home > 2005 > December > 01

Monitoring Real-Time Consumer-Generated Media

12/1/2005 By

Pete Blackshaw, Chief Marketing and Customer Satisfaction Officer, Intelliseek, speaking at the conference:

Consumers never talk in a vacuum.
Even folks you don’t know are more credible than many mass media.
The blogosphere is permanent. Anything that happens leaves a trail.

Blogpulse is designed to be a user-friendly blog search engine. 20m blogs, 50,000 added per day.

DosBebes.com stats:
- He pays $14/month to Typepad
- Time to create initially: 1-2 hours
- Time to update: 5 mins., 10-15 w/graphics
- Storage cost: 1000 megs, 10gigs storage
- Instantaneous time to analyze results
- New features constantly: podcasting, advertising, new tools to connect with other bloggers

- Passion + Expertise = successful blog

Consumer generated media squared = photo, video, audio
This will be big in 2006

Intimate and influential social network
Putting big carrots in front of mom & dad

Harry Potter gets more buzz online than George W Bush, because so many teens/moms online

June 05: engadget speculated that video ipod was coming. Got tremendous buzz/linkins.

Auditing the GM Blog. 45% of comments are critical. But got high rank (about 500) for a very new blog.

What popped on Wikipedia in 2005 is a leading indicator.

Consumers really hate being shilled: A tells B to buy X, but if B finds out A was paid, the relationship will be destroyed—and X wont get bought.

Trends:

shift in research community from controlled focus groups to the mass media.

Consumer generated multi-media will change the game; video ipod will accelerate that trend.

Activist groups will get more adept at exploiting CGM data.

Blurring between PR firms and ad agencies; between media planners and agencies; between call centers and marketing department

A majority of Wall St. analysts will integrate CGM data (especially blog trends) into forecasting models.

Online buzz will get huge role in getting consumers to box office

“Blogpulse is our marketing engine.”

Filed Under: Blogging, Chapter 26: Marketing, Web 2.0 Industry, Web 2.0 Sites

Corporate Blogging

12/1/2005 By

and more from the conference:

Moderator: Kent Lewis, President, Anvil Media

- Alex Williams, Managing Director of Events, Corante
. Here are his slides: Anvil

Industrial success story: Maxcess International.

Janet Johnson, VP Communications, Marqui
You can download more analysis of Marquis’ story here: Marqui

And Janet Johnson’s slides here: Marketing via Blogs–Marquis

“The blot that almost ate Marqui.”
Her advice: take English writing courses and excel. Marketing depts. are going to be hiring more and more marketers.

We’re here because a year ago we paid 20 bloggers to write about us.
They paid 20 bloggers , 3-month contracts, at $800/month, with no ability to suspend.
She tried to feed them stories.

For 3 months, the first posting you saw when you searched on “Marqui” was Robin Good, a very negative post.

The success:
Customer acquisition rate grew by 43%/quarter. 30-person private company.
Over 120 pieces of press coverage
Multiple “Excellence in Marketing” awards.
After 3 months, they stopped paying the bloggers and started blogging themselves.

Chas Martin, Director of Communications, BetterManagement.comThe Blog as SEO Strategy”
You can download the slides from this presentation here: Presentation

Business Best Practices site. We’re a portal. 99% of our marketing budget is keyword acquisition. Site is 5 years old.
Their parent company is SAS.

Dependent on email communications, but in 2004, 24% of email newsletters failed to reach the targeted inbox (Source: INBOX). So we had to consider IM, alerts, RSS, blogs as replacements.

Cost per click is also going steadily upward.
His CEO was skeptical of the blog, so he argued it was good for SEO.

Results so far: Google pagerank is 6/10. 1,000-1,400 unique hits/day. <30 responses/comments on blog.

Filed Under: Blogging

MediaBistro and GoBigNetwork CEOs on Online Social Networks

12/1/2005 By

and more from today’s conference.

- Laurel Touby, CEO, MediaBistro

Journalist by training.
Was Managing Editor , working from home.
1993: started media cocktail party in E. Village. No thought of a business model.
We called it a salon to make it high-minded.
She wore her bio and forcibly introduced people to one another.
It all started in a little tiny party. Every time I heard what customer wanted, I added it. At first, I had no money and no business experience.
Grew into email newsletter because people told her she was spending too much $ on postcards.
1997: Then community told her she needed a website
Overnight, people started flooding her site with user-generated content.
Became full-fledged online community.
She didn’t think of it as a business, until she saw Monster/HotJobs, and realized she probably should start charging for job listings. (she was earning $20,000)
She told community: pay me if you’re happy with results from advertising for jobs on my site.
So in April 99, she got 8 checks for $100.
So then she stopped writing and started writing a business plan. She got funding, staff. Moved out of bedroom.
Started figuring out how to be CEO.
Next added classes & seminars , during post-dot-com bust.
Next, membership and subscriptions.
Will soon be adding a social network. She’s not an expert yet.

Wil Schroter, CEO, Swaplease, and Gobignetwork (3mos. Old).

swaplease is $1B market place for auto leases.
He used to have parties for entrepreneurial community.
Highly disconnected community
Wanted to have easy way to route requests to right destination.
Only 3000 companies so far on the site

Teten: I asked how do they keep the ‘haves’ in the system?

Gobig is designed to solve problems for people, who are willing to pay for a solution to their prob. They don’t serve the MLM people (too small) and the top VCs (Sequoia). Few people want to meet the MLM people, and the top VCs have no problem getting deal flow. It’s the people in between whom Gobig serves.

On MediaBistro invites, they say: no students, no freelancers, no interns.

Moderator Bartlett: Who are the successful online networks?

Touby: Myspace, Flickr.
Schroter: social networking is a platform, not a business.

Schroter: TheFacebook is a great dating tool; that’s the problem it solves.

Teten: Amazon and ebay are highly successful social network sites.
Schroter: When building swaplease, schroter looked for a highly disconnected community where the internet could bring together people who could not otherwise be together.

Who will fail?

Schroter: Friendster. Not well defined.

Filed Under: Chapter 08: Social Network Sites / Virtual Communities, Web 2.0 Sites

Dan Burstein on Blogging

12/1/2005 By

Dan Burstein, Founder and Managing Member, Millennium Technology Ventures; co-author, BLOG! How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business and Culture, on blogging (from today’s conference):

Blogging is a revolution. We will have quantum leaps in knowledge because more people will have access to more knowledge more efficiently.

Classified advertising is grossly inefficient. Individual bloggers need a business interest.

Google is undervalued at $400/share. Becoming #1 global media brand.

Ebay will overpay for Skype; AOL etc. will overpay for Weblogs Inc.; for a piece of the technology that they’re missing.

20 years ago if you want to be the top IP attorney, go to law school. Today, if you follow it diligently in your blog, then you’re an expert. (DT: Cf. SchwimmerLegal.com) Blogs today are primitive but we’re already seeing an impact.

People’s idea of a blog will expand significantly. 2004: year of political blog. 2006: year of adoption of business blog.

Lot of discussion of media and blogs this year.

More interesting patterns we’ll see in near future: blogs used in R&D process. Blogs used at senior executive ranks.

All of the modern media standards (insider trading, objectivity, media confidentiality, etc.) are just 20th Century constructs. They are not written in stone.

1800 Presidential campaign: nastiest in US history

Scott Allen: how will mainstream media respond to need to niche expertise writers?

Burstein: CNN Blogwatch is hilarious: perky beautiful anchors sit in a studio, look at a computer, and tell us what some ugly people somewhere in the hinterlands are saying about a topic.

Best political bloggers will all get bought out by MSM (despite their protestations).

Cf. WSJ story about expert on Disney stock—someone who wrote every day on this issue. He became a consultant to Disney on their stock.

Filed Under: Blogging

Michael Wing, IBM, on Corporate Blogging and Jamming

12/1/2005 By

more from today’s conference:

Michael Wing, IBM

You can download the slides from this presentation here: Michael Wing

They call it ‘Web 2.0′ because this all feels very déjà vu (circa 1995). Something major is happening.

We don’t know yet what is a ‘good blogger’.

Clay Shirky: We’re at the beginning of major change in how people act/communicate.

Huge empowerment underway.

Fulfilling the original promise of the Web

Syndication + XML=new global information commons. Blog content is contextualized via XML. Any data can be syndicated, whether or not created by human.

IBM now runs a number of blogs: the Mainframe blog, the Automotive blog, etc. IBM is now perceived as ‘we get it’, along with MSFT and Sun.

“WorldJam”: online discussion around certain key issues. 72 hours, 52,595 participants (unique users), 6,000+ ideas, 268,000+ views of posted ideas. Extremely positive feedback.

When they first launched WorldJam, they didn’t tell certain people until was too late, in order to make sure it didn’t get stopped.

On every forum, some people posted “Give back the money, Lou—let’s unionize IBM”. IBM kept that information up, somewhat to peoples’ shock.

ConsultantJam—to discuss PWC acquisition. 8,560 participants. Michael Wing is the champion of this within IBM.

Introduced Jamalyzer (real-time text-mining and theme analysis)

A jam is not :
- an announcement vehicle
- top-down
- community creator/definer: it’s a population, not a community
- personal soapbox
- a chat room.

Important: no one is anonymous.

A jam is:
- best-practice capture
- global collaboration
-democratic
-pragmatic
-organizational research
- an event

On very pragmatic topics (“It’s not just selling to the CIO anymore”), the threads read like project team meetings.

Jams are organizational interventions—short events. Blogs are ongoing digital identity.

Two epiphanies :
1) The intranet can transform the relationship between employees and the company.
2) Scale makes it more likely, not less, that you’ll get concreate results. It gets you past silos, into culture. Trustworthy because everyone is invited. It’s like a general election.

Research aids: eClassified, JamAlyzer (visual means to find people of like mind), and SurfAid (real-time metrics on usage & demographics).

ValuesJam= in-depth exploration of IBM’s values and beliefs. Set of new core values defined by IBM’s workforce (210,000 downloads, 1.25m views to site, 22,007 unique users, 9,337 posts/replies).

Put all of IBM’s Lines of Business, and individual countries, into a matrix. Each is a P&L which needs to be closed every day.

Half of IBMers had been there <5 years. Important for the vets and the newbies to see one another online. HBR article “Leading change when business is good.”

Followup to Culture Jam was WorldJam. goal to identify actionable ideas. They only rated the ideas AFTER the jam happened, in order to avoid what James Surowiecki of “Wisdom of Crowds” calls “information cascades”.

Now, today, IBM is doing its first external jam, “Habitat Jam“, jointly with World Urban Forum/Gov’t of Canada/IBM. Jammes from 175 countries. Outreach events for slum-dwellers. Goal: eradicate world’s slums.

Jams are all in English.

Intelliseek CEO asks: What are your concerns about blogs as a platform? Blogger/Typepad keep offering new functionality.

We need to be able to hear this. 5000 people in a stadium is a cacophony; with this technology you can HEAR the voice of the people.

Hear the stuff we didn’t know to ask about.

Filed Under: Blogging, Chapter 08: Social Network Sites / Virtual Communities

Rob Key, CEO Converseon, on Consumer-Generated Media

12/1/2005 By

Rob Key, CEO, Converseon, speaking at today’s conference:

You can download the slides from this presentation here: Converseon

3 of top 10 media sites are blogs

39% of top search engine listings for Business week 100 derived from consumer-generated media

Google allows max of 2 listings per domain, so out of top 10 sites, 8 are not your corporation’s site

David Weinberger: ‘Google is the home page of your corporation”

7.6m searches on the term “Walmart” last month, and most of the results are negative.

“brand is an experience that creates an impression”

Someone who’s addressing this technology well: the “Starwood Concierge” goes out and interacts with bloggers, addresses their concerns

Blogs can maximize “shelf space”, Converseon’s term for the first page of search engine results . their product is “Search Engine Reputation Management” (SERMA)

Jupiter: 75% search engine users never go beyond first page of results. Very rare for user to scroll past the top twenty (2 pages) of search results. Therefore, critical battleground for reputation management is what content appears in 1st 20 sites.

Push negative listings off the ‘visibility cliff’.

His guidelines:

  • Establish a corporate blog policy.
  • Harness, don’t squelch.
  • “Don’t be stupid.”
  • Be committed.
  • Speak with authenticity.
  • Take the high road.
  • Be prepared for critics.
  • Let your personality come thru.
  • Consider legal parameters.
  • Listen & respond.
  • Optimize.

    • WHAT NOT TO DO

    Create fake blogs, e.g., Mazda.

    Quixtar created a series of “adoration blogs”. They were called out on it.

    Don’t disguise your intentions. “I Hate Starbucks” started getting communications directly from Starbucks, and so he posted their enthusiastic messages online.

    Burger King’s attempt to market its ‘king’ masks was a failed attempt at viral marketing.

    Don’t ignore the conversation. E.g., Dell initially ignored Jeff Jarvis, but then realized they had to pay attention.

    I asked: your SERMA product is designed to lower the ranking of negative sites. From Google’s point of view, perhaps they believe that they can provide a better user experience by providing a diversity of views about a controversial subject, e.g., starbucks. So how are the search engines responding to your efforts?

    Rob Key said: the engines do value diversity of opinion. A PR firm is your advocate in the court of public opinion; you have the right to an advocate.

    Filed Under: Blogging, Chapter 12: Future of Social Software, Chapter 26: Marketing, Miscellaneous, Success Stories, Web 2.0 Sites

    Steve Rubel on Blogs/Consumer Generated Media

    12/1/2005 By

    Steve Rubel, Micropersuasion, Vice President, Client Services, Cooperkatz, talking on blogging at the conference.

    Cooperkatz is a 20-person PR firm. Has visibility comparable to the top firms because of blogging.

    Started with moment of silence for “ye olde mass media ecosystem”.
    - centralized/top down
    - costly/high barrier to entry
    - staffed by professionals
    - unidirectional

    New media ecosystem
    - widespread broadband
    - cheap/free, easy-to-use online publishing
    - mobile devices
    - new advertising paradigms, to allow bloggers to monetize

    Two spheres of influence: media sphere/blogosphere

    ———————————–V
    Blogs < --> Media < --> Audience
    V———————————

    1.2m new blog posts per *day* (much more accurate metric than # blogs).
    33,000 posts per hour
    9.2 per second
    21.9m blogs in total
    70,000 new blogs per day
    A new blog born every second
    Doubling in size approx every 5 months

    When you track # blog posts, you see spikes after every major media event (tsunami, Deep Throat revealed, etc.)

    Case study: hackingnetflix.com shows up as #2 when you search on ‘netflix’, because of all his incoming links. When hackingnetflix.com complained about the fact that the PR department was ignoring him, hackingnetflix.com created even more traffic for himself—publicizing their brushoff.

    Case study: MSFT. Problem: “no one trusts us”. Solution: “Channel 9“, a place where developers can see what internal MSFT people are saying. Got 75,000 page views in first week strictly from word of mouth. MSFT has 2,000+ employee bloggers.

    InflightHQ.com – a “tip blog”

    Vespaway and Vespaquest. These are four vespa enthusiasts. The company doesn’t pay them or give them Vespas; but they do give them access to top management, and that’s what they value.

    Who’s losing with blogs?

    Captain Morgan blog. He’s a character, but he can’t blog; he can’t have a dialogue with me.

    Kryptonite blog story posted to bikeforums.net . Result: they promised free product exchange, with estimated cost of $10m (for a $30M company).

    This is bigger than blogs. RSS disseminates info to the broader world.

    False information stays up on Wikipedia for just a few seconds.
    It’s now a top 10 news & reference site. More traffic than NY Times. Wikipedia is the next Google.

    Four-part philosophy to dealing with this new world:
    1) Find—which bloggers have the greatest potential to become your evangelists/vigilantes

    2) Listen. Understand the common threads of conversation. Engage with bloggers.

    3) Identify key trends/issues/needs

    4) Size up competitors

    Empower bloggers to achieve something they might not achieve on their own.

    I asked to what extent lines between traditional media and old media are fading.
    Rubel said, it’s already happening. Adrants.com and Paidcontent.org are professional bloggers.

    Filed Under: Blogging, Events, Miscellaneous, Success Stories

    Notes from today's Virtual Handshake conference: Jonathan Carson, Buzzmetrics

    12/1/2005 By

    I’m liveblogging from today’s Strategic Research Institute conference, “Beyond Blogs and Social Networks: How Consumer Generated Media and the Virtual Handshake will Make or Break Your Business”.

    You can download the notes from my initial keynote here: Introduction to Social Software.

    Jonathan Carson, President & CEO, Buzzmetrics; Co-Founder, Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) is the next speaker.

    You can download the slides from this presentation here: BuzzMetrics

    Some impressive statistics
    New blog created every second(Technorati)
    MySpace has 50% more traffic than Google—will surpass MSN and AOL within a few months; only Yahoo will have more (Comscore)
    Wikipedia is #1 online reference site, double #2, which is dictionary.com, 5x Encarta (Hitwise)
    5m US podcast users in 2005 (up 500%)
    Forecasted to grow to 63m by 2010…vs. XM and Sirius have 7m subscribers
    June 2005: Flickr had 19.5m photos, 80% shared publicly. 75m by end of 2005, vs. Getty Images, which has 70m images (and a $5.7b market cap)

    Almost everything that’s going on was predicted in Cluetrain Manifesto (published 1999—long time ago)

    230 members in WOMMA. Definition of “word of mouth”=one consumer passing marketing –relevant information to other consumers.

    “Word of mouth marketing”=any marketing effort designed to affect the ways in which one consumer passes information to other consumers

    Consumers trust WOM much more than other media

    Yankelovich says: best source for advice on a new product: 35% say Consumer Reports, 67% say another consumer.

    NOP says: best source for new ideas about products. In 1977, 67% said word of mouth, but in 2005, 92% said word of mouth.

    Why so powerful?

    1) Channel large and growing.
    44% of online US adults (>50m Americans) are content creators (Pew Internet)
    Virtually all online consumer encounter consumer generated content
    8% of online adults blog; 27% of online adults read blogs.

    2) Internet increases power of consumer influencers

    Their reach is greater, and consumers seeking help can find them more easily.

    3) Consumer content dominates Internet content.

    Jupiter: 26% of top search results for world’s 20 largest brands is consumer-generated. 22% expert content, 12% media content, 18% corporate content, 22% other (affiliate, etc.)

    SUMMARY:

    Consumers trust other consumers more than advertising, spokespeople, unbiased “expert” third parties, or traditional media.

    New technology tools make it much easier to find and share insights.

    FOUR THINGS YOU CAN DO BY LISTENING

    1. SEE THE FUTURE

    Ex: study buzz on nutrition as predictive tool. Consumer buzz about “Atkins” and “low-carb” started dropping in Q32003, precisely the time when all the big food companies started releasing low-carb food. Meanwhile, over the last year, steadily increasing discussion of “portion control”, which the big food companies are unprepared to service.

    2. DISSECT CATASTROPHES IN NEAR-REAL TIME

    Ex: research done jointly with Pew on blog storms during 2004 election.
    Analyzing buzz is like stormwatching. Bloggers used buzz to keep Rathergate alive.

    3. CREATE A HIT WITH NO ADVERTISING

    Situation: appliance manufacturer starts to get fan mail for a high-end washing/drying machine. Selling very well. Started to get fan mail. (seriously…they were shocked too)

    Heard anecdotal reports of evangelism.

    Amazing finding: 48% of the machine’s most aggressive advocates were men. Very unlike this company’s traditional market, women.

    What do owners talk about (in this order): provide usage reports, misc. duet banter, promote/swap, complementary products, provide usage tips, seek/provide product info, seek tech support, request features, give tech support, seek usage tips, FL/TL debate.

    People particularly reported testing the machine with little league uniforms, which are an acid test for these machines.

    I asked, is Buzzmetrics’ sample of communicators skewed from the overall market?

    Carson answered: it’s definitely skewed; they’re much more passionate than the norm. However, targeting the mass market is old school marketing. New school, WOMMA-style approach: target the enthusiast influencers, and let their message trickle out to the mass market.

    Influencer marketing has been the norm for B2B for years; now we’re seeing the same phenomenon in consumer marketing.

    It was always feasible to target developers for a new software product. Now it’s feasible to do the same thing for consumer marketing.

    4. UNDERSTAND THE LANGUAGE OF BUZZ

    Case study: How strongly are consumers linking GM (Pontiac G6) to the Oprah event?

    GM owners: they all linked the Oprah story to GM

    Among general population, 84% talked about Oprah car giveaway, but didn’t discuss the G6.

    Initially, this was perceived as a success. But then GMInsidernews.com commented this will be considered a chick’s car not a guy’s car. And then it turned out all the recipients owed a $7,000 tax bill. This became a very problematic promotion from GM’s point of view..but turned out well from Oprah’s point of view!

    Filed Under: Chapter 26: Marketing, Events, Miscellaneous, Web 2.0 Industry