Web X.0

If You Can Guarantee WOM Success, You’re Probably Measuring it Wrong

Maybe it’s just me but I’ve always been wary of money back guarantees.  With very few exceptions, returning products or getting refunds is generally a hassle.  By the time you’ve been through the whole process you generally regret the whole experience and that attempt at a “clean slate” with the brand is rarely achieved.

BzzAgent disagrees with me.  In a move Ad Rants is calling “desperate,” BzzAgent is guaranteeing that their word-of-mouth campaigns will perform 20% better than other media or you can have your money back (if you’re spending more than $300,000).

So what is 20% better?  Is it 20% more conversions?  WOM is about more than just selling products and services in a one time hit, isn’t it?  Or maybe it’s our beloved Net Promoter score rearing it’s ugly head again.  If you can prove that your banner ads make more people likely to recommend your product then you can have your money back.  Nope, that doesn’t sound right.

The problem in the money back guarantee for me is that it undermines what I consider is the true value of what BzzAgent does.  Over the years the company has built a network of “agents” who are basically people that like getting free stuff to try.  The company is criticized by those who say that these people aren’t influencers but, if we’re talking about candy bars and laundry detergent, one-to-one recommendations from average consumers are just as valuable as one from the hyper-connected.  Is Seth Godin really blogging about how soft his toilet paper is?

BzzAgent is in a unique position as a word-of-mouth marketer.  If you’re interested in seeding a packaged goods product, there is probably no better company to get it out to most major demographics.  They’re ethical marketers who keep their agents informed of the WOMMA rules and have more experience than just about anyone else.

The only problem I have with this is that it once again shrinks WOM down to the campaign level.  Sadly, there are no great metrics of WOM except trying to find out the number of recommendations or somehow being able to track conversions, neither of which are usually an option.  The level of WOM that a brand attains is more akin to brand awareness than it is to most of the common marketing metrics that advertising and PR are based on.  This is a discipline that can only be measured by trend data and I don’t think you can compare that to other media that delivers short term reach.

I side with Contagious on this one.  The guarantee is a stunt that gets BzzAgent some added visibility but it raises more questions about measurement than it attests to the true value of WOM.

The Julia Allison Guide to PR

Julia Allison isn’t selling an iPhone.  She’s selling Julia Allison.  Julia Allison is pretty, writes well, can hold the attention of a camera, is stylish and has a social interest in Web 2.0 companies and their scruffy founders.  On paper, you probably wouldn’t want her as a client because you wouldn’t think there was much you could do with her.  There is no shortage of pretty girls who can write and look good in fancy dresses, right?

That why I think other brands need to study how Julia pulled off one of the best PR success stories in digital media.

Ms. Allison will grace the cover of Wired this month, talking, presumably, about this very same topic.  Granted, this isn’t exactly Time Man of the Year but it’s certainly the kind of PR hit that could sustain a high tech client for about six months.  But yet, she didn’t discover a faster processor or start a company that allows you to cook an egg on your Blackberry.  She’s promoting her new Web idea, Nonsociety, but she’s really just promoting Julia Allison.

She did it the (new) old fashioned way too.  Julia jumped on Tumblr when it was new and hot and hit the ground running.  She also regularly puts up videos on Vimeo (it never hurts to have dated one of the founders) and she regularly responds to commenters.  When she sees people trashing her on Gawker, she doesn’t sit back and check with her legal team…she responds.  When she’s writing an article for Time Out, she asks her readers for feedback and they give it to her.  She puts it all out there and accepts the consequences.  This is not paid media, it’s PR – the new way.  The result is that she’s found her audience.

She’s also found people who take a lot of offense to the fact that she’s famous for doing nothing.  Although she’s been silent since June, the woman who anonymously writes the Reblogging Julia blog spares no amount of venom in ripping anything that Julia publishes.  Loren Feldman has also taken an unhealthy interest in her, but that too has tapered off once he actually met her.  There are other detractors now too, just as there are legions of people that hate the iPhone, but she’s being sustained by the people that support what she’s doing, which quickly cancels out the naysayers.

The reality is the Julia is one of the best PR minds of a new era of digital media.  Imagine if she put this energy into your crappy product.

Update – As expected, Jason Tanz at Wired covered this in a little more detail, with an interesting twist on why people are really interested.

Should You Retire from Blogging?

Jason Calacanis did.  You may remember Jason from founding the Silicon Alley Reporter in New York.  Or perhaps from Weblogs, Inc.  Or maybe even Mahalo, his new social search engine.  You may even remember him from when he friended you on Twitter, something he did to try to gain the most Twitter followers (he follows 34k and is followed by 31k).  You may even be one of those VC stalkers who just knows Jason because he sold his company to AOL for a lot of money.  Either way, if you haven’t been following him closely, like the “Jason Nation,” you probably won’t be hearing much from him anymore.  Jason has retired from blogging.

Calacanis claims that he has retired because he wants to have a more meaningful relationship with a smaller amount of people, which is quite the 360 from his Twitter spamming.  If you were one of the lucky few to make it into Jason’s treehouse, you have been privvy to his email newsletter, which goes a little something like this:

Most folks have no tolerance for ambiguity, and when faced with it are extremely uncomfortable. This lack of comfort makes them think, and my goal with the blog was always to challenge people’s thinking–most of all my own. Confusion is attention of the best kind–I long to be confused. I’ve become addicted to playing poker because your constantly faced with confusion, and winning is trying to make sense out of nonsense.

The email goes on at length to say how blogging has died because bloggers spend more time on SEO and social bookmarking than they do on content so the conversation becomes secondary.

Sadly, he’s probably right.

While blogging remains highly interactive among bloggers in certain industries, it is largely becoming a broadcast platform.  Social distribution of content seems a lot more geared towards garnering more eyeballs than it is about inspriing great conversations.  The original purpose of technology like trackbacks was to let the blogger you were responding to know that you have written something but now it’s more about getting your link on their page and gaining residual traffic.  Maybe it’s about the natural desire to be heard or some dream of making millions in advertising revenue off your blog but somewhere it has moved away from being a platform for organic conversations.

In all fairness though, it depends on how you do it.  Jason, like most bloggers, is an attention whore.  If you go into blogging with the goal of connecting with a small group of people, there is a good chance that your platform can remain effective.  In just PR alone, there are many bloggers that produce great content without trying to get on the front page of TechMeme or embed their links into the comments of a more popular blog.  A few of them are in this blogroll over here to the right.

So move to Friendfeed or Ustream or your own private Ning community if you want.  Heck, you can even keep your blog.  Just keep yourself in check and make sure you’re using the right channel for what you really want to accomplish.

As a side note, Jason is actually a great guy in my limited exprience with him.  When I was starting in PR during the dot-com boom in New York, Jason would always give me a fair shake and helped me to determine what was news and what wasn’t.  I once even had a client at PC Expo in New York and we had a interview booked with Stuart Elliot of the New York Times.  Elliot never showed up and my client was growing increasingly pissed off.  I ran out into the hallway and noticed Jason mulling around, as he always was at industry events, and he agreed to save my ass by doing an impromtu interview with my client.  It never appeared in the Silicon Alley Reporter but it saved my ass for a day.  Thanks Jason!  Too bad I missed the cut off for your newsletter.

The Flu is Viral, Marketing is Not

My number one least favorite term in the world of marketing and PR is “viral.”  No term is more misleading or shows less insight into the key motivators in media habit than suggesting that people are merely mindless cogs that perform a certain behavior when introduced to a certain kind of stimulus (sorry, Dr. Skinner).

For starters, the behavior that is commonly referred to as viral is a classic example of word-of-mouth.  Someone discovers a piece of content that they find compelling and then they share it with their wider social network.  A certain percentage of that audience performs the same behavior and if the number of people in the next generation of the cycle are greater than the previous then the impressions expand and something seemingly “viral” has occurred.

The only problem is that if the response was merely viral in nature than just about all spam would “go viral.”  Sure, not everyone would forward a spam message but a percentage of the recipients would and then the distribution would grow over time and the Internet would be littered with spam memes.  Fortunately, this doesn’t happen very frequently.

The reason it doesn’t happen is because widespread word-of-mouth distribution is all about trust.  In the first cycle of a “viral” distribution, that first person sends the content to a portion of his or her social network and the only reason it is viewed is because of a level of inherent trust from the source.   If the content producer sent that content to that same group, as is the case with most advertising, it would be spam and probably not viewed at all.

Unfortunately, ethical word-of-mouth marketers now have another challenge to face in “viral marketing” companies.  Some of these companies charge brands for access to a group of people that are willing to send content to their social networks (usually posting content on their actual online social networks) for some sort of reward incentive.  Over time this dilutes the whole concept and will make people trust less in the content they get from their friends and colleagues and bad marketing will have ruined yet another communications channel.

Reaching the Silent Majority

In social media PR, you often find yourself targeting the most influential people within a demographic. Influence can be measured many different ways but it generally comes down to people that are vocal and reach a certain group of people in a meaningful way. Often we look for people who blog and have a lot of people who link to them or, when we’re diving another level deeper, we’re looking for commenters who have a degree of credibility in the places they post their encapsulated opinions.

But not everyone is looking for connectors.

With some of the frenzy about social media and Web 2.0 coming back down to earth, there are some companies and organizations that are realizing that the people they really want to target aren’t the most vocal but instead the most silent.

In many online circles that encourage interactions, people who just watch and read content without posting or contributing are called “lurkers.” In the early days of the Internet and digest mailing lists, people would look at the amount of subscribers on a list then the amount of people that were posting and then call out the people who were merely lurking. It was equivalent of “leeches” on file sharing sites.

As much as most people in this field will make a case for the value of connectors, it isn’t hard to come up with examples of companies that would be afraid of them. One of the biggest spenders in public affairs PR is the US Army and one of their main objectives is recruitment. Do you think the Army is trying to reach people that are extremely vocal and blog? Probably not. What about Apple? As the company continues to grow rapidly, they will probably turn towards recruiting and, given their secretive nature, I doubt they’ll be looking for message board loud mouths in their R&D department. These are PR challenges.

To it’s credit, reach marketers and advertisers already do this pretty well. Most of their media is push or one way so anyone who comes across it basically takes away the same value, whether or not you have a participatory personality. Of course there are several downsides to this as well, since you’re probably paying for a lot of marketing that isn’t reaching the right people and your message is most likely becoming diluted.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any answers on this one but it’s a challenge that social media marketers need to become aware of. It’s fine to track the most active people online but you can’t completely discount the silent majority.

Users are Defining Emerging Social Media Platforms

Twitter history

Although almost universally dismissed when it began to catch on, few can dismiss Twitter as anything less than a phenomenon now. Yes, like a lot of content on the Internet, you have to do some digging to find the good stuff but most experienced Twitter users claim that the larger conversation happening in their friend circle is more organic and unique than just about anything happening online.

After weeding out some of the ranters a couple weeks ago, I’m having a much easier time managing Twitter and can stay up-to-date with most of the people I follow pretty easily. While I find the Twitter site fairly useless, except to read the profiles of other Twitterers, software like Twhirl and my new IM client Digsby make it easier for me to follow people and send off a quick tweet without stopping what I’m doing.

What’s becoming clear with the rise of Twitter is that being an agnostic platform is one of the keys to growth in the Web 2.0 world. With social networking, it was the flexibility that took people from Friendster to MySpace and then streamlined functionality is what eventually drove them to Facebook. Web 2.0 took a cue from that development and focused on delivering streamlined tools but the one’s that really took off are the open technologies that didn’t try to dictate how end users interact with their service. This can definitely be said for the social bookmarking technologies and is probably, at least tangentially, responsible for the rise of Gmail.

Jeremiah Owyang is an example of this with Twitter. He uses Twitter as a social computer and states that it has many benefits over technologies like Google:

While Google is great for finding information and websites, it’s NOT great for getting opinion, hearing nuance, or telling me relational information. With Twitter, I can ask information about opinions, and receive responses from real people (many I know, most I don’t) that often have first hand experience with the question at hand.

Pamela Seiple says that Twitter is her favorite social media tool. She compiled a list of uses for Twitter, describing as a source of timely news and insight:

Many of the people I follow on Twitter are active social media players – bloggers, PR professionals, tech-enthusiasts. Therefore, the tinyurl’s they share are usually useful for me to check out. My logic is, if the people I interact with and respect on Twitter think something is important and worth a click, chances are I will, too!

The truth is that Twitter is a lot of different things to different people and, while many people were repelled by their “What are you doing?” tagline, there are probably just as many people who have redefined what the purpose of Twitter is and are using it on their own terms.

(“History of My Blog” cartoon by Hugh MacLeod)

WordPress 2.5: Another Giant Step Forward

Today I installed WordPress 2.5 for this blog and, while I did hit a couple roadblocks writing new content for the upcoming week, I have to say that this is yet another big step forward for blogging.  More specifically, WordPress is now one of the most powerful technology tools that just about any mild Web savvy consumer could master in a second.

As much as everyone loves to talk about what a joke the concept of Web 2.0 is, it is the simplification of design and interface that Web 2.0 has inspired that is the driving force behind the development of platforms like WordPress 2.5.

When we show a new CMS to a client we try to explain to them how it is as simple to use as Microsoft Word but, to be perfectly honest, WordPress is now easier to use than Word.  In fact, I would love to have a “view” option in Word that gave me basic WYSIWYG functionality, a visible auto-save and basic media management tools without cluttering my screen with hundreds of features I don’t use.

Plus, none of this came at the cost of the more advanced tools for the real geeks and old time bloggers.  Sure, password protecting your posts and changing authors now requires a little scrolling but power users probably weren’t using the Web interface anyway.

Yes, there is a new version of one of the most important social media properties on the planet.  It’s not loaded with more features, it just does want you want it to a lot more easily.  Detractors be damned, Web 2.0 is making a lot of things better.

Lifetimetv is Now Following You on Twitter!

Lifetime TVOMG! The Lifetime television network cares about me enough to follow me on Twitter!  I wonder why the television network is interested in me.  Could it be that they think I have script for a great relationship drama that can be shot in periodic soft focus or perhaps they’d like to cast me in one of their signature shows like “How to Look Good Naked“?

Of course @lifetimetv has no real interest in me other than hoping that I will choose to follow them as soon as I find out they’re following me on Twitter.   So far the company has actually tweeted eight times since July 2007, consisting of insightful messages like “ looking at http://www.lifetimetv.com some good stuff up right now.”  They also managed to follow 1,067 people, convincing 153 people to follow them back.  Some marketing person, whether internally or at thier agency, is hoping to report thousands of people are following them on Twitter to justify their existence.  

While this is only mildly unethical – since it is, in fact, spam – it certainly is bad marketing.  Friending as many people as possible to gain brand awareness is the social media version of blind reach marketing.  Additionally, if you’re adding all these people to your social network and not providing anything of value past “snow and now rain? at least Jersey Girl is on tonight” then you’re actually providing a negative brand experience and the whole thing is backfiring.

Then again, “me too” marketing isn’t new to Lifetime…their Web site is mylifetime.com.  Mygodwhycantyoubeoriginal.com!

I guess I’ll have to wait another year to meet Carson Kressley.  *sigh*

Theme of SXSWi: Online Transgressions

SXSWA lot happened at SXSW this year (and I’m not even including the music portion, which I’m posting my terrible camera phone pictures of on my Tumblr). Regardless of many people claiming that there were no great technology innovations, I got the sense that streaming video technologies like Kyte, Qik and UStream are way ahead of their time and will someday reach Twitter-like status. Oh yeah, speaking of Twitter, was anyone not Twittering at SXSW? Then, of course, there was the Sarah Lacy pile-on.

Trumping all of these trends, in my opinion, was a new awareness of online transgressions and the way different people deal with them. Regardless of how bad you felt the Sarah Lacy interview was, there was no way it justified the response from the crowd or the tsunami of social media vehemence that came afterwards. Tim Russert’s softball interview of George W. Bush didn’t even get this much criticism and that was a president in wartime. What happened to Sarah Lacy was the result of two things: she didn’t know her audience and the current state of social media technologies like Twitter give the average SXSW attendee a new way to vent to a group of highly influential like-minded group of people.

Apart from a minority of people that are willing to approach the microphone during the Q&A, most of this extremely rude reaction was due to the fact that people feel a sense of insulation in social media. If you look at the bigger players in social media, like Scoble, you can see that they quickly retracted some of their earlier vehemence since they realized in retrospect that Lacy is a real person and maybe venting their frustration isn’t worth straining a relationship with her or Business Week. Take away the insulation and people are a lot less likely to slip into these transgressions.

There was an amazing panel at SXSW that tackled this issue in virtual worlds called “Virtual Scandals and Sacrilege: Who’s grieFing Now?” The panel featurd academics from around the world discussing the behavior of people in virtual worlds and how there are groups that perpetrate acts of transgression that they would never attempt in real life. The panel discussion focused on how the users are often pitted against the system and administrators but something very interesting happened during the Q&A. The former head of governance at Linden Labs, the developer of Second Life, stated how many of the perceived actions of the administrators of SL were untrue and they actually respected the rights of virtual world “griefers” like the W Hats. By the end of the session, the man from Linden Labs was sitting with a member of the W Hats, pleasantly discussing community issues. Again, take away the insulation and the transgressions are gone.

In light of these experiences, my main takeaway from SXSW was not some new whizbang technology or an insightful keynote address. What I walked away with was a sense that in order for social media to become truly organic we need far more than just transparency. Making people take ownership of content is no use if the insulation is still there for them to act in ways that are far less sensitive than their real world behavior. Perhaps when all your social media activity is available in various personal feeds and more people are held accountable for things they have said in the past that many of these transgressions will be eliminated and there will be a more natural discourse that adds credibility to the whole medium.

The Polite Way to Chat During a Panel

SXSWChatting during panels is generally considered rude.  Your main opportunities for engagement are at the end during the Q&A or by waiting until the end when you can discuss with your neighbor or approach a panelist.

Meebo found a great use for their technology at SXSW this year.  As opposed to relying on loose social networks and instant messaging, Meebo has set up chat rooms for every panel session at SXSW. The best thing is that you don’t need to register or enter any personal information.  You simply clink the link, find your panel and start chatting.  To change your user name, you just click on it and type in a new one.

Is this the most secure system?  Probably not but it eliminates crucial barriers that exist for conference (or any event) attendees to connect with each other or dig through layers of complexity on any topic.  As more and more devices can access these kinds of technologies, you could easily see wanting to log on between sets at a music concert or at halftime of a sporting event.

It sounds techie but, when in action, it seems like a completely organic technology that is long overdue.

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