Social Media Marketing, Thoughts, Facts & Data

January 26, 2010

Using Information Visualisation to uncover gems in Social Media?

Filed under: insights — laurentpf @ 8:23 pm
Tags:

Marketers are trained to understand the customer and social media has become a wonderful
playground to fulfill this purpose.
Let’s look at how information analysis and visualization can help.

I will pretend I’m a knowledge and information Expert (which I’m not) and summarize a discussion I had lately with a marketer

“Are tag clouds useful?” – asks a Marketer

“Sure” – I answered.

“By showing what’s important in a very concise manner, it helps you find your way to what’s most relevant to you” – “It’s a navigation/organization tool”

“But in order to understand, you need more”

“Why do I care?” – asks the Marketer.

“Because we, human beings, have 2 basic communication needs (amongst many): To find something and to understand or study that same thing. As marketers, you are trained to understand the customer.” – I replied.

To find something, we use signals like right, left, here, there, behind.
One signal at a given time is enough.
Applied to information, those signals will be the most frequent words found. Many ‘one world’ makes a tag cloud.

To understand something, we use a combination of signals: A sentence made of  several verbs, nouns, adjectives…The meaning will augment as more words are combined together.

At eCairn we believe in expression clouds, as clouds of multiple words which helps discover patterns of meaning. Indeed we have the algorithm to produce expression clouds from a set of highly relevant conversations taking place in social media communities.

eCairn has many examples to share so here is one:

  • Community = Beauty Blogger in the US (~600 bloggers – 40k conversations over the past 6 months)
  • Topic = Anti-aging (4k conversation over the past 6 months)

And here’s the corresponding tag cloud:

Clearly the expression cloud offer more meaningful information which can be reused for messaging as it represents the essence of the conversation as seen through the eyes of its beholders (the community).

January 19, 2010

New Feature: Add any RSS feed in eCairn Conversation(tm)

Filed under: Conversation App — ecairn @ 2:04 am
Tags: ,

Today, we introduce the ‘Add RSS feed’ feature.

eCairn Conversation(tm) users can now track conversations taking place on relevant Facebook Wall pages, LinkedIn Q&As and Network updates, forums and sub-forums or even general news and traditional media sites.
Basically every RSS can be added.

Click on the link below for 2 minutes demo:

http://www.screencast.com/users/laurentpfertzel/folders/Shared/media/f3d071eb-fba6-40ac-981f-3d77316edb24

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January 12, 2010

Real Time Search, yet another oxymoron?

Filed under: search — domlah @ 11:35 pm
Tags: , ,

Is there such a thing as a do it all real time search? Probably not.

Something happens, let’s call it “small bang”.

In order to “real time” search it; you have to know about it, right ? You can only search for something that you already know about.

But if you already know about it, that’s no longer real time. Hence,  real time search is an oxymoron.

We should rather name “the need to be on the top of something as soon as it occurs”,  real time listening or real time discovery.

And this opens several interesting challenges:

1) One can listen to so many sources at a given time.

Although one can talk/ tweet to millions in one click, listening, and even automated listening does not work the same way.

The consequences is that people and brand have to prioritize and organize who they are listening to.  That’s what Facebook Friends, Twitter followers, RSS lists are all about.

I remember attending one Robert Scoble talk where he was mentioning having a 45 mn advantage over CNN learning of events like plane crashes, earthquakes …

To do that, whether on purpose or not, he was relying on a network of people spread across the globe and counting the repetition of the same tweet to validate the information and judge its importance.  He also had trusted sources he could count on to double-check.  Even implicitly, there was an organization around his listening effort.

If let’s say, 95% of his contacts were in Silicon Valley, then he would have a hard time spotting a new event happening in Italy or Brazil.

For a brand, the implication is that  they have to map their target communities and align their listening efforts and resources to their strategies and to “who matters”.

They also have to give up the dream of real time listening to a few billion people real time.  The “more is better” approach of listening  is a root cause for “systemic intelligence failure” as Predident Obama just named it.

2) Any discovery process starts with a definition of what is supposed to be discovered:  “patterns”.

Pattern can be simple ones

  • mentions of brand & product names, executive names, competitors … (yes/no, number, frequency)
  • lack of mentions of brand name in their target communities… which is usually a much bigger issue for mid-size brands.

or more complex ones.

  • expressions that have surfaced recently  in a given community
  • changes in the structure of the community (let’s say top influencers start linking back to your competitor blog, following an outreach effort this competitor just performed)
  • changes in the tonality of the conversations around your brand in a given community

Poincare (early 20th century French Physicist) once said: ” to find something without looking for it, one must have looked for it without finding it for a long time” (“Pour trouver sans chercher, il faut avoir beaucoup cherche sans trouver”).

Back to Robert Scoble example, he was not just looking for “anything” but discovering potential already known phenomenas. He also had to have an idea of  normal versus abnormal frequency of events.

This is the same for brand. They need to get an idea of what they should be searching for in order to instruct the discovery process.

This is best done with a non directed listening for a while; to get an idea of the events that are usually of interest and a generalization into “patterns” that can be looked for.

After community mapping and strategy definition, listening is a mandatory step before setting up any “automated” discovery.

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December 9, 2009

Does shouting work for a social media strategy?

Filed under: Uncategorized — ecairn @ 6:54 pm

Shouting vs Sharing: Every person having SM experience will say it’s one big difference between traditional marketing and social media marketing.

Any fundamental change, such as social media, requires a change in both tactic and strategy. Using an old strategy with the new tactic will not work.
In this case, shouting through the SM megaphone will either get you 1) ignored (that’s if you’re just not relevant but with a flawless execution or 2) hurt (that’s if you piss off people at the tactical level).

So when I hear stories like Pizza Hut has more than 100k fans on Facebook or that TGIF got 900k fans, I’m in awe.  On the surface they look like awesome social media success as they’ve built a huge and visible social proof that way.
But then, I ask myself: Are they sharing or shouting? Are people sharing back with them? What kind of relationships are they building with all those fans?

This is the case where your common sense tells you “No, it can’t be”.
So I went and looked under the hood, more precisely at TGIF’s facebook page (>900k fans!).

Woody (the TGIF persona) is basically a special offer machine, which to me is more shouting than sharing. Not really anything engaging, it tells nothing about TGIF as a company.
But I was also very intrigued by the number of comments as they were tons of them.
There comes the real big surprise.
The comments range in the categories of:
- People really pissed of at TGIF for not getting their free burger coupons (which is truly what got TGIF to “pay for” >900k fans..Read “pay for” because they ran a very traditional marketing campaign to get people to sign up)
- People encouraging others to boycott TGIF
- Random nonsense
- Spam

Basically I think they screwed up. They achieved their goals by getting an amazing number of fans (but to be honest it’s not hard when you giveaway something). Again this is the big debate between quantity and quality. Huge number of fans, large number of comments but zero in quality (no blame on the hundreds of people unhappy who want others to know they’re unhappy)
Bottom line, I think it’s a big failure. What they got is a lot of shouting back and tons of angry people. Their FB page looks like a mega crisis and their reputation will take a hit as they can’t erase the mess.

While it’s true that brands have to be where people are and Social Networks/FB/Twitter/Blogs is where people spend more and more time according to the latest surveys, you can’t go there with the same agenda as before.

What could TGIF have done differently?
First, change the strategy.
It’s half of their problem.
I’m not an expert in their business but instead of trying to shout, they could have empowered employees locally to create their own SM properties (consistently with some corp guideline) and share with people that matters locally and leverage blogs/twitter/etc to find them. Find local people who have a passion for, I don’t know, but for example: party, budget dining, sports and so on…and adapt to their agenda.
They could have thought “target” (can’t be everything to everyone), “network” (network have structure), “relationships” (relationships brings loyalty).

November 24, 2009

Communities and Influencers marketing webinar

Filed under: measure, targeting — ecairn @ 3:45 am

Last week, we held 2 webinars on the topic of  “communities and influencers marketing”.
We believe communities are the new media (thus the decline in other type of media) and as such it’s important for brands and agencies to pay particular attention to the ones that matter.

The goal was to share our view on how to get answers to the following questions:

  • How to identify and engage with influencers?
    (the core set of people driving the conversation in your target market)
  • How to understand the conversation they’re having?
    (i.e: what the influencers on “sales management” or “beauty/cosmetics” are saying when they discuss “how to sale with social media” or “aging”)
  • How to  measure the conversation according to your business objectives?

Here’s the link to the recording.
(it’s about 20-30 minutes long)

At the end, you’ll see links to our 3 sample “Industry Influencer Report for Brands”:

 

November 10, 2009

Nov 09: Top 150 Social Media Marketing Influencers

top blogs Here is our updated list of the top 150 social media marketing blogs.

As you’ll see, the ranking, computed with the last 6 months data is pretty   stable, with Chris Brogan moving back to the first position.

O Blanchard, J Baer and J Cass are  showing some impressive progressions over the period.

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If you want to know more on how we map communities and how to market to industry influencers,  we’re organizing a  FREE webinar next week and would be very happy to have you with us, click here to register:  Webinar

======================================================

Here is the new Top 150:

Rank Name Url Trend
1 C Brogan http://www.chrisbrogan.com UP 1
2 J Owyang http://www.web-strategist.com/blog DOWN -1
3 B Solis http://www.briansolis.com UP 2
4 D Armano http://darmano.typepad.com UP 0
5 S Rubel http://www.micropersuasion.com DOWN -2
6 V Maltoni http://www.conversationagent.com UP 0
7 T Defren http://www.pr-squared.com UP 0
8 S Godin http://sethgodin.typepad.com UP 1
9 R Scobleizer http://www.scobleizer.com DOWN -1
10 Lee Odden http://www.toprankblog.com UP 3
11 J Falls http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com UP 1
12 http://www.mpdailyfix.com DOWN -1
13 http://www.marketingprofs.com
14 S Holtz http://blog.holtz.com UP 5
15 M Collier http://moblogsmoproblems.blogspot.com DOWN -5
16 J Jarvis http://www.buzzmachine.com UP 8
17 http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC UP 16
18 J Juice http://www.jaffejuice.com UP 0
19 G Livingston http://www.livingstonbuzz.com DOWN -4
20 P Kim http://www.beingpeterkim.com DOWN -4
21 N Hobson http://www.nevillehobson.com UP 8
22 G Kawasaki http://blog.guykawasaki.com DOWN -8
23 D Meerman Scott http://www.webinknow.com DOWN -3
24 S Israel http://redcouch.typepad.com UP 3
25 S Monty http://www.scottmonty.com DOWN -8
26 http://www.searchengineland.com UP 4
27 J Jantsch http://www.ducttapemarketing.com DOWN -5
28 G Verdino http://gregverdino.typepad.com DOWN -3
29 http://www.marketingpilgrim.com DOWN -3
30 D McLellan http://www.drewsmarketingminute.com DOWN -2
31 B.L Ochman http://www.whatsnextblog.com UP 1
32 B Harte http://www.theharteofmarketing.com DOWN -1
33 D Rowse http://www.problogger.net DOWN -12
34 K Huyse http://overtonecomm.blogspot.com UP 6
35 http://www.socialmediaclub.org UP 6
36 J Pepper http://pop-pr.blogspot.com UP 13
37 O Blanchard http://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com UP 63
38 D Fleet http://www.davefleet.com UP 7
39 http://blog.hubspot.com UP 5
40 A Servonitz http://www.damniwish.com DOWN -5
41 R Bhargava http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com DOWN -4
42 S Rubel http://www.steverubel.com
43 G Heaton http://www.servantofchaos.com DOWN -9
44 KD Paine http://kdpaine.blogs.com UP 12
45 Laermer Dugan http://badpitch.blogspot.com UP 1
46 M Dickman http://technomarketer.typepad.com DOWN -10
47 T Hunt http://www.horsepigcow.com UP 3
48 B Kanter http://beth.typepad.com DOWN -9
49 http://www.imediaconnection.com UP 11
List provided by eCairn: http://blog.ecairn.com/
50 J Moore http://brandautopsy.typepad.com/brandautopsy UP 2
51 http://www.brainsonfire.com/blog DOWN -3
52 T Andrlik http://www.toddand.com DOWN -5
53 http://www.adliterate.com UP 0
54 J Baer http://www.convinceandconvert.com UP 57
55 M Sansone http://www.converstations.com DOWN -1
56 http://www.searchenginejournal.com UP 21
57 S Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com DOWN -6
58 C Shirky http://www.shirky.com DOWN -20
59 http://www.everydotconnects.com DOWN -16
60 http://blog.ogilvypr.com UP 36
61 P Mcenany http://heehawmarketing.typepad.com UP 12
62 http://www.prblogger.com UP 5
63 McConnell Huba (*) http://www.churchofthecustomer.com UP 0
64 http://www.cc-chapman.com UP 5
65 C Kerley http://www.ck-blog.com DOWN -6
66 http://blog.futurelab.net DOWN -2
67 http://blogs.forrester.com/marketing UP 42
68 D Haslam http://www.doughaslam.com UP 3
69 http://pr.typepad.com/pr_communications UP 101
70 CB Whittemore http://flooringtheconsumer.blogspot.com UP 3
71 http://adverlab.blogspot.com UP 9
72 http://www.personalbrandingblog.com DOWN -4
73 http://theblogconsultancy.typepad.com UP 53
74 A Wolk http://tangerinetoad.blogspot.com DOWN -10
75 F Gossieaux http://www.emergencemarketing.com DOWN -16
76 S Howard http://www.craphammer.ca DOWN -21
77 http://buzzmarketingfortech.blogspot.com DOWN -17
78 D Berkowitz http://www.marketersstudio.com DOWN -22
79 http://www.wearesocial.net UP 59
80 http://prblog.typepad.com UP 64
81 http://bloombergmarketing.blogs.com/bloomberg_marketing UP 19
82 J Burg http://jburg.typepad.com/future DOWN -5
83 http://www.bryanperson.com UP 18
84 http://www.stuartbruce.biz UP 10
85 J Thornley http://www.propr.ca DOWN -13
86 http://www.adpulp.com UP 46
87 http://www.searchenginewatch.com UP 45
88 http://www.adverblog.com UP 1
89 http://www.outspokenmedia.com
90 http://www.hyku.com DOWN -16
91 http://www.socialmedia.biz UP 48
92 http://www.christopherspenn.com UP 28
93 http://www.communityguy.com DOWN -9
94 http://www.brendancooper.com UP 7
95 http://www.nickburcher.com UP 7
96 L Green http://lgbusinesssolutions.typepad.com/solutions_to_grow_your_bu DOWN -8
97 http://blog.basturea.com UP 18
98 http://www.brandingstrategyinsider.com UP 50
99 http://weblogs.hitwise.com DOWN -35
100 http://www.seomoz.org/blog DOWN -21
101 http://buzzcanuck.typepad.com UP 34
102 B Carroll http://www.customersrock.net UP 16
103 http://herd.typepad.com/herd_the_hidden_truth_abo UP 6
104 http://www.sphinn.com UP 39
105 http://blogs.hillandknowlton.com UP 6
106 http://www.chrisheuer.com DOWN -39
107 http://www.thefuturebuzz.com DOWN -22
108 http://www.tpemurphy.com/blog UP 37
109 N Perkins http://neilperkin.typepad.com UP 4
110 http://youngie.prblogs.org DOWN -6
111 http://www.crackunit.com UP 16
112 http://theflack.blogspot.com UP 4
113 http://www.smartblogs.com/socialmedia UP 61
114 http://t4w.blogs.com/spinningaround DOWN -6
115 http://nextup.wordpress.com UP 4
116 http://blog.stroutmeister.com UP 25
117 http://www.no-mans-blog.com UP 23
118 P Chaney http://www.conversationalmediamarketing.com DOWN -33
119 http://www.noahbrier.com DOWN -26
120 http://www.searchengineguide.com DOWN -60
121 http://www.veryofficialblog.com DOWN -42
122 http://www.kylelacy.com DOWN -33
123 http://www.marketingtechblog.com UP 29
124 http://www.thisisherd.com UP 13
125 http://www.doshdosh.com DOWN -45
126 http://www.acidlabs.org DOWN -29
127 http://www.techipedia.com UP 30
128 http://www.socialmediabreakfast.com DOWN -9
129 http://johnbell.typepad.com UP 51
130 S Woodruff http://www.stickyfigure.com DOWN -29
131 http://bloggingmebloggingyou.wordpress.com UP 14
132 http://ringblog.typepad.com/corporatepr UP 34
133 http://www.brandflakesforbreakfast.com DOWN -7
134 http://www.collaboratemarketing.com UP 14
135 http://www.seroundtable.com UP 14
136 Groundswell http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli DOWN -6
137 http://themarketingspot.blogspot.com DOWN -23
138 http://threeminds.organic.com UP 51
139 http://www.thesocialorganization.com UP 33
140 http://www.dannybrown.me UP 33
141 http://www.directmarketingobservations.com UP 33
142 http://brandimpact.wordpress.com DOWN -48
143 http://pulverblog.pulver.com DOWN -36
144 http://www.freshpeel.com UP 9
145 http://www.paulgillin.com DOWN -65
146 http://www.engageinpr.com DOWN -37
147 K Trgovac http://www.mynameiskate.ca DOWN -38
148 http://makethelogobigger.blogspot.com UP 18
149 http://customersrock.wordpress.com UP 36
150 http://www.socialnomics.net
151 http://www.laurelpapworth.com UP 23

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November 9, 2009

New Features: Topical Targeting & Community Mapping

Filed under: Conversation App — ecairn @ 11:47 pm

We’re pleased to announce our November release with the following new features:

  • Topical targeting: To help you research who has been talking about you, your competitors or your favorite topics within the scope of your projects communities.
    (i.e: I have aggregated a community of 500 beauty bloggers and I want to find out who has been talking the most about my brand or about “aging”).
  • Community mapping: To visualize how the various bloggers in your community network with eachother, and, group them according to your preferences.

Watch this quick video if you want to know more:

October 28, 2009

4 reasons why negative comments drive sales

Thbenettonere is more and more evidence that feedback, even negative ones drive sales:

This may be counter intuitive but actually should come at no surprise to marketing savvy people.

Here are 4 main reasons:

1- Trust

When all comments are positive, people start to wonder whether the business owner had his wife, friends and his dog writing all the reviews or whether the system can be gamed for a few dollars more.

2- Positioning

Not all consumers are the same and what’s negative for  someone may be positive for somebody else.

As an example, if an airline gets negative reviews because everything has to be purchased, from peanuts to drinks to access to the toilets (yes, Ryanair was said to be thinking about it). Well, it you’re a budget traveler and you want to pay only for what you need, it’s actually a plus. You know this airline is the right one for you.  (better to cut this than security).

3- Purple cows

I remember Pr Larreche at Insead presenting a case study on Benetton and its very offensive advertising messages. The truth is that in fashion, 5% market share is huge and it’s OK to “piss off” 95% of the people if the other 5% are really moved and engaged by your message.

You may argue that the negative comments are then not an issue with the product or service but a targeting issue for the messaging.

4- Community re-inforcement.

If you’ve raised or are raising teens , you know that they love it when you loose your temper and make negative comments on how they behave … or dress.

gothic

Many communities are built “against” majorities and  strengthen in adversity.

Isn’t that the very driver of Mac versus PC’s, Linux versus Windows … and many others.

Contrast is what makes something visible and known.

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October 23, 2009

Targeting Community and Influencer

Filed under: buzz, figures, targeting — laurentpf @ 4:19 pm

All good fishermen know that you’ve got to fish where the fish are.fishing
All waters aren’t equal.

In the world of social media marketing, it translates into : “They’re conversations about your brands potentially everywhere, but they’re places that are more important than others”.

Marketers need to identify the right pond for them.

Let’s pick an example.

You’re a marketer of a beauty brand and you plan a blogger outreach for a new line of skincare products designed to fight aging.

The first question to answer is “where do you fish”?
All other factors equals, you may want to find the most relevant bloggers and perform a compelling, relevant and timely outreach to them.

An obvious pond to go to is the mommy bloggers community. Every single consumer brand on earth go after them those days, they’re a thriring community, they love to do reviews and will probably be very open to your outreach. Bingo.

But wait,  is this a good pond to fish in?

Let’s look at some numbers: In our db, we track 1100 ‘mommy blogger’ blogs which account for 117k posts over the last 6 months. A quick simple search on skincare, makeup and aging shows respectively 329, 957 and 135 results.
Good? Bad?
To get an idea about the answer, let’s compare with the beauty/cosmetic blogger community.
In our db, we track 550 blogs of that type, 60k conversations.
And the jury is out: Skincare gets 3200 results, makeup 12000 and aging 3100.
That’s respectively a x20, x20 and x50 factor compared with the mommy blogger community.
To add to it, here’s the # of mentions of some well-known cosmetic brands in those 2 communities:

  • Lancome: 1179 in Beauty/Cosmetic, 22 in Mommy blogger
  • Estee Lauder: 874 in Beauty/Cosmetic, 29 in Mommy blogger
  • Clinique: 974 in Beauty/Cosmetic, 42 in Mommy blogger

Conclusion: By targeting the beauty/cosmetic community which is more relevant, such a brand can earn more media, which translate in better WOM, potentially benefit their SEM effort and also create relationships with a key community (i.e: They may get them and their audience to subscribe to the brand’s blog, twitter or FB fan page) .

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October 14, 2009

Brand under attack

Filed under: strategy — ecairn @ 10:16 pm

Brands are loosing control on the net. Not new.
It started in social media where people can freely have conversations to share experiences, thoughts and ideas about them (though, to be honest, a tiny fraction of the overall conversations do talk about brands in reality).
So far, Brand’s website were left intact.

By now, all of you have heard of Google Sidewiki and Squidoo brands in public.

Both news hit the wire at about the same time (last week of September) and, as shown in the picture below, have generated quite a lof of buzz and polemics in the social media marketing community (#1200 blogs, 800 conversations per day).

Sidewiki

They have something in common:

  1. Aggregation of fairly exploded information: They aggregate  in a centralized way social information about a brand.
  2. Loss of control for Brands. Sidewiki truely increases the power shift to consumers as they are now able to share what they think of a brand right on a brand’s prime real estate. It’s not clear if you can opt-out…at least you can claim your sidewiki. Brand in public does it in a more subtle way: Nowadays, we always go to social media to find more about a brand. Brands in Public puts it all in one place…making it possible that we go there first to find more about a brand, as we’ve grown tired of websites that tell the same story after you remove brand’s specific content.
  3. They’re public

Let’s stop the comparison here. Sidewiki and Brands in Public aren’t the same kind of beast.

For squidoo, which plans to charge brands $5k/year.. it’s  about making revenue.  But stitching together information that can be found easily using free tools may not cut it.
For google, the agenda has to be more strategic. After all it’s Google, the company that aims to organize the world of information.
Considering that 1) information is more and more consumed/accessed through ‘conversations’ and 2) Google has been so far absent of that battle from which emerged Facebook, Twitter to name the most popular, they surely must be trying to catch-up.  Sidewiki makes any page on the internet social. Add that Google Wave brings together many social networking paradigms and you start to see an agenda:

When you control the world of keywords, you control information consumption -web1.0

When you control the world of people’s interaction, you control conversation consumption -web2.0

And markets are conversations.

Google has won the first battle and is now pushing its pawns in order to win the next chess game. Not by building another social network where we have to go to, but by making social the places where we have traditionally gone for our information/knowledge need (search, websites, email).

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