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”:

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.

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

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:

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:

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

• Money CNN (end of the article)
• and this older one

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.

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.

All good fishermen know that you’ve got to fish where the fish are.
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) .

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).

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).

For a change, let’ have a conversation about the future… no facts, no data.

I just read the excellent article (IEEE computer Nov 08) from Bernardo Huberman (HP) on the attention economy.
Here’s the Wikipedia entry along with an excerpt.  It’s eyes opening:  Attention Economy

“…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it” (Simon 1971, p. 40-41).

The social web is making the issue worst and quickly moves the challenge from information to attention.

We are indeed moving from the “Information Age” to the “Attention Age”:

If the “Search engine” with the eco-system that comes with it  is/was THE critical element in the Information age, it’s less the appropriate response to the “Attention Age”.

Real time search is the immediate challenge  but is still a marginal threat.  Attention on Twitter is barely better than on Google and spams, bots and old school marketers are already making their way into it.

So how would we define “Attention Engine”? :

For those who follow this blog regularly, you probably see a huge overlap with the right column and what eCairn is all about.

We’re the first Attention Engine out there.

Arsenal

We’re using our application to monitor the world of soccer and doing so, we’ve accumulated  hundreds of blogs around premiere league.  And as we have introduced  mapping capabilities… I could not help giving it a shot.

Voila: Here is the map of the Premiere League Blogosphere and it’s quite amazing.

1. The cluster in red is Arsenal  and the gunners seem to be the only team with a huge and strongly connected community. They clearly win Social media league. My friends from footbalistic.com are telling me this is the same on Twitter . On Facebook, ManU seems to do better.
2. The cluster in green is “all other Premiere League Blogs” and this cluster is lead by the top influential blog overall.
3. The small cluster in purple is the “Official cluster”, most of the team’s official blogs are in this cluster.

By the way, here is our top 10 (over 400) and as you can see, a lot of them at gonners.

1- http://www.theoffside.com The Offside
2- http://www.epltalk.com Premier League News from EPL Talk
3- http://www.soccerlens.com Football Blog | Football News – Soccerlens.com
4- http://www.fourfourtwo.com Latest Football news, Blogs & Forums | FourFourTwo
5- http://aculturedleftfoot.wordpress.com A Cultured Left Foot
6- http://youngguns.wordpress.com [» Young Guns «]
7- http://www.whoateallthepies.tv Who Ate All The Pies: Filled with meaty football goodness
8- http://www.gunnerblog.com Gunnerblog
9- http://www.goodplaya.com GOODPLAYA
10 – http://www.the-cannon.com The Cannon

These blogs are worth a visit !

PS: Tickets for the Emirates Stadium are warmly welcome .

PS2: We don’t invest a lot in the ongoing management of this specific list, so we may have missed a few. Just make suggestions in the comments and we’ll take a look.

Cats and Dogs aren’t  the best friends on earth. They’re exceptions but, as a dog owner myself, I can testify of the profound animosity between the two species.

Let’s put it that way, they’re not socially inclined to each other.

Does this translate to this new planet that we call social media?

Look at this picture:

Forgive me the fuzziness, after all we’re talking furry things here.

This picture* represents the mapping of a network of pet bloggers (a sample of 400 amongst 1500 pet bloggers). The purple ones are the dog’s bloggers while the red ones are the cat’s bloggers. We also have a handful of pug’s bloggers and they’re in blue.

A picture speaks 1000 words as usual. Even in social media, dogs and cats don’t socialize with each other. Can’t change mother nature.

* The picture above was created using our newly released ‘community network mapping’ feature.

It’s amazing to look at words and expressions and to infer the history behind them.  So this is just a quick post with observations on oxymorons in the online world.

Online newspaper is an oxymoron. It the news is online, then there is no paper.  The words online newspaper tells us that newspaper industry resisted the change. Maybe when they all die, we just call that online news.

Social Media Public Relations is also an oxymoron. But more subtle. TV’s and Newspapers have public, Social Networks have communities. There is no such a thing as the Facebook public. So, the expression makes no sense and should be replaced by Community Relations, or Tribes Relations to make it more ” according to Seth”.

Any other you may think about ?