatantly hard sell for one post!

I'm pleased to announce that the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communications recognized our Super Bowl Advertising Audience Impact Report with 2 awards!

First, we took the Gold in the category "Best Use of Measurement for a Single Event". The award judges cited our combination of traditional and social media as a "benchmark for the future" and praised it as "an intellectual piece of work" that "had real value for advertisers".

In fact, they liked it so much the judges also awarded it Grand Prix -- Innovation Award. In explaining why we were selected for this award too, the judges said it was a "ground-breaking analysis" and we earned "Top marks for the idea and the execution"

Thanks, AMEC! We are honored!

PS. If you are with a brand that is advertising on the Super Bowl, or an agency for one of those brands, we are offering this service again this year! Come to the Super Bowl page of the Cymfony site to learn more.

Posted by Jim Nail on November 25, 2008 at 05:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Learning from the Obama Campaign

Since Tuesday I've seen lots of stories and posts about what marketers and PR people can learn from president-elect Obama's use of social media. My main takeaway: wait. There's more to learn in the coming year as President Obama mobilizes his social media skills to use the power of "We, the People" to trump the lobbyists and legislators who will try to advance their own agenda over his.

There's no doubt that the Obama campaign masterfully used social media to mobilize new voters. There's no question in my mind that this race will mark a watershed in campaign media stratgy not seen since the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy campaign ushered in the era of political television strategy.

But the real story is just beginning. A savvy social media user like Obama won't disband it, in the way he disbands his campaign staff. In the coming year, President Obama will mobilize this network to help him drive change and repel the usual Beltway obstacles that are undoubtedly already plotting to drive the agenda their way.

This will be an even greater testament to the strength of American democracy than electing an African-American to the presidency, which is rightly hailed as a great moment in America. If he can leverage social media to offset the forces of money and special interests that drive so much of our national agenda, an historic election will be followed by an even more epochal change: a return to "We, the People" promoting the general welfare and not narrow interests.

Marketers and PR people take note: this will also signal the end of the campaign-oriented mentality of our current approach. It will usher in an era of understanding that a brand relationship doesn't begin and end with a purchase or a coupon redemption, any more than a presidence begins and ends on election day. It is a living, breathing bond that can now be nurtured in a way impossible before the advent of social media. Strong brand bonds will trump even the best advertising and promotions of brands without this relationship.

Can the marketing and PR professions make this change?

Yes, we can!!

Posted by Jim Nail on November 6, 2008 at 04:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack

Transforming Research, Step 2: Cut the fat

At the ARF's Industry Leader Forum on October 29, many people commented that a lot of surveys are done and much of the data isn't used: data isn't believed, a particular question is a vestige that is no longer relevant, and myriad other reasons were given.

In the afternoon workshop I conducted, we were tasked with coming up with a new way to identify trends early. One of the questions the ARF asked us to address was "Assuming your budget won't increase, what would you give up in order to fund new techniques or approaches?" My group had no problems coming up with ways to cut back their current research. Prime among them was eliminating questions from tracking surveys that are no longer used.

Lunch speaker Joel Benenson of Benenson Strategy Group told one such story. A cosmetics maker hired him to conduct their tracking survey. Included among the attributes was the statement, "Makes me feel alluring." His question to the audience was "When was the last time you heard a woman say she felt alluring?" This drew knowing laughs from a large segment of the audience.

This language was probably right on in the '50's, maybe even the '60's. But it probably died out with the Women's Liberation movement of the '70's when women no longer had to use euphemisms and could openly admit that they wanted to feel sexy.

Why has this question survived if the language is so dated? The only possible answer is "comparability". But shouldn't relevance to the audience trump comparability? But who cares whether women considers your brand alluring, if they haven't wanted to be alluring for 30 years?

And this leads to one of the fundamental principles that research must adopt in order to transform: greater allegiance to the consumer than to the strictures of research purity. Research quality is an essential foundation of all our work. But quality shouldn't mean rigidity in the face of changing consumer needs and language.

Read my first post about the conference, Integrating Insights, here.

Posted by Jim Nail on November 3, 2008 at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Transforming Research, Step 1: Integrating Insights

Yesterday's ARF Industry Leader Forum "Transforming Research: Are You Listening?" had many great insights which I'll blog over the next hours and days. The first big theme was integrating insights: taking data from various sources and interpreting them together to get a more coherent picture of the consumer and the market.

In one of the first morning sessions, General Mills' VP Consumer Insights, Gayle Fuguitt, described the evolution she is leading her group through: from consumer research, to consumer insights and ultimately to "integrated insights". I really like this idea. Research should be shedding light on consumer wants, needs, motivations, and influences. It shouldn't matter whether the data comes from a traditional survey, social media analysis or, as talked about in a later panel, search terms, web analytics, or TV set top box data or any other source. If it helps a brand gain a better insight into its audience, "market research" should be all over it.

The flip side of this is the statement: "We already have more data than we know what to do with." I heard this in the workshop I conducted in the afternoon and is a complaint I often hear from Cymfony prospects and clients.

Plenty of data, but a dearth of insights. Many attendees believe that if instead of viewing these reports individually they were viewed in a more integrated fashion, there would be greater insights and the value of this research would increase dramatically.

This was music to my ears! (Disclosure: here comes a plug!) Last month I led a webinar with my TNS colleage Jeni Chapman. We used a variety of data and research techniques to gain a better understanding of the booming HDTV marketing. We found that looking at market share, brand equity, brand awareness and social media discussions provided a much richer understanding of the dynamics driving the market than any one or two of the sources alone. ARF members can view the recording of the webcast in the My ARF section of the website.

Other idea/questions/issues struck me and I'll try to address those in posts over the next few days: cutting the fat, questioning the data, what to do with the data that doesn't fit, and what skills are needed.

Posted by Jim Nail on October 30, 2008 at 04:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

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.

Posted by Jim Nail on March 11, 2008 at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

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." 

Posted by Jim Nail on February 6, 2008 at 03:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

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