WOM

Further Evidence That Nothing is Viral

trafficThe research refuting the grand myth of viral marketing continues to pile up.

The latest is an analysis from TubeMogul that shows the real sources of traffic to so-called “viral videos.”  As anyone who has actually looked a referring traffic on a socially distributed video can tell you, it is blogs that drive the most traffic by an overwhelming majority.  To quote the data, it’s about 80% of the traffic for a mere 35,528,837 videos surveyed.

This isn’t the result of a chain letter, these are highly influential blogs driving traffic to content.  Not forwarded emails or IMs.  Not even social networks.  In fact, the data on how important social networks are to this kind of content is equally revealing:

In total, search engines provided 11.18% of all video referrals; social networks provided 3.66%. Following close behind were social bookmarking aggregation sites, with 3.19; then video search engines (0.63%) and email/IM sites (0.05%).

These all powerful social networking sites barely beat out social bookmarking aggregation, which the vast majority of Internet users are still completely unaware of.  Equally interesting is the small sliver of people that are driven to “viral videos” in the way most people think of “viral” distribution, email and IM.  0.05%.  That is so low that it’s statistically irrelevant.

I know we will continue to hear about viral marketing for years to come but I hope that, over time, professional marketers and public relations practitioners will begin to change the way they talk about this kind of marketing to focus more on the influencer networks that actually drive brand building results in this space.

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Buzz Off, and Please Make It Viral

beeThere are a lot of terms in this new world of marketing that I really hate.  I’ve written before about how I believe that nothing is really “viral.”  I work in an industry where I get calls out of the blue asking me how much it would cost for us to do a viral video for brand X.  Or how can we stop the “blog chatter” around some bad news (this is usually involving a blog with millions of readers).  Or how do we generate some early “buzz” around an announcement that no one really cares about.

Ben McConnell tackled the issue of word-of-mouth vs buzz quite adeptly in a recent blog post.  He defined “word-of-mouth” as follows:

Word of mouth is a byproduct of a remarkable culture. It’s how companies like 37 Signals, Discovery Education, and The Container Store grow and flourish. Their companies are organized around a well-defined purpose and strong values, which may not be for everyone, but they’re important enough to a significant group of people.

Subsequently, he describes “buzz” quite differently:

Buzz is the result of word-of-mouth marketing. Its results are typically short-term. Gimmicks are common, and examples abound.

I would take it one step further.

Word-of-mouth is an actual marketing behavior, like executing a call to action.  It’s a marketing conversion that can be measured.

Buzz is the perception of word-of-mouth activity.  You can manufacture buzz, much like McConnell shows in his post, but it doesn’t have to be real.  While buzz can be the result of widespread word-of-mouth activity, it can also be created in a void by PR and advertising.  How often does a film having “Oscar buzz” actually result in an Oscar?  There’s often no delivering on the buzz promise, which is a pretty good sign that it’s been manufactured.

It will be a good day for all marketers when terms like “viral” and “buzz” are put to bed and we can finally focus on measurable behaviors that actually support quality brand values.

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How Coraline Redefines Influencer Engagement

97815_coraline1Coraline may be a movie about a young girl trying to escape a parallel universe but the marketing behind the film is something potentially even more compelling.

Tasked with promoting what is being called by many a “small movie,” the film’s ad agency, Wieden + Kennedy, came up with a very unique way to engage with influencers in the animation industry, who are most likely the ones to inspire the most sustained conversations about a film like this.

The agency produced briefcases that themselves became storytelling mechanisms for the film (Ad Rants offers a couple good examples here).  Each box was different and sent to a different blogger or esteemed member of the animation community.  Some people posted pictures and some posted videos of the unboxing but very few people ignored them.

While ad agencies are generally the poster children for transparency gaffs and ham-fisted mailings, W+K added an element to the film that appeals to the nature of the kind of stakeholders they want to reach.  The campaign itself is worth following and there are people this morning that are searching the Web to find out what was in the other boxes and who recieved them.  When you read about the unboxing on different blogs, you generally find out more about the film and the creativity that went into it.  It opens up a level of stakeholder engagement that never would have been achieved with an email and a YouTube video.

Far too often, influencer outreach becomes an extension of traditional media relations and never gets beyond the “smile and dial” mindset.  It’s great to see companies like W+K get involved and (hopefully) begin to raise the bar.

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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 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.

Forrester: Listen Before You Shout

ShoutAccording to Mary Beth Camp and Peter Kim at Forrester, the big agencies that currently rule the marketing world, both on the PR and advertising sides, won’t be going away as much as they will be changing their focus to be more deeply entrenched with consumers. Naturally, this is a true 360 from how the industries have worked since the beginning of time and they make a point to mention that there are no agencies currently doing this, which should get their report forwarded around to plenty of the top brass tasked with reversing the downward spiral many agencies are facing.

Luckily for the agencies, Forrester has outlined an easy three-step process towards revamping your businesses for the future:

To become a Connected Agency, current players will have to shift:

1. Consumer: from messages to connections.

2. Media: from push to pull interactions.

3. Operations: from campaigns to conversations.

Simple, eh?

The main factors driving this will be familiar to many people working in social media. For starters, the report points out how sophisticated consumers are at ignoring your messages. Not only do they know how to block ads they don’t want but they’ve also been given better tools to fast forward through your commercials in media where they have traditional been passive. On top of this is the old faithful pyramid of influence, which clearly show organic word-of-mouth to be roughly twice as powerful as any other vehicle for your messaging.

There’s not a lot that you can argue with in the report except for one question: “what advantage do agencies have in making this change over individuals or small specialty shops?”  Sure, you could argue the economics of it and how the agencies have access to the brands and are skilled at selling in larger programs.  Plus, if there was a network of smaller specialty practitioners that were more ingrained in the social landscape then they will probably be sucked up by the big media holding companies as their value becomes more obvious.

I see it from a different angle though.  The benefit of being a specialist is that you’re more agile and can adapt to these kinds of changes much faster than big agencies.  Also, contrary to what the report suggest, CMOs are getting smarter and will be able to overcome operational struggles much sooner than agencies will be able to change their whole model.  It’s much easier for a CMO to start a few new specialty areas than it is for an agency to tell their creative department to completely change the way they think.  Just look at how CRM has become integrated into the corporate structure while agencies struggled to figure out what their role was.

Of course, I could be wrong.  Agency-wide emails could be going out right now that could turn the agency structure on its head.  But, of course, the emails aren’t going out.  Not yet anyway.

Talk When People are Listening

ListeningThe other day I made the horrific error of forgetting my iPod. Now I’ve never really been clear on why people in the suburbs need an iPod but when you’re getting on crowded smelly subways everyday, like I do in New York, your iPod can be just the means of escape you need when confronted with the drip you just felt on your arm was indeed the sweat of a stranger.

Often when I’m wearing my iPod I can get more than a little oblivious to my surroundings. I try to perk up around each subway stop so I can move if I need to let someone off but I often forget and end up with either someone yelling at me or the polite tap on the closest part of my body. I’m not proud of this but it happens. It’s worth it to hear Wowee Zowee on the way home after a long day.
Yesterday, while traveling sans iPod I was surprised to find that I did it again. This time I had nothing in my ears to make me deaf to the world but, when the train stopped and the man behind me needed to get off, I simply didn’t hear him and he was forced to give me the tap. He was completely audible and when he tapped me I immediately realized that his “excuse me” was meant for me but I just wasn’t paying attention.

This experience made me think of all the clients who talk about “cutting through the noise.” While some people in PR understand the benefits of pitching the press in competitive industries during slower periods, you still often hear “how are we going to cut through all the noise at CES and tell the world about our ______?”

The answer is to wait. Interrupting people during their favorite crime drama isn’t the perfect time to tell them about your new mini-van. Similarly, a roadblock ad that appears when you’re clicking a link to read about primary results isn’t the time to tell people about your low mortgage rates. In fact, there is now automated advertising system that really knows the best time to reach people when they want to pay attention to you, which is all the more reason to try to offer your customers word-of-mouth tools and allow them to decide when is the right time to tell their social networks about your product.

Edelman on Trust

Trust

So maybe a couple botched campaigns over the past couple years keeps you from shouting out “Edelman!” in a word association game when the word “trust” comes up but that doesn’t stop the largest PR firm in the US from releasing their annual Trust Barometer. The latest report was released to mild fanfare at WEF in Davos with the key finding being as follows:

Young opinion elites show higher general levels of trust than their older counterparts; rely on multiple sources of information to form opinions of companies.

Ok, not exactly groundbreaking. Luckily, Richard Edelman broke it down a little further in one of his standard length blog opuses (I kid, I wish all PR CEOs would be as vocal as Richard).

The most important finding to Richard was that people tend to trust businesses more than they trust their government. Somewhat surprisingly, this gap was the largest in the United States and China (out of 18 countries surveyed). This has big implications in public affairs, where many groups will often tout their connection to government to gain credibility. Obviously, that is no longer a wise decision.

In another win for the word-of-mouth people, the survey found that employees are trusted about twice as much as CEOs, which Richard states as a case for focusing on peer-to-peer relationships. It always struck me as unnecessary when CEOs made all the major announcements for their companies when there were more passionate and knowledgeable people behind the scenes that could do a much better job at being persuasive.

Although somewhat buried, the report also found that the 25-34 age group found Wikipedia to be the #2 most reliable source for information about companies in the US behind business magazines. While I doubt few people realizes that exponentially more people visit Wikipedia than every domestic business magazine in print, I’m sure the traditional PR people will be loving this statistic.

Be sure to check out Richard’s post for more details. All kidding aside, it’s probably the most thorough survey on trust done in recent memory.

Over Marketing Kills WOM

DisappointedDavid Pogue’s Circuits e-mail today contained a sneaky lesson about WOM and it’s relationship with advertising. The e-mail followed up on a rant from Pogue’s blog about how disappointed he was after seeing “National Treasure: Book of Secrets” and finding out that his favorite scenes from the trailer weren’t in the actual movie. As with most of his blog posts, comments immediately began flooding in from people who were similarly annoyed with misleading trailers from this and other movies.

But doesn’t this happen all the time?  And not just in film.

When you see the screen of an HDTV in a print ad, isn’t actually a high-res photograph? Don’t they go frame-by-frame in every major television commercial to make sure the colors are as unrealistically vivid as the one’s it’s sandwiched between? So isn’t this an accepted practice that doesn’t really hurt the brands that do it?

The director of “National Treasure: Book of Secrets,” Jon Turteltaub, doesn’t think so. While he makes a case for certain clips being more appropriate for trailers than the actual movie, he also cited examples of how misleading advertising can erode word-of-mouth and actually really hurt a film.

“Personally, I think that’s what happened to ‘Sweeney Todd.’ Perhaps they didn’t want anyone to know it was bloody, gory and a musical. So they hid that. What happens is that the wrong audience sees the movie on opening weekend, and the word of mouth is all wrong. Great movies can get lost because of this”

Maybe there is something to be learned here for all marketers.  If you ultimately rely on word-of-mouth for the long-term success of your brand then you need to make sure your WOM mentality extends into all areas of your marketing.  It’s not good enough to just create a WOM campaign with the leftover money from your massive traditional media campaign.  It’s a mentality that needs to permeate everything you do.

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