Cymfony's Influence 2.0

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.

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." 

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!)

Has the Web 2.0 Hype Cycle Kicked In?

I'm as bullish as anybody about the growth of social media and the impact it will have on the relationship between brands and consumers. But this study makes me think "Bubble 2.0" with its conclusion that 81% of marketers will spend as much or more on Conversational Marketing than traditional marketing by 2012. This suggests an order-of-magnitude faster growth than Interactive marketing and TV advertising has seen in the last decade...

Let me start by saying Cymfony is a member of SNCR and fully support their work. And I'm friends with Joseph Jaffe and think he is one of the leading thinkers in the dramatic changes marketing is experiencing.

That said, this study smacks of the hype cycle "peak of inflated expectations". I use these as reference points:

• Interactive marketing has been around for over 13 years, and it is $18.4 billion this year, according to Forrester's latest interactive marketing sizing report and will be only $61 billion by 2012. (I say "only" because Bob Coen at Universal McCann pegs 2006 advertising spending at $285 billion.)
• If you date DVR's to TiVo's launch in 1999, they have been around 8 years, and the penetration is only 17%, with only about 5% of viewing is on DVR (don't remember where I saw that stat...). Sure, the TV business is quaking in their boots but the 2007 Upfront was stronger than ever -- about a 5% overall increase and CPM increases up to 8 - 9%, despite repeated predictions that it must collapse in the face of declining audiences and rising CPMs.

In other words, if after 13 years, interactive marketing is less than 10% of total marketing, how is conversational marketing going to get to 50% in 5 years? Same question if DVRs haven't demolished the TV advertising business after 7 years?

As an ex-analyst, I sympathize with anyone trying to predict the future of radical changes like this. I've had my share of "irrational exuberance" reports like the December 1998 "1999 will be the year of rich media ads" and my wish-to-be-forgotten January 2001 classic "Online Advertising Eclipsed" (which predicted rapid growth for online ads but even more rapid growth for a broader definition of interactive marketing just as we entered the collapse of Bubble 1.0; I quickly revised it in October 2001 with "Online Advertising Retrenches"). I fear Joseph may have fallen into the trap I fell into of 1) believing what the marketers he interviewed told him and that 2) he only spoke to early adopter conversational/social media/Web 2.0 marketers who have all good intentions that haven't yet hit the reality of corporate conservatism.

The one thing I learned is that no matter how fast technology changes, consumers and marketers don't change nearly as quickly.

My fear is that numbers like this strain the credibility of the industry such that they may do more to reinforce reluctant execs' view that this is another bubble than they do to galvanize them to change.

Is there an irreversible change that will shift money out of traditional, one-way, broadcast marketing? Yes.

Is the future of marketing conversing with customers, listening to their needs/complaints/suggestions and adapting products and messages to align with them? Absolutely.

Will marketers learn to love giving control to their brand advocates and increase their use of widgets and allow consumers to take and spread an array of brand assets as they see fit? No doubt in my mind.

But none of this will happen overnight. Living through one "Trough of Disillusionment" is enough for my career. Let's all try to skip it and keep the marketing world climbing the "Slope of Enlightenment".

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?

Is engagement devolving into old metrics?

A new study by OMD shows that their definition of "engagement" increases ad ROI by 15 - 20%. But their definition rests on old measures like media time spent and ad copy testing. Is this good news or bad news?

Engagement began life three years ago as the new metric meant to replace the old standby of GRPs, reach, frequency, etc. which are failing to answer senior exec's real questions about marketing effectiveness. In the ARF's initial model, engagement looks far different that past models.

As reported in Ad Age, though, OMD's model looks surprisingly traditional. Here's the description of OMD's model:

"OMD used its proprietary engagement measure, an index that factors in such things as how often people say they watch a show, to measure media engagement. The agency used copy-test results measuring primarily how much people like ads to measure advertising engagement."

Self-reported media consumption data...copy-test likability measures. Advertisers have been using these data forever.

The slightly new twist is throwing all of this into a market mix model which revealed that media engagement had 3 times the impact of media weight, while ad engagement had 8 times the impact. This gives a more quantitative way of using what has historically been gut-feel hunches about how to build a campaign. (With Mike Hess and Huw Griffiths, both pioneers in market mix models, building the models these findings have high credibility.)

I could make the case that this is good news: marketers haven't been so far off for the past 50 years, they have been using the right variables in their decisions. Now there is a more disciplined way of using these data points to make better decisions.

But I can't help but feel that there must be something more to engagement than a mash-up of 50-year old approaches. Will marketers decide this is good enough, and thus take the wind out of the sails of the ARF's ongoing work to create a new metric? What do you think?

Social Media Forecast: Looks a lot like online advertising 1994 - 2000

Mediaweek, citing an eMarketer report, states, "User-generated content on the Web is set to rapidly shift from a budding consumer trend to a serious business over the next five years." For those of us who have watched the adoption of online advertising, we are seeing history repeat itself.

This eMarketer report states that UCG sites will earn $1 billion in ad revenues this year, and $4.3 billion by 2011. Mediaweek goes on to state, "Plus, users have shown no indication that creating their own Web content for others to consume is a passing fad, found eMarketer. By 2011, the researcher estimates there will be 95 million Web users creating content online, up from 64 million last year."

The analogy to Web 1.0 online advertising is this: 1994 is usually cited as the birth of online advertising, and in 1997, the medium's fourth year, the IAB reported $900 million in ad revenue. Arguably, 2005 was the first year of social media, so 2007, the third year of its existence, will see $1 billion. Very similar growth curve. Online advertising hit $4 billion in 1999, its sixth year; UGC will hit this landmark in its 7th year. Since UGC growth isn't being propelled by a bubble that was starting to inflate in 1999, the curve again looks similar.

At the same time eMarketer also published an article "UGC not Critical for Many Marketers" in which only 12% of survey respondents said UGC was "very important" to their marketing efforts. The top reasons according to eMarketer "lack of clear ROI was often named as an objection. Other reasons listed included "management doesn't embrace it yet," "we simply haven't given it enough priority to consider it at this point" and "we've had difficulty in getting the establishment to understand it."

Nonetheless, over 40% are either using it already or considering it for next year. emarketer explains, "respondents understood the benefits of using UGC. A third of respondents said UGC was cost-efficient compared with traditional marketing and advertising, and 31% said it was useful because the credibility of traditional advertising and marketing was declining."

This is really deja vu for me: I wrote the following in an October 2001 Forrester Report titled "Online Advertising Retrenches":

"Marketers wrestle with opposing forces that alternatively urge them forward and hold them back from adopting Web site display advertising. They sense the Web's potential but recoil from the risks of being a pioneer and so wait for proven metrics and ad formats to appear."

In a nutshell, consumer media consumption habits are changing faster than marketers can learn and adapt. But year by year, from dipping a toe in the water, to pilot tests, to full adoption, the shift is on an inexorable course. The only question is whether the shift will be faster or slower than the prognosicators think.

I have an obvious bias, but my money is on it growing faster. Being a former prognosicator, here is how I would think about it:

1. There is no VC-fueled dotcom spending here, so the growth is unlikely to be interrupted for 3 years as happend to online advertising.
2. Senior marketing executives and industry observers like Bob Garfield have woken up to the reality that the age of mass marketing is in decline and they no longer need to be convinced to move beyond the tried-and-true tactics of the past. Traditional advertising spending is slowing and "below-the line" (I've always hated that phrase) on CRM, interactive, direct mail, etc. is growing.
3. Social media represents a bigger change than online advertising was. Banners were another format to push messages through; blogs and social networks require a much more dynamic relationship with consumers.

IMHO, the biggest drag on the growth of online ads in the '90's was lack of urgency because marketers still had total confidence in TV and mass marketing. Without that comfort, marketers will be much more willing to invest in the necessary learning to add new social media tools to their marketing arsenal.

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.

Gread Ideas I Learned in October, Part 4

ROMO COP.

No, this is not a new Schwarzenegger sci-fi flick. It's the right approach to marketing measurement.

Back to Rex Briggs' and Greg Stuart's What Sticks for this one -- or actually two -- ideas: Return on Marketing Objective and Communication Optimization Process.

I really like the distinction Briggs and Stuart draw between ROMO and ROI (Return on Investment). I've ranted that the measurement obsession is wrong: ROI (usually defined as immediate sales spurred by an individual ad) is NOT the only valid measure of marketing effectiveness. If it were, all we as marketers would do is a bunch of couponing and discounts, and as the authors state on page 50 "If you condition consumers to wait for price discounts..then you're also conditioining them to switch from your brand to a very similar competitive brand that may be offering a price deal this week."

(They refer to breakfast cereals in this paragraph -- I wonder if this is the old (circa early '90's) General Mills market mix model study by Promotion Decisions, Inc. authored by Greg Ambach and Mike Hess. They proved that promotion generated immediate sales but not repeat sales while advertising generated repeat sales, both at higher price and higher frequency. I was going to link to it from this post, but couldn't find it online any more. It's an oldie but goodie! If anyone knows if it is still online, leave me a comment.)

But back to the real story. ROMO is so important because in so many catagories and many media, it is unrealistic to expect a person to drop everything and make a purchase that moment. When they purchase later, the last ad/marketing piece/brochure, etc. that he/she sees gets all the credit, discrediting all the other previous marketing stimuli. Market mix modeling is a great tool to straighten out the misallocation of credit, but it is costly and complex.

Boosting consideration and purchase intention provide a return because the indicate that the consumer is moving toward a purchase. Rex's Cross Media Optimization methodology is a great tool But since these metrics are softer than revenue, the process behind measurement is as important as the metric itself, the authors argue.

This is where COP comes in. The authors lay out and illustrate three critical steps: 1) to get everyone to agree on the primary goals of the campaign;  2) create the right measurement tools, processes, and metrics; and 3) devise scenarios on how to change the campaign as results data come in.

It sounds deceptively simple, but in reality is hard. They bring this to life with the example of the McDonald's chicken flatbread sandwich. The company had to answer the following question: if the ad increased traffic, but people ended up buying a Big Mac and not the chicken sandwich, was the advertising successful?

What Sticks provides some great advice on how to apply this discipline to benefit the quality of marketing programs, improve the ability to rapidly respond to results of the campaign, and appropriately get recognition for marketing success.

Time for Creatives to Engage with Consumer Engagement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consumer Engagement Agency Creative Director Advertising

Time to Disengage from Engagement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advertising Market Research Consumer Engagement

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

Research Reports Now Available in the Knowledge Center

Cymfony has partnered with Forrester Research to offer several valuable social media research reports to Cymfony.com visitors.

The reports are now available free of charge for a limited time in the Cymfony Knowledge Center.  The reports available now include:

Social Computing Takes a Step Forward

What’s the Buzz About Word of Mouth Marketing

Best Practices in Market Mix Modeling

Social Computing

We hope you enjoy these reports and return to this blog to discuss your thoughts and opinions on these important topics.

 

Controlling Consumer Control Goes Out of Control

Jackie Huba’s Church of the customer blog has hosted a lively debate whether the Chevy Tahoe Apprentice campaign – in which consumers select from Chevy-provided video clips to create their own commercial --  is consumer-generated media or not. Consumers have settled it once and for all: technology trumps the corporate powers who would guide, constrain, and compel the “wisdom of the crowd” to do their bidding. But maybe Chevy should consider these ads as a new kind of ad testing mechanism for the images they associate with their vehicles.

Chevrolet thought they had a way to harness the power of consumer-generated media to further the Tahoe’s marketing goals: give consumers a carefully selected inventory of video and audio clips that they can assemble into their own commercials, cherry-pick the ones that best fit Tahoe’s strategy, and voila, consumer-generated commercials. If a consumer created something the brand didn’t like, no problem, it would simply be suppressed.

Problem is, the consumers haven’t followed by the script. They have come to create commercials, but many of them depict the Tahoe as a gas-guzzling, global-warming-gas-belching, earth-destroying behemoth. These ads are now cropping up on sites such as TotalTactics, Heavy on the Chevy, and You Tube. The story has even made the New York Times advertising column.

As a professional marketer I think there is more to learn than just that technology has made consumer control absolute. These commercials are a virtual Rohrschach test – or maybe a Zaltman brand co-creation collage -- of how the typical images used in SUV commercials strike consumers. Instead of communicating freedom to explore the wilderness, they communicate the power to trample it. Instead of confidence, arrogance. Instead of protection, destruction.

Being a Prius-driving, save-the-planet kind of guy, I love this, and perhaps this may turn the tide on the popularity of SUVs (my favorite ad is “What Will You Tell Your Kids You Drove?). People buy cars to project an image about themselves to friends, neighbors, colleagues. So far, the car companies have been able to wrap their vehicles with the image of their choice; now the friends, neighbors and colleagues are setting the agenda for the associations that will attach to SUV drivers. This kind of peer pressure may accomplish what nothing short of a $1-a-gallon-gas-tax could do: destroy the market for SUVs.

If you think I am over the top, check out the commercials on YouTube – then go back to Jackie Huba’s blog and read her analysis of the growth of this site. Watch a few of the consumer-created Tahoe commercials and see if you will ever look at an SUV the same way again.

Chevy Tahoe marketing advertising consumer-generated media

Dispatch from the ARF Engagement Metrics Panel

Yesterday morning, the Advertising Research Foundation ReThink! conference explored in depth the idea of “engagement” as a consumer-centric metric to supplement if not replace the traditional media-centric metrics of impressions, GRPs and reach/frequency.

I’m biased of course, but I see the analysis of consumer-generated media playing an important role as marketers move toward the future of engagement as a central principle.

Joe Plummer, the ARF's Chief Research Officer, kicked off the morning summarizing the work of the committee and presenting this definition of engagement:

Engagement is turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhance by the surrounding context.

He went on to define "turning on" as "activating associations and metaphors so the prospect co-creates brand meaning."

So here's the central paradox of the idea of engagement as a metric: it is fundamentally a “soft” concept in a world demanding more and more hard metrics

Jean-Louis Laborie, Global Research & Development Director for Integration Marketing & Communications, demonstrated some progress toward resolving this paradox. He granted the point that engagement is attitudinal, and as such, can only be a relative measure, e.g., this consumer is more engaged than the other consumer. An objective scale of engagement is probably impossible. He showed indices his company is developing for consumer engagement with media and brands.

Why CGM has a role: CGM is a qualitative data source in high volume. Applying the right analytic tools and techniques can identify brand associations with quantitative rigor.

Other notable comments from the session:

Ted McConnell, Manager of Interactive Marketing Innovation, P&G, quoted this excerpt from the World Federation of Advertisers’ Blueprint for Consumer-Centric Holistic Measurement:

We know our consumers beyond demographics and get info about them in a very timely manner. We truly understand their multi-media behavior and respect their privacy.

Ted also had one of the most quotable quotes of the day: “We should measure share of choice, not share of voice.” He didn't elaborate on what he meant, but I interpret it to mean simply counting the number of impressions we deliver in an ad campaign is inadequate; we need to shift the perspective to the consumer reaction or behavior that is the result of those impressions.

Why CGM has a role: CGM is both timely and revealing of consumer attitudes and habits: it is available continuously in real-time, and this spontaneous voice of the consumer provides insight into consumer feelings. And because Cymfony analyzes both CGM and mainstream media, we can track how mainstream media is impacting these feelings.

Greg Smith, EVP Media Insights, Planning & Analysis, Carat Fusion, had one of the other most quotable quotes: “Today’s media choices allow us to paint our brand story in color; current metrics only measure black and white in b/w.”

Why CGM has a role: Greg is agreeing with the WFA vision of understanding more about consumers than dry facts. In CGM, consumers share their motivations, needs, wishes and other  colorful details. Extracting the essence of these emotional characteristics from CGM and overlaying it on the demographics statistics will put flesh and bones on our statistics.

market research Advertising

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.

Building Brands through Recommendations

It’s been known for decades that consumers value recommendations about products from their friends far more than reviews by industry experts but what may still be surprising to some marketers is that online consumers highly value recommendations from strangers too. Perhaps one of the reasons is that so much information is available online that a recommendation from a stranger can be investigated quickly to dig up supporting evidence or people can simply check out the recommendation among their friends through instant messaging, blogging or sharing services. For people interested in reading more about the power of recommendations and maintaining brand trust, I recommend a few good reads:

Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and Gartner collaborated on a study that researches the phenomenon of playlist sharing. The study suggests that consumer recommendations influence music sales. For more information, you can download the report : Consumer Taste Sharing is Driving the Online Music Business and Democratizing Culture

Fred Reichheld of Bain & Company is writing a book to be published soon about the importance of recommendations across all categories of products. He believes that many companies are not asking themselves the ultimate question: Would I recommend my product to a friend of colleague? Instead, they are focusing on bad profits vs. good profits, chasing quick dollars over the long-term value of a satisfied customer. The first chapter is available for free on Womma’s blog.

Even if your product is highly recommended, you need to be careful that you maintain high standards for quality, innovation, safety or whatever brand attributes are most important to your audience. This is especially true for brands that are built on a trust relationship with consumers. Stanford University Business School Professor Jennifer Aaker and her colleagues Susan Fournier and S. Adam Brasel researched the affects of a transgression on relationships with sincere brands (i.e. Coca Cola or Hallmark) vs. exciting brands (i.e. Yahoo! or MTV). Their findings suggest that sincere brands suffered more after a transgression while exciting brands ‘evinced a trajectory characteristic of short-lived flings’ according to their abstract. In a nutshell, I guess they are saying that it may hurt just as bad initially to be let down by an exciting brand as it does for a trusted brand, but you were sort of expecting that weren't you? So you are more likely to give it another try. The impact of being hurt by a sincere brand is far more damaging. Sounds a lot like human relationships. For more on this interesting topic, take a look at the study: When Good Brands Do Bad

Using Online Communities for Customer Insight

The American Marketing Association held its 2005 Marketing Research Conference here in Boston last week.  I made it over on the last day and had the chance to sit in on a session called "Online Consumer Insights: Lessons From the Front Line".  The conference session described as - When companies and consumers engage in an online dialog, it's a win-win situation for marketers and customers.  Several leading manufacturers share their experiences in leveraging an ongoing online relationship to conduct research, provide information, develop insights and successfully guide management decisions - was essentially about using company sponsored online communities to help guide market research.  Representatives including Joyce Ann Lindbloom-Salisbury of General Motors, Mike Troutman of Eastman Kodak Company and Lynne Kerger of the Chicago Tribune spoke on the panel with Thomas Brailsford of Hallmark as the moderator. 

As market researchers by profession, a common goal among the speakers is to continue to find ways to conduct research on behalf of their companies faster and cheaper.  The panel openly discussed how using online communities has helped them to establish a direct dialog and relationship with the consumers representatives in each online community.  The companies all had different parameters, uses and measures when setting up or interacting with their community.  Some even found other benefits in working with the communities.

GM, for example, realized early on that consumers don't always want to talk about what GM wants them to talk about.  Setting up the online community has helped them to learn to "ask the right questions", as Joyce Ann stated.  GM still conducts traditional market research such as panels and focus groups but has found that using the online communities allows GM immediate access to a segmented customer group.  Joyce Ann revealed that GM has had 9 branded communities over the last 3 years.  Some of the communities included:

• Hybrid car communities
• Women's communities
• Mobility communities (wheel chair or disabled consumers)
• Tech influential communities
• General Automotive communities

Kodak set up its first online community to open up an online dialog with a segmented consumer group.  For example, the first group consisted of consumers who had already made the switch from film to digital, they already owned a digital camera, already used online albums and used websites to share images.  Kodak gave them cell phone cameras and sent them on "field trips".  Kodak then asked members of the online community to perform tasks such as "print photos online".  The researchers then developed insights based on what the community talked about online.  Kodak admits that this type of research is not the "end all, be all" and that they learned a lot from their first test community group (and admits they could have done things better) but that it has helped them to be more strategic, efficient and cost effective in delivering research. 

Lynne Kerger told the crowd that the Chicago Tribune started to seriously look at online communities for market research because it needed a way to connect with consumers faster.  TV can measure how many people watched a show within hours, online news sites can measure viewership by click through, but the newspaper's research department faced very different challenges:

• The newspaper could only gather evidence of how readership was going every 3 months -
• "The product" (the newspaper) was produced daily and the actual production of the product was a huge challenge to make changes without data to back up why...
• And they have journalists and editors trained NOT to listen to others (form their own opinions)

By setting up online communities the research staff at the Trib had more immediate access of "facts" by asking questions such as "what sections did you read in Sunday's issue?"

Of course, listening to this panel raised many questions in my mind such as, aren't these "sponsored" community sites bias?  are these folks receiving incentives and if they are, doesn't that sway their opinions?  (BTW, I later found that incentives for all three companies were small, each very different but up to about $20 per month at the highest).  What about confidentiality within the group?  How do you recruit people into the group?

After a lengthy Q&A session many of my questions as well as others were addressed.  To summarize, all company representatives agreed that using online communities for insights is just one piece of the puzzle and does not have to be used as the sole source of consumer information.  I applaud these companies for looking beyond traditional market research and exploring different methods.  A final thought (disclosure, I'm going to promote Cymfony because its nagging at me...) I would urge companies to consider another option of looking beyond the sponsored online community site and dig a little deeper into blogosphere and consumer-generated media to explore unbiased or unfiltered discussion using tools such as Digital Consumer Insight. 

market research, Marketing, consumer behavior, online marketing

Building a Word of Mouth Marketing Campaign

In the Sept. online edition of CMO magazine's "Analyst View", Forrester analysts Michele Bouquet, Jim Nail with Fiona McDonnell and Jaap Favier provide a step by step guide on how to build a word of mouth campaign.  All agree that the terminology around a WOM campaign is a bit confusing at the moment, but as Paris Hilton would say, WOM marketing is still "hot".

(The Word of Mouth Marketing Association has attempted to address this issue with the recent release of the WOM terminology framework). 

The Forrester analysts suggest that planning a successful word of mouth campaign comes down to 4 basic marketing concepts:  the audience, the message, the vehicle, and the metrics.

Without providing too much editorial content on the article, most marketing need to look at 3 different areas when starting to create buzz around a company, product launch or campaign including:

• Who to target - Forrester suggests Evangelists or influencers.  The key is to target the right influencers - which are most likely different for each market segment or industry.  They can also be different by product lines within one company.  I like the way the authors define evangelists or influencers:  "Influencers use rational arguments while spreading the word, as opposed to evangelists, who are emotive."
• Look at every channel option available: viral or traditional. The traditional way can be defined simply by talking, spreading news or buzz in whatever form that may take - including on the the soccer field or at the local pub or lunch room.  Forrester tells us new channel options include the Internet, mobile phones, and MP3 players. I would also add more specifically email, blogs, podcasts, ect.
• Content: anything consumers want to share. The actual content and creating a message that consumers will WANT to share and feel passionate about sharing is critical.

There are also "four stages of planning" as well as some great case studies on Virgin Mobile, Audi and ebookers.com found in the article. 

Data Without Insight Can Be Dangerous

I love data and colorful charts but data without insight can be dangerous, especially to the marketer. Every day we are bombarded with new studies, survey results and benchmark reports intended to shed light on industry trends and consumer opinion. Through the wonders of excel, photoshop and sophisticated reporting tools, our eyes are enticed to glance quickly across charts of rolled up data to look for meaningful indicators of success or failure – or simply for clues to meaning. The goal of the marketer is usually to provide a persuasive argument for or against an idea, requiring the viewer to spend the least amount of time possible reflecting on the data. But fancy charts should not replace the need for really digging into the data to understand the comments and opinions provided by real people about their real desires and issues.

Quick trend charts showing who the hottest movie stars are might be interesting for about two seconds. But are the charts really meaningful? How do you know if the data represents the opinions of moviegoers? How do you know if the data represents micro trends indicating shifting momentum in box-office appeal? Any marketer who relies only on summary data and trend charts to make important decisions about their marketing mix or even about a single promotional campaign could easily get blindsided.  It’s critical to understand the data at a more granular level, segmenting information by geographic, psychographic or demographic views and getting down to real comments to expose what your customers and prospects really care about.

The New York Times does a nice job of presenting data clearly in both static and interactive graphic formats. They don’t always use clever design techniques to illustrate the data but they always present the information organized in an easy-to-consume style for non data gurus with just enough commentary to make the data meaningful.

As an example, on August 14^th, the Times published a series of lists showing the most popular choices for the past week in categories such as DVD rentals, music downloads and broadcast programs. While these lists are interesting they don’t tell us that much, except perhaps to reinforce the impact of advertising blaring 24x7 to promote short-term excitement. What is more informative is the commentary next to the lists highlighting Google’s significant share increase in the local search market over Yahoo! If the reader simply looked at data showing overall market share, they would have missed this important data point that may be influential to marketers trying to increase their own visibility in local markets.

Digging into the data and understanding what is meaningful and interesting is critical to determining what to focus on and what effect marketing strategies may have on customer retention, consumer perception or revenue generation within target demographic and geographic segments. Marketers can also be more effective in communicating their strategies and effectiveness to the CEO, CFO and the top executives of their clients by showing data represented in the form of benchmarks, performance trends and expected ROI that support company objectives and are correlated to revenue and growth goals. By applying key insights to the most important charts, the marketer can reinforce their point very effectively in a presentation that retains its meaning when left behind on the CEO's desk or at a client site.

For data enthusiasts who want to learn how to create information rich, yet easy to understand charts and graphics, I recommend spending some time on Edward R. Tufte’s website. Tufte has been called "The Leonardo da Vinci of data." by The New York Times. While the skills required to create similar beautiful designs may take years, Tufte's principles of visual design can be understood and applied by any marketer or business analyst to improve communication both within their company and to their customers.

RSS 101 for Marketers

Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li shares her insights from two recent reports on RSS for marketers: "RSS 101 for Marketers" and "Using RSS as a Marketing Tool"

The executive summary for "RSS 101 for Marketers" is described as:

In Forrester's February 2005 Marketer Online Survey, 57% of marketers said that they were interested in using Really Simple Syndication (RSS) as a marketing channel. Why the interest when just 2% of North American online adults use RSS? The combination of reduced email marketing effectiveness and growing consumer advertising backlash drives marketers to test RSS — from creating their own feeds to putting ads into RSS feeds themselves. This report introduces who uses RSS in North America and the implications of RSS adoption. The second report in the series looks at best practices for marketers using RSS.

And the exective summary for "Using RSS as a Marketing Tool" is explained as:

Despite its resemblance to the Wild West, best practices for how marketers can use Really Simple Syndication (RSS) are already emerging. In this second of two reports, Forrester outlines why marketers should experiment with RSS, especially marketers with customers who fit the profile of early RSS adopters. Even if it's something as simple as putting press releases in an RSS feed, marketers will benefit from early exposure to distributing information via RSS — and receive valuable feedback from key constituents on what types of content they would like to have.

While the first summary reveals that only 2% of American households use RSS, Charlene reminds us on her blog that this number doesn't include all the people who may be using RSS (for example, through My Yahoo!) and don't realize it. Also that young consumers between the ages of 12-21 were more likely to be using RSS -- 5% of online young consumers say they use RSS. 

In the comments section of Charlene Li's blog, Lockergnome's RSS & Atom Tips poi