Customer World

The laws of physics behind marketing methods

I read an interesting post about how the rules of mass marketing, direct marketing & social media are so different in approach, content, analysis and results. Therefore, for marketers, the challenge of applying & measuring each of them is conflicting, different & downright confusing. The truth though is that data(at an individual customer level) is becoming the DNA for marketing and incremental byte-sized data from each of them come at different points of time - controlled to near-real to real.The key, therefore, is knowing how to use it, apply it basis the method of marketing marketers are executing or seeking solutions for, not making the mistake of transposing one type of marketing hypothesis to the other etc. are key factors of being a successful marketer tomorrow.

Take a look:

Mass advertising is like Classical Physics; large-scale, mostly intuitive and somewhat predictable.

Direct Marketing is like Atomic Physics; small/medium-scale, mostly logical, but the segmentation aspects start to show some bumps and troughs on what appeared to be smooth and simple.

Social Media is more like Quantum Physics; small-scale, counter-intuitive and usually unpredictable.

• Traditional marketers deal with everyones opinions in big bins like sales figures, national focus groups, opinion polls, etc. These roll-ups average out the inconsistencies of individuals and blur together to form tendencies, trends and preferences. The actions taken in mass marketing can expect a relatively consistent result (i.e. send out a coupon and you can expect a certain level of redemption and sales revenue to come from it and the larger the audience, the more likely it is to average out at a predictable result). This is the world that marketers are familiar with and all-in-all it makes sense if you know the system.

• Social Media on the other hand acts on the niche and individual level where things are a lot less certain. The complex nature of blog posts is hard to parse out into definitive numbers and trends.The lack of large numbers makes the reaction and result of social media efforts difficult to determine and measure. It is much more difficult to roll up all of these disparate opinions into a meaningful decision than to look at an opinion pie-chart.So in essence, social media tools have given marketers a microscope powerful enough to see what is going on at smaller scales.

...many marketers in the classical camp are not very happy with what they see, because it doesn’t confirm what they thought they knew. Decisions which appear obvious when looking at large sample sizes becomes more nuanced and contradictory when you see everyone as an individual.

Do you know how to build analytics from conversational databases?

Peter Kim of Forrester has written a thought-provoking article on the future of the advertising agency. The report argues that consumers now rely less and less on marketing messages when in buying mode. Instead they seek guidance from family, friends and others in their respective communities to guide them toward purchase decisions.

Peter’s views via AdWeek

(Agencies are) “in “a world of hurt” because consumers are tuning out the messages the industry is predicated on producing. Instead, it believes shops need to be organized around communities, not disciplines. What it is calling “the connected agency” would not only know certain communities but also be active members of these groups. Pushing messages would give way to encouraging voluntary engagement, and ongoing conversations would replace time-based campaigns”.

My View:

As communities & conversations become more and more important, there is a need to understand how to build analytical models around huge "conversational  databases" that will emerge. The ability to mine data and conversations together, will become a  huge competitive advantage for service providers. The ones who will succeed are the ones who will be able to overlay the traditional transactional data with conversational data. This is a skill that needs to be built and nurtured if brands and service providers have to succeed in the future.

Forrester's ladder of participation and impact on marketing

I was reflecting over the weekend about Forrester's Social Technographics Ladder of Participation. While it was focussed on emerging social technologies, I felt there were some trends, learnings and practices that can be applied from here to refresh marketing thinking, practices, evolving needs to embrace technologies that can make some changes happen and thereby make marketing more relevant to enterprises and CEOs. Let's take a look at this Ladder of Participation first:

I see the marketing eco-system too, taking a very similar shape(with either customers or prospects) in the years to come. The need to 'engage' and run marketing campaigns across a similar ladder is bound to become increasingly important. Marketing will need to 'bucket' its segments of customers or prospects across the spectrum of Inactives to Creators. The 'old world marketing' practice would have stopped with collecters - who I would define as repeat purchasers. Normally, marketing practices would have stopped there.

But, in the 'new world of marketing', customers will be more involved, participative and conversational. Thereby, customers will leave a 'trail of information' behind, in enterprises. For an enterprise, the creators will be the most loyal and demanding. They need to be recognized, valued and encouraged to converse. The ones who do it, will become identifiable and the most important. Also, products/brands will have to become 'information platforms' in such a world. This will also lead to customized design of products and services for them.

The critics are the ones who will have to be 'listened' to. With emerging channels or touch points, the enterprises must open a channel of communication to hear and rectify their problems. They are the ones who can potentially move-up the ladder of participation.

The collectors need to be 'prodded' to talk rather just buy again and again, get them to share their experience and frustrations with the product. And the joiners will have to be moved to become collecters.

This kind of marketing will combine a lot of information, analytical insights, real-time marketing automation to talk to customers in different behavioural states and stages in the ladder. And when enterprises talk of millions and millions of such identified customers or prospects, the need for marketing to deliver scalable, real-time, right-time marketing will only become sacrosanct. The ones who will practice it, will have the ear of CEOs/CFOs and the rest will be left behind.

 

    

One more perspective on the future of marketing

I have been posting a lot of thoughts on the future of marketing and how it's changing dramatically. Here's one more perspective from Idris Mootee. He has an interesting presentation on this topic which brings to life the challenges that lies ahead for CEOs, CMOs and their communication partners.Take a look:

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Open Social - The platform for customer aggregation

I have often wondered( when I receive mails from different folks inviting me to be a member of several social networking sites they were members of)oops, hear comes one more social network membership!  I was always left overwhelmed. Where is the time for me to become a member of one more social network and interact. Being an active user of linked-in, I have always felt, what if I had a way to get everyone of my contacts across all social networks into linked-in, be it professional and personal.

I think Open Social from Google just does that. Open Social provides a platform for aggregation of Social networks into the social network site of your choice. It's Google's solution of a connector like app for social networks. There are some lovely business application demos from Linked-in & salesforce.com there. I am sure there will a lot more applications, more than just business applications, which will help me get connected to my contacts and connections in Linked-in, wherever they are in any social network.

At the start of the year, I had read 2007 will be the year of Widgets and it's coming alive with this innovation from Google. I am sure there will be a lot more application development around this code but this is according to me is just the beginning. I believe this is going to have some profund impact on how data, information & interests about consumers will get shared and also how businesses will get a lot more collaborative in the future.

Take a look at the launch video:

Credit Card marketing in Facebook

Rob Walker has an interesting article on how Chase has developed a credit marketing  program in Facebook.

“We felt Facebook would be a good partner for us, since they had such strong credibility in the students’ world,” explains Sangeeta Prasad, who oversees branding for Chase Card Services. “And we felt, you know, financial institutions lacked credibility. Students don’t see credit-card issuers or financial institutions in general as meeting their needs.” Thus the company started offering a new card it called +1, primarily by way of a “sponsored” Facebook group.

The +1 program was largely devised by Noise Marketing, a company that specializes in reaching young adults with nontraditional branding tactics. Making Facebook central to a college-focused effort had obvious advantages. “Everyone talks about the fragmentation of the media,” observes Noah Kerner, the C.E.O. of Noise Marketing. “Yet there’s never been such a concentration of people from one segment in one place before.” The Chase + 1 group has attracted so many participants in large part because of a rewards-program scheme. One tweak of this familiar tactic is that some of the rewards are tied to “credit education” material. Kerner maintains this coupling is what’s “really resonated” with students. “It’s connecting with them on a basic level: ‘O.K., you’re not trying to pull the wool over my eyes, and I appreciate that,’ ” he says.

That said, the education component doesn’t use precisely the same curriculum that, say, Consumer Reports would design. Students are advised not to spend money they don’t have, which is hard to argue with. But some might replace the counsel to “Pay at least the minimum due on time so you don’t waste money on late fees” with a blunt example of how fast debt can accumulate if the minimum is all you pay.

Kerner says that more good-behavior incentives are in the works — like rewards for paying your bill on time. And it’s the rewards that really seem to draw people in. The +1 system involves racking up “karma points.” You get 1 for joining the group, 15 for registering your +1 card, 5 for taking a brief “credit essentials” quiz and so on. These points can be disposed of only within Facebook: either spent at a special store (White Stripes’ “Icky Thump”: 10 points; Ticketmaster gift card: 35 points; Facebook T-shirt: 10 points), donated to one of several designated charities or given to other Facebook members.

Interesting isn't it? Looks like there is a convergence of traditional direct marketing thinking with web and loyalty for which Facebook seems to be a great platform to begin with.

Is it customer or consumer?

The word customer and consumer is used interchangeably today.What's right? Should we, as marketing folks, understand where to use customer or consumer? Susan has some interesting take on this:

My real problem was that I'd crossed over from a world where the buyers of your services have individual names (financial services), to a world where the buyers of your goods are largely a nameless mass (most consumer products).

What's the difference between a product and a service, really?

Here's a nice definition for a service:

"Any act or performance offered that is essentially intangible and does not result in ownership of any thing"    - Prof. Brian Engelland, MSU

You are dealing with a service when...

[1] Production and consumption are hard to separate. Examples: travel, investments

[2] Intangibles form a large part of what is being purchased. Examples: insurance, consulting

[3] There is no change of ownership. Customers typically rent a service, rather than owning it. Examples: credit card or loan, hotel room

[4] A sale that does not happen today cannot be recovered in the future. Examples: empty seats in a theatre, lost interest on a mortgage

[5] Customers must evaluate the purchase decision with few tangibles to go on. Examples: health care

[6] Output quality is variable, and depends on the performance of individuals. Examples: Hair styling, interior decorating, surgery

[7] Manner of dress, body language, and expressed language form part of the brand experience.  Examples: air travel, retail banking

[8] Cycle of purchase is repeated through 'rental payments'. There is no smooth movement through a consumption cycle, and there are frequent 'moments of truth'.  Examples: health club membership, anti-virus software rental, weight-loss groups

[9] Employees behavior and knowledge is central to delivery and quality. Examples: financial planning

[10] The memories of the experience may be as important as the experience itself. Examples: vacation travel, theme parks

[11] There are high degrees of customer contact during production. Examples: health care, spa services

[12] Competing offerings may differ in how much of the work of production is shifted to the buyer.  Examples: online brokerage vs. full service, self-serve vs. full service gas station

[13] Suppliers assume real economic risks (exceeding the revenue potential) by choosing a given customer. Some interested customers must be rejected. Examples: credit cards, insurance, auditing

[14] Customers assume real economic risks (exceeding the fee paid for the service) by choosing a given supplier. Examples: mutual funds, home insurance

[15] Everyone calls them clients, users or customers, rather than consumers

So now you know. There you have it. Try to keep your customers and your consumers straight now, okay?

Future of Marketing

Here's a nice quote from Todd Watson of IBM:

"Trackable, slicable, diceable, inferenceable, correlative, targeted digital advertising and communication based on explicit consumer expressions (search queries, online viewing, online shopping behaviors, etc.)  is the future of marketing. It's not just about the eyeballs anymore.  And increasingly, it's going to be all about the data"

The difference between network and community

I have noted offlate, there has been a lot of interest with marketers talking about the need to build online communities and getting closer to their customers online. There has been a lot of action around this, where brands have built programs or websites or built sponsored content within a group on the web to make this happen. I have often wondered how will all this work for brands. Some of the questions, I have always had are:

• When brands enable specific online spaces for consumers to meet and spend time, what is the desired impact that the brands hope to achieve and what will be results or ROMI(Return on Marketing Investment) of such an initiative?
• Do marketers believe that consumers will find their best network of friends/ interest group in a specific branded online space and is that the best place to meet and share ?
• Consumers are interested in hobbies, interests - like music, food, beauty, friends, dating etc. Why will they align themselves to specific brand related community sites?
• How many such branded online spaces as a consumer will they become a member of? It's crazy given the amount of brands one consumes and interests that one has! Also, take into context millions of things they would like to do on the web.
• What's the motivation for repeat visits for such spaces and how does one keep the interest alive?

For example, closer home in India, we have sunsilkgangofgirls promoted by Unilever. I registered into this website and went into different gangs(groups) to seek answers to my questions. I was really not suprised to see very few members in different gangs - Uptown Club, famous 5, sushmitateam had just one or two members while there were several such hundreds of gangs that have been started or registered. While there are a lot of activities and content in this site, engaging the gangs with all of this is the key task and challenge, I presume.

In this context, I came across a very interesting point of view by Chloe Stromberg of Forrester on how marketers need to understand the difference between community and network as it is often misused.

I hear marketers using the words "community" and "network" interchangeably.

But a community is just one type of network.  My working definition of network is: a group of people who have something in common and who have a motivation for connecting.  For example, a bunch of people who all buy the same brand of toilet paper, but have no desire to meet, are not a network.

It's easy to recognize different types of connected groups offline.  But as marketers wade into the less familiar universe of social computing, a lot of people assume that any type of online network associated with their brand is an online community.

What other types of online networks are there?

• Emotive networks (e.g., CarePages, PreludeDriver.com) -- Commonality: a powerful emotional experience, like being diagnosed with an illness or loving a particular type of car.  Motivation to connect: find people to share your experience with.
• Advice networks (e.g., Berkeley Parents Network, del.icio.us) -- Commonality: you're trying to do an activity like parenting in the Bay Area, learning about emerging technologies.  Motivation to connect: get suggestions from someone whose perspective you value.
• Dating networks (e.g., Match.com, Yahoo! Personals) -- Commonality: you're single, maybe you share similar social values.  Motivation to connect: meet a sweetheart (not a community).
• Blog networks (e.g., Micropersuasion, Greg Mankiw's Blog) -- Commonality: the ideas that you're interested in.  Motivation to connect: affect the public dialogue about the ideas.
• Wiki networks (e.g., Wikipedia, CarGurus) -- Commonality: you want the unvarnished, comprehensive truth to be free and available.  Motivation to connect: get the whole picture.
• Linkedin -- Commonality: you want to leverage business relationships.  Motivation to connect: get a sales/deal contact, recruit someone, find a job.
• Facebook -- Facebook is a tool, not a network, although that may be changing.  Existing offline networks use Facebook to socialize.  Commonality: having gone to the same college.  Motivation to connect: Socialize or build relationships with people of social standing.  (I'm going to dodge the class bullet on this one -- Dana Boyd has kicked off the discussion here:http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html)
• Myspace -- There is a strong commercial dimension to the networks forming on Myspace.  Commonality: anything.  Motivation to connect: be found by anyone, share.  This open-door, hello-world atmosphere is especially conducive to small biz commercial activity (e.g., if I'm an unsigned band, I want anyone anywhere in the world to find me, buy my music, and come to a show).

It is important for marketers to understand the 'motivation to connect' as they go about building their 'network of customers' for their brands online.

Which promotions do consumers trust?

There's an emarketer report on what US adults find worthwhile and trust when it comes to promotions. To me, it's a benchmark of how consumers may see them across different geographies too. Take a look: 

Virtual Kitchens - Consumers get involved

NY Times has an interesting article on how recipe searches on the internet are gaining huge interest among women:

Roughly 50 million people, or one-third of active Internet users in the United States, visited food sites in May, Mr. Cassar said, with sites like foodnetwork.com and kraft.com attracting more than seven million people. If recent and expected changes are any indication, these visitors are looking for friends as much as they are seeking recipes.

Condé Nast’s epicurious.com late last month introduced My Epi, a set of online tools perhaps best characterized as Facebook for foodies. Readers have long been able to compile their own recipe collections on the site. But now users on Epicurious, which was among the earliest recipe-sharing destinations on the Web, can search the virtual recipe boxes of other users, create profile pages for themselves and sift through profiles of other users with whom they may share similar interests.

In the coming months, marthastewart.com, the online division of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, will also allow users to collect, share, rate and review recipes with other users on the site. “And that’ll just be the beginning of our community and personalization initiative,” said Jody Jones, the editorial director of the Web site. “These are big growth areas for us.”

When do we really get convinced to buy?

Noah Elkin writes in a article -'real-world data ...might affect my purchase decision.'

That's is so true. When you see a salesman, you feel he has an agenda to sell his products. So, we get a lot more cautious. We raise our defences. When you see an ad, you know they will have to say nice things about the product to make you buy. Hence, we normally filter these messages and add our own 'trust filter' to it before we make a 'buy' decision. So, where do we really get real world data?

• In our informal conversations with our friends, relatives, family members, associates etc.
• In our formal conversations when you first believe that the person who you are talking to is an expert and therefore you can trust his/her word.
• Or news that you pick-up in the newspapers, TV, internet etc - Sources that you believe provide unbiased information.

The sad truth is such data is never archived till social media came-in. Noah writes:

This kind of dialog long predates the meteoric rise of online social networks. Content has always connected us as consumers, and similarly, we have always found ways to share our thoughts and feelings about what we've consumed. The dramatic change that has taken place in the past few years enables us to capture, create and share our own content, moving us in essence from a one-to-one model (the proverbial water-cooler conversation) to a one-to-many model, opening our opinions to networks that span space and time.

He suggests two simple rules of social media:

1. Listen to your networks.
2. Be useful to them.

According to me, this should be the foundation of any communication that we design for consumers in broadcast media now. But, it starts from the other end.

1. It must be interesting enough to be useful to them first.
2. Then, they will listen to it.
3. And it must be useful enough, so they pass on the message to their network of friends.

I guess this triggers a dialog - the world of real data, which will then convince them to buy the product.

American Express brings its customer community together

American Express has launched a unique online initiative called The Members Project that enables its cardmembers to come together as a community by submitting and sharing their project ideas for making a positive impact in the world. Cardmembers can rate and discuss the project ideas on message boards and will ultimately vote and choose one innovative winning idea that American Express will help
bring to life with up to $5 million. The Members Project, which is a part of American Express' new brand campaign, "Are You a Cardmember," highlights the value of being a Cardmember and part of the American Express Cardmember community. "Our Cardmembers make up a unique community -- one that is highly engaged and passionate -- and we know that they care about the world around them," said Jud Linville, president of American Express Consumer Card Services Group. "Through the unique experience of The Members Project, our community of Cardmembers is pulling together and collectively shaking up the world just a little bit to do some good."

Cardmembers can go register and submit their project ideas for making a broad positive impact in one of the following categories: Arts & Entertainment, Business & Finance, Education, Environment & Wildlife, Fun, Health & Fitness and Community Development. Cardmembers can also participate by rating or posting comments about project ideas already submitted. For every Cardmember that registers, regardless of whether they come up with a project idea or just add their input on project ideas already submitted, American Express will contribute $1 toward the winning idea. The more Cardmembers registered, the more dollars available. American Express will commit at least $1 million and up to $5 million for the winning idea.

I love the deep engagement that this idea will create with their cardmembers.

UIDs - User Initiated Discussions

I had recently posted about the impact of UGC(user generated content) in travel and the rising power of user-driven marketing. It seems this is an interesting trend that is gaining ground. Myspace, the social networking site, conducted a study called neverendingfriending and there are some interesting facts from this study. Forbes has carried an article on the same which mentions some of the highlights of the study which include:

• When a MySpace user talks, her friends listen.
• ..in addition to the 1.8 million MySpace users who said they plan to buy a new Electronic Arts game after seeing the company’s ad campaign on MySpace (at a cost of $1.19 per user), 4.5 million more — people who saw the brand’s profile or heard about the product from a friend, but didn’t see the ads — said they’d buy it, too.
• MySpace calls that kind of word-of-mouth spreading of an online ad campaign the “momentum effect,” and says its ability to calculate the chatty effect is the best thing to happen to social network marketing since, well, clicks.

Some key questions that came to mind were:

1. User Initiated Discussions(UIDs) in social networking sites drive brand awareness and conversions. How will one monetize this impact as this has an effect beyond CPT and CPC?
2. For advertisers' and social networking sites, it is more than just getting more dollars but may be is there a need for a new form of "giving back" to the community that needs to be adopted by brands?
3. Context-driven conversations(CDCs) have to become accountable and transparent. Is there a need for a new kind of tracking  that needs to evolve? It has to move beyond white papers and studies in my opinion for ad dollars to move here.

Travel consumers trust each other - CGC is a big trend

According to a research study released by Compete, when making travel decisions, consumers listen to one another. In total, consumer generated content (CGC) already influences $10 billion a year in online travel bookings.  Consumers are increasingly embracing their peers’ voices online: 20% rely on CGC when planning travel, and they consider this content more credible than reviews from professionals or information from the brands themselves.

To understand how marketers can create a strategy for getting involved in the conversation, Compete analyzed the effectiveness of three innovators in the travel category that have already embraced CGC:

• Sheraton Hotels pushed its standard website booking functionality aside, transforming into a social platform revolving around a “Global Neighborhood”
• Southwest Airlines launched a promotion to involve consumers in its marketing campaign through a contest for creating the best “Wanna Get Away” commercial
• TripAdvisor has become the single largest source of consumer-generated travel reviews online, with over 5 million consumers sharing in an ongoing dialogue

Three strategies recommended are:

What drives deep engagement in communities?

Just read a nice piece of research on what drives deep engagement, involvement when brands want to build communities. Looks like if you can't drive involvement, passion, alignment of minds and a channel for dialogue and sharing, communities won't take-off. I also felt as I read this research, as communities grow, we need to break them down into smaller communities of similar interests to sustain interest and engagement amongst members. Communities are not about "width of users" but  about "depth of usage".Read on for some extremely good insights:

People Engage More With Small, Branded, Well-Lit Communities!

According to Communispace, in this new era of "conversational marketing", the measure for engagement in a community isn't the number of people logging on. Rather, it's how actively people participate in the community.

New Communispace research, which analyzed participation behavior among 26,539 members of 66 private online communities, provides an initial look at member participation in communities.
The study evaluated communities along three participation metrics:

• Frequency - how often members contribute
• Volume - the number of contributions made by each member
• Bystander or "lurker" rate - what percentage of members are simply observing versus actively participating.

Key findings of the research are:

The more intimate the community, the more people participate:

• 86 percent of the people who log on to private, facilitated communities (average community size: 300-500 people) made contributions.
• Only 14 percent merely logged in and observed, or "lurked."
• In contrast, on public social networking websites, blogs, and message boards, this ratio is typically reversed, i.e., the vast majority of site visitors do not contribute. In fact, in a typical online forum (e.g., wiki, community, message board or blog), one percent of site visitors contribute and the other 99 percent lurk.

People get more involved when they know whom they are talking to and why

• Branded sites showed a higher volume of participation.
• When potential members were considering whether to participate in a community, they were 30 percent more likely to log on when the welcome notice disclosed the company sponsoring the community. Branded sites had an initial log in rate of 71 percent, compared with 55 percent for unbranded sites. This suggests that transparency - being upfront about who's behind the community - is a key factor for companies that want to engage with customers in a community.

Why people participate: social glue, shared passion, having a voice

• Communities of parents get the highest involvement
• Differences between how men and women participate: based on analysis of single-sex communities, the research found that although members of women's communities participated more frequently than men, men seemed to have more to say when they did participate: 4.8 weekly contributions for men compared to 4.1 for the women.
• Homogeneity triggers participation
• Education and household income were not related to community member participation
• Having a voice, productive leisure: One of the implications from the research is that people may get more involved in private, intimate communities because they feel like they can have a say.Another implication is that people may view the time spent as "productive leisure." They see participating as an interesting or fun outlet for communicating with other people who love what they love.

Integrating minds and solutions not just agencies or departments

At OMMA Hollywood, there were some interesting points made on the challenges facing agencies and how they need to rethink their solutions & models for consumers. Take a look:

Tim Hanlon, senior vice president-Ventures Group, at Publicis Groupe's Denuo said "Agencies should be de-siloing to make that TV expression both a branded and DR vehicle," whether it's a TiVo vehicle or a telescope unit, "a little TV with a DR component," adding: "Is that the direct marketing agency's responsibility or the brand agency's? I think it's both, so why do have two separate groups?" He further added "Consumers, especially younger ones, if they see something in any form of media, they're going to want to go further with it,"

Bant Breen, president, Interpublic Futures Marketing Group said ""It's a messy landscape today ... Digital media staff is working two and a half times longer and harder than the traditional media staff," he noted, citing thousands of media channels and different data feeds. "We need systems to coordinate that process. Truly personalized creative could be very, very exciting."

"The big part of what agencies do is to empower consumers to make a purchase decision, foster relationships, enable transactions and deliver information," added Sean Gold, senior vice president marketing, MySpace. "Traditionally, they've been great at delivering information, but the fostering relationships/enabling transactions needs to improve."

 

Snack Media will drive snack marketing

Wired has a nice perspective on the changing face of media and how it is evolving.

For marketers, the article provides great insights into how they  need to reshape their marketing thinking. I think they need to get ready for 'snack marketing' - small byte sized campaigns, convenient and fast food like distribution strategies, messages need to be munchy as it will be consumed throughout the day, communication needs to be packaged well with lots of variety and choices, needs to appeal to different target audiences as they will come with different tastes, brand needs to engage consumers at armslength from where it is consumed etc..

Take a look at why it needs to change because media is increasingly getting packaged like a snack:

Movies, TV, songs, games. Pop culture now comes packaged like cookies or chips, in bite-size bits for high-speed munching. It's instant entertainment - and boy, is it tasty.

Replace Nabisco with Apple, the Mini Oreo with the iPod nano, and youve got a blueprint for the current boom in what might be called snack-o-tainment. Apples single-minded marketing campaign for the iPod (its tunes - not albums - in your pocket, after all) taught us the joy of picking the choicest cuts and shuffling them into individual hit pdes. The same with television: When the video iPod launched in October 2005, we were suddenly eager to pay $1.99 to watch a music video or a recent episode of Lost in a smaller, portable version of what was already available for free on that big square thing in our living room.

Today, media snacking is a way of life. In the morning, we check news and tap out emails on our laptops. At work, we graze all day on videos and blogs. Back home, the giant HDTV is for 10-course feasting - say, an entire season of 24. In between are the morsels that fill those whenever minutes, as your mobile phone carrier calls them: a 30-second game on your Nintendo DS, a 60-second webisode on your cell, a three-minute podcast on your MP3 player.

Welcome to the new world of snack marketing!

Making Social Networking mainstream

NY Times has a very interesting article on how enterprises are making Social Networking as a platform to get  companies closer to their customers.

I really love the extension of the idea to business because social networking was seen more as a "peripheral community" among industry leaders. These sites were seen as a hub of young consumers getting together more as a hobby and sharing amongst themselves common issues and interests. Imagine, if this can become mainstream for enterprises - making it the hub for its customers! I think this is a big idea and inflection point for social networking this year and the future too.

When large companies & visionaries like Cisco Systems, Ning(the latest venture of the Netscape co-creator Marc Andreessen) put their might behind it, this idea has the capacity to really fly. Look at some examples of how it can be used:

• Imagine a social networking site for Whirpool where women who have bought their products can share their experiences,recipes, usage problems, service issues etc. in a social networking context. This could lead them to meet new friends, new information about raising children, new usage ideas etc. and Whirlpool will be the catalyst for this community. It could end-up in them sharing photos, holiday information etc. and this community will help Whirlpool design its products and services better for them. Imagine they allow customers to build their own site, invite their friends, look and feel are customized etc.
• Or a bank where people talk about money and issues wrt money - How to save, how to increase their wealth, investment opportunities, chat on financial services brands, their agents or Financial planners, their concerns and fears about the future of their investments, retirement plans etc. Imagine a banking website having a social networking site that can allow this community to grow and spread on the web, mobile, TV etc.
• Social networking can become the call centre of the future. The agents are customers themselves!

I think this is a great opportunity but companies need to be just the catalyst for such forums. They need to enable, listen, share, collaborate, engage with these customers and prospects if enterprise social networking has to come of age.

New media getting more attention from marketers

There's blood bath out there for the traditional media as new media seems to be gaining the attention of marketers.  According to American Advertising Federation, non-traditional media in the US is now attracting an average 15% of marketing budgets.

Interesting findings and more importantly  to me service providers like Ad agencies, DM agencies, interactive agencies and the like need to take notice of how technology is driving the morphing of various specializations. This disruption is hitting their business here and now. Couple of years back, no one from the ad agency would talk about TV on Web  and the interactive guys would not talk Web on TV! It all seems to be coming together.

I hate the word non-traditional media, new media etc. being used as it distances and builds further barriers amongst current communication professionals and agencies a lot. I would rather like to use the  word convergent media or conversational media or collaborative media as it is far more inclusive.

According to the ARF survey:

• 73% of those surveyed said they allocated up to 20% of their spend on new and experimental media.
• Marketers also said traditional media had to innovate to stay competitive. Those most in need of a novel approach and reinvention, according to the report, were newspapers (51.4%), network television (34.5%) and radio (33.8%).
• Of the 1,000 industry executives polled, 80% believed the pace of media innovation was faster in 2006 than in the previous year, while nearly 60% thought the pace would quicken even more this year.
• 86% of those polled had foreseen the mushrooming of TV programs via the web, while 80% were unfazed by the wide adoption of SMS messaging.
• The rush to advertise in the Second Life virtual community caught most executives by surprise, with 77% saying they did not see it coming
• 61% were caught on the hop by the advance of video sharing website YouTube.

Here's the presentation for you to take a look at the findings:

Dripvertising - Is this the future?

I was reading an article in NY Times on how Microsoft  launched Windows Vista last week. There is an interesting point in the article that reinforced my long-held belief that we are going to see seismic shifts in marketing communications and how consumers will consume communication - "Messages in Drips" as I have termed it. It's no more the blockbuster approach of the past! It's happening as we speak and is gaining ground rapidly.

Here's the point Brian Marr of Microsoft makes in the article that reaffirms my belief:

“We wanted something very special for this audience; something very low key,” ....“This is an audience that is very cautious about marketing.”

Take a closer look at this:"low key", "cautious about marketing". That's the biggest challenge for brands today! Marketing to the ever cautious consumer!

How has Microsoft approached this problem? They launched a site called clearification.com. According to NY Times:

The campaign offers a series of “webisodes,” or stories told in short video clips. Microsoft also sponsored a performance tour for Mr. Martin and his Comedy Central special....

News of the clearification.com site was released in e-mail messages to influential blogs like laughingsquid.com and on video sites like YouTube.com. The site also lets visitors sign up for an alert to notify them when the latest webisode is released.

It's interesting how messages are being released in "drips". This creates a high level of engagement and involvement plus don't forget the buzz it creates.

I believe "drip messages" can capture the imagination of consumers. There is a lot intrigue and expectations in this kind of story-telling for brands. It's pretty media neutral and does many things a 30-sec spot can never do - dialogue, converse, respond, interact and build an experience. This is the way marketing communications is headed in the future.It's not devices like TiVo any more that pose a challenge for marketers. Brands need to break the "cautious wall" consumers have built around themselves.

The article ends with this quote"...The idea is to deliver something with depth and substance.”. Never mind the jargon -"Dripvertising" but surely this approach makes a lot of sense to me.

Forrester's take on ROI of blogs

Forrester has released a research report “The ROI Of Blogging: The “Why” And “How” Of External Blog Accountability”.

It's got some very insights on the kind of metrics brands should use, when it comes to evaluating their corporate blogging initiatives:

Conversations are never assembly line

Joseph Jaffe is one person who does a great job of building collaborative projects. After his successful book Life after the 30 Sec Spot, he has started to write a  new book - Join the conversation and has invited people to contribute. I have tried to contribute my thoughts in Chapter 10 - Why are you so afraid of conversation? Here's my take:

It is a good idea to trace this to the history and growth of organizations in the industrial age. This was the age where efficiency was the focus. Organizations were built around driving productivity. People were trained to do things over and over again - faster and quicker. For over a century, people worked in an era of mass production. Hence, they forgot the ability to develop conversations. They worked in large organizations that told them what to do rather than get them to explore what to do.

We therefore moved from

• an era of 'inventory of goods' to an era of 'inventory of ideas'.
• an era of 'scarcity' to an era of ' insatiable choices'
• an era of ' information poverty' to an era of 'information overload'

Imagine the kind of shift they would have to make for this new eco-system. They had to express, share and collaborate to get prepared for such an environment. This is a new work culture altogether for them. Also, one-size-fits-all product strategy became irrelevant.

Conversation at the end of the day is two-way. Conversations require

• A capability to accept reality as it were because that's how consumers talk amongst themselves
• Ability to listen and respond in an unbiased manner
• Skills to experiment,learn and develop
• Ability to change the course of one's action swiftly, even if the decision was wrong

Hence, they were not ready for a conversation era. An environment where one has to express, empathize, engage, enable and empower. The mindset a marketer must have is not to 'inform at any cost' but 'spread at no cost'. This is a new marketing paradigm that demands new thinking, new rules and new ideas.

P&G Productions makes a debut

Procter & Gamble is making its first foray into consumer-generated content with two new Web sites.

The company's P&G Productions unit said Monday that it has launched Capessa.yahoo.com. an "online community" where women can share information, practical advice and inspirational stories.

P&G Productions also said Monday that it will launch the People's Choice Community, an online forum that will feature voting for the People's Choice Awards, as well as blogging and chatting.

The site will go live Tuesday night, at www.pcavote.com, with programming and online activities to continue year-round.