Going Social Now

Pangea Day, May 10th. Don't miss it

2008-05-04T23:36:19Z

Don't let this opportunity to be a part of something incredibly special go by. Pangea Day is a special, global event to bring the world together through film on one day. The idea is to help people see themselves in others and in their stories. Starting at 18:00 GMT on May 10, 2008, locations in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked for a live program of powerful films, live music, and visionary speakers. The entire program will be broadcast – in seven languages – to millions of people worldwide through the internet, television, and mobile phones.

Participate online or better still through one of the community events. You won't regret it. You can also show your support on Facebook, MySpace or YouTube. I'm proud to say that Avenue A | Razorfish played a small role in the Pangea Day effort by designing and building the website. We talk a lot about social media and online communities, well there's nothing more special than showing we're part of a global community that cares.

Social Influence Marketing: Understanding those Peer Influences

2008-05-02T21:29:33Z

Here's my latest article on Social Influence Marketing where I delve into how those peer influences actually. Let me know what you think of this one.

At the root of Social Influence Marketing™ is how peer influences work. With the digital world going social, we recognize that peer influence is having a greater affect on brand affinity and purchasing decisions than any traditional form of marketing. Customers are excited about doing the marketing themselves if the product is strong. We also know that with the proliferation of social technologies from mainstream social networks like MySpace and Facebook to niche social tools like del.icio.us (bookmarking) and FriendFeed (personal content aggregation), the peer influence may take many different forms.
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Motivations to Share

Abraham Maslow emphasized that personal value precedes network and social value in his hierarchy of needs theory. He argued that most people are not selfish but self interested – they are always searching for an answer to the question – what’s in it for me? This applies to the web domain where people don’t share and allow peer influences to take place just for the sake of it. People share online when they are incented to and when there’s potential for personal value to be realized.

Clay Shirky and Peter Kollock also point out that once a person has been able to derive strong individual benefit from a particular experience, the motivation to share increases significantly. This happens as the user realizes that through the collective action (or experience) there’s opportunity to derive even more personal value from it.

What are the implications of this? When you design a website or online marketing campaigns, remember that if the experience isn’t valuable to one person, it won’t be to a hundred, a thousand, or a million people. Tied to that, consumers must be able to derive greater value through the act of sharing for them to make that effort. For example, a person would be more likely to share a piece of media to influence a peer if the act of sharing enhances his reputation among those peers or if it encourages the peers to participate in the social activity too.

Location in the Network

Not everybody is inclined to play a role in influence either. People use the Internet in different ways, and their usage patterns dictate how likely they are to share information and influence each other. But more than that, their location in an online community or social network heavily influences their likelihood of playing a role in influencing others.

The closer a person is to the center of the conversations, and the more people he is connected to, the more likely he is to influence his peers. Because he is directly involved in many different conversations, his peers typically treat him as a credible or appealing information source. They get used to getting information from him and get used to sharing information with him, providing him with something to respond to in turn.

As a result, this person is in a much stronger position to influence a peer than someone who only occasionally participates in the conversation or is just loosely connected to the group. In fact, this is how the influential bloggers work too – because they are at the center of conversations sharing a lot of information themselves, they have lots of influence.

The same philosophy applies to networks of friends and how they share information online. Why does this matter? It is important to recognize that not every Web user is a candidate for peer influence. Only those that are at the center of their networks communicate actively and regularly with their peers and can play this role. Look for those people, and meet their needs as you design for influence.

Influencers are not Brand Advocates

A report from JupiterResearch highlights that nearly 25% of all online adults are brand advocates. They are more likely to research and purchase products online too. But as the reported pointed out, these brand advocates focus on gathering product information and purchasing them, rather than spreading the word through social media sites. They are not the most important influencers.

Rather, the most important influencers are the people who play a role further down the purchasing funnel. They are the people who are solicited for advice while a consumer is in the consideration phase of a purchasing decision. These people are in the consumer’s network – online and offline. They serve as validation points sharing their own experiences of a product with the consumer, pointing the consumer to resources that can affect the purchasing decision, and weigh in with their own opinions. How do you reach them?

Contrary to traditional word-of-mouth marketing strategies or even viral marketing, you don’t. You let your potential customers, who are in the consideration phase of a purchasing decision, reach out to them. Why? Because these influencers don’t vary by product, rather they vary by consumers. And it is difficult for you as a marketer to know who the core influencers for a brand consideration or particular purchasing decision are. In some cases, it may be the consumer’s parents or it may be the friends, or peers at work or relatively anonymous peers in a discussion forum, or maybe a combination of all these.

Tactics for Success

So if you cannot reach these important influencers that are having a far greater influence on purchasing decisions than any other form of marketing, what can you do? You can formulate your web strategies to allow for those peer influences to take place. I introduced some tactics in my previous article, here are some more but specific to online retail experiences –

1. Integrate more deeply with the social networks. Yes, your consumers are spending a lot of time on these social networks, and that won’t change anytime soon. Office Depot allows consumers to post messages directly to their Facebook profiles, or into their newsfeeds, about products they are interested in. It does this from the product page on its site. It makes it easier for a consumer to solicit feedback from his peers.

Other e-retailers should follow by integrating directly with the social networks allowing consumers to get feedback more directly during their purchasing process. For example, a consumer should be able to take a product from a retailer Web site, post information about it in his social network, and solicit feedback via a poll from his network seamlessly. No one does this today.

2. Point customers to third-party review sites. Consumers are going to go to third-party review sites regardless of what you tell them on yours. So rather than trying to stop them, point your consumers to the most authorative and credible ones out there. They will appreciate this and return to your site once they are ready to make a purchase. Most sites point to favorable product reviews in the mainstream media, but that’s not enough.

By pointing to the blogs and review sites themselves, consumers will know where to look for more information, and they’ll find communities of peers looking to make similar purchases. These are peers that can positively influence them.

3.Tie more directly with the offline shopping experience. Consumers move between the online and the offline space as they make product purchasing decisions. The iPhone and other mobile devices that simplify web surfing are making this happen more. In fact, Google has seen a 20% increase in searches from mobile phones in the last few months.

Therefore, as you think about an online shopping experience, keep in mind those offline scenarios and how social influence can support them. A consumer might be surfing to your web site or broadcasting to his Facebook network asking for advice while standing in a retail outlet looking directly at your product. So for example, consider publishing the customer reviews for a particular product that were originally published online in the retail store itself. Staples is already doing this successfully.

4. Make the product a strong discussion point. We’re used to thinking of products in terms of features and specifications in relation to other products on retail Web sites. Separately, we think of online communities and social networks as places where people talk to each other. Those two worlds can blur if you allow for more conversations around the product. It’ll lead to more peer influences.

Amazon has started doing this with their Customer Discussions. These aren’t customer reviews, rather, they are forums to discuss the products and everything about them. They are designed to enable conversations about a product that people are interested in.

5. Leverage your employees to build online communities. Both Best Buy and Circuit City in different, but exciting ways, encourage their employees to participate in their online communities on their retail Web sites. These employees answer customer queries about specific products, advise each other on technical issues and demonstrate that there are real, authentic people who care behind the brand.

Why does this matter? Because when these employees play authentic and personal roles in online communities where consumers are making purchasing decisions, they blur the lines between sales representative and peer influencer. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily which is why these retailers, and others, should encourage their employees to participate in third-party online communities too – as long as they do so honestly, authentically, and appropriately.

Social Influence Marketing™ takes many different forms. As we’ve seen, at the root of Social Influence Marketing™ are the peer influences that can positively affect brand affinity and purchasing decisions. Taking advantage of social media, by tapping into the Social Influence Marketing™ concepts, requires a more rigorous understanding of those peer influencers. Only through a focused understanding and appropriate design tactics can you take advantage of one of the most important dimensions to marketing today.

Some Twitter numbers and LinkedIN CPMs

2008-05-01T15:46:26Z

It is nice to see some actual Twitter numbers. According to Techcrunch, in March Twitter had 1+million users of which 200,000 were active each week. The active users send an average of 15 tweets a day. That's well above my average. And finally, there are 4 million connections between Twitter usres. You do the math to find out how many connections per user. Now I wish I knew who these actual users are. What are their demographic and psychographics?

On a loosely related note, LinkedIn told Silicon Alley Insider that its earning $75 CPMs (cost paid per thousand viewers) for advertising in the US and $50 CPMs in the U.K. Now, LinkedIn certainly has a more targeted and potentially valuable audience than Facebook and MySpace but those CPM numbers sound really high. Still its a sign that niche networks with more focused audiences matter. LinkedIn has 17 million users in comparison to Facebook's 70 million and MySpace's 200 million. CPMs on Facebook and MySpace are much lower.

Relevantly Speaking, a SXSX Interview

2008-04-27T23:41:46Z

While at South by South West I was interviewed on Social Media by Relevantly Speaking. They have some great interviews on their website too.

Headlight blog sheds light on auto trends

2008-04-27T15:53:52Z

A few years back I was the lone Avenue A | Razorfish blogger with the Workplace blog. A lot has changed in a short while. Every second day we now have a new blogger in our midst. It is exciting to see so many more employees take to blogging and experiment with styles and formats. The latest entrants are Grant and Mary with the Headlight blog covering the auto industry on a monthly basis. It covers digital automative trends and insights and the first few posts focus on going green. Don't miss the article on Green Social Networking tools and topics which discusses Goloco.

Bringing the Social Web to the Financial Services Space

2008-04-24T23:21:39Z

There hasn't been too much social innovation in the financial services sector. Most large banks have taken hesitant steps into the social web. Their reluctance to do so is understandable. As a sector, they have a lot to worry about and the last thing that they'd want to do is take on more risk - especially when their brands are taking such a beating. As a result, the most innovation is happening among the startups. Two in particular really impress me and an internal email chain about social media and financial services got me thinking about them again.

The first is MINT. It aggregates all my financial information from my different accounts whether it be brokerage, retirement or bank accounts. It tells me the categories of my expenditures, my spending trends and gives me pointers on ways to save. But the feature that I find most interesting is the SpendSpace at the bottom of the Trends tab. It lets me compare my spending trends to other people in similar (or different) locations as me. For example, I can compare expenditures in restaurants to other New Yorkers (lower). And more than that, it tells me whether my shopping at specific retailers in a given time period matched others in my location. Apparently, I spent a lot more at Best Buy than others in February. Similarly, my wireless phone bill was lower than other New Yorkers. It is fascinating social information.

The other interesting website is Covester. It is a social investing website that tells me how other people are investing their money. Harnessing wisdom of the crowds concepts, Covester lets you link your brokerage account to other individual investors and fund managers so that you can see how your portfolio performs in relation to theirs. The idea is that you can discover the most successful investors from within the community and start learning and benefiting from their investment choices. Part of the idea is to enable those with the best portfolio to get some financial return by making their investment decisions public. The only problem - investing is about beating the market. If Covester become so successful that everyone knows who you are and what you're investing in, you won't be able to beat the market in the future.

Nevertheless, Covester is a perfect example of a startup that harnesses the power of the social web. Now just imagine if MINT and Covester were to merge. Wouldn't that be neat? Better still, a major bank in the consumer banking business should acquire MINT and someone like Etrade should pick up Covester.

UPA Presentation on Social Influence

2008-04-24T23:01:49Z

Last night I addressed the New York Chapter of the Usability Professional's Association in our Avenue A | Razorfish New York offices. The subject of my presentation was Social Influence: Social Media and the Enterprise. The event was sold out with over a 150 people in attendance.

It was a fun experience with a lot of great questions being asked during and after the presentation. In fact some are still trickling into my email inbox. The audience seemed to have enjoyed the talk and no one questioned the fundamental premises behind Social Influence Marketing. Looks like I found a few more believers in the concepts. Thank you for attending.

A special thanks to the UPA for giving me the opportunity to speak and to my peers Elliot and Mary-Lynne who helped organize the event.

Office Depot gets Social Influence

2008-04-21T03:35:44Z

There's one obvious area where Office Depot is definitely ahead of Staples and that's in recognizing the power of social influence. Take a look at the Office Depot Planner product page above. Notice the little Facebook, Digg and del.icio.us icons? Yes, I can easily share an image of the product I'm thinking of buying on my social network or add it to my bookmark list. On clicking on the Facebook icon, a window opens asking me whether I want to post the image of the Planner to my profile or send it to a friend. See below for how this looks.

Office Depot recognizes that I'd probably need to solicit the advice of a few others when making a purchasing decision. The website makes it easier for me to harness those influences. What Office Depot does is the bare minimum, but its a start. Expect Staples and other retailers to start doing this soon too. In the case of Office Depot, I wish it let me share the product information with my LinkedIn network - they're the people who I sometimes get advice from when making office purchases.

Amazon starts Customer Discussions

2008-04-21T02:59:16Z

Few e-retailers understand the power of social influence the way Amazon does. From its wildly successful customer reviews to the more recent customer images, Amazon tries hard to take advantage of the notion that when it comes to purchasing books we are heavily influenced by one another. Probably my favorite feature on Amazon has been the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" one. It tells me what other books I'd be interested in based on my interest in a specific book and what other customers bought. Those recommended books can be filtered by category and scroll horizontally like the Apple Album Cover Flow interface.

But there's a new feature that I like too. And that's the customer discussions. They connect customers to each other to share questions, insights and views about products available on Amazon.com. In other words, they're discussion boards for each product on Amazon. What's refreshing is that Amazon recognizes that I'm not as interested in meeting people on its site as I am in finding books. So rather than design the feature a social network and encourage me to make friends, Amazon focuses on the reason that I'm on the site in the first place. To find good books to read and to learn more about them. Take a look at the guidelines to learn how Amazon thinks about these discussion boards.

If only other companies paid more attention to what we as consumers are trying to do on their websites. We'd have fewer social networks and just more relevant and useful interactive features.

My Starbucks Idea. The Future of the Contact Us page

2008-04-07T23:18:14Z

They're so close and yet so far. I watched with increasing interest the launch, promotion and growth of My Starbucks Idea. On the surface, I really like it. It is an enthusiastic effort by a social brand to be more social. If there's anyone who should be really embracing social media, its Starbucks because the brand is about community and people.

It's a simple concept - users are invited to tell Starbucks what they should be doing. Users publish their ideas and others comment and vote on them. Every now and then Starbucks takes an idea and moves it to the "See" section. Acknowledgment that the idea has legs and is being turned in to reality. I like it.

But its missing a few things. The first is best represented by this user comment in the Idea section.

I don't know how long this ideas website will be up for, but I hope this idea is reviewed soon by the ideas people in the company.

Starbucks doesn't participate in the conversation. It doesn't respond to comments directly rather it responds more broadly in the "See" section when they're making reality out of an idea. That's disappointing. If you expect your customers to help you, you should be willing to participate in their conversation. Not stand by silently or only speak from a pulpit.

What's also missing is there's no form of reward for ideas turned into reality. Imagine if every person who participated in the discussion around a frequency card, were added to a beta list for that card? That would be a great way to thank those customers for their thoughts. It would seed the concept with passionate consumers too. Opportunity missed.

On the whole though, I'm impressed. It borrows from the Dell Ideastorm concept and applies it to the Starbucks world. I believe that concepts like these are the future of the contact us page. Every site will need to have an area like this - a place where the brand solicits feedback from its customers and responds to their comments. If a brand doesn't want to be social in this manner, it shouldn't really be on the web at all.

Social Influence Marketing: Is it different to WOM and Social Shopping?

2008-03-23T13:16:42Z

Since my SXSW presentation where I introduced Social Influence Marketing (SIM) more broadly, I've fielded lots thought provoking questions and comments. Most interesting have been the questions about the relationship between SIM, Social Shopping and Word of Mouth Marketing. Here are a few clarifying thoughts.

Firstly, social influence marketing includes social shopping but extends beyond it. Social Shopping is primarily concerned with group purchasing behavior at the point of purchase. It is tied more into sales leveraging the wisdom of the crowds to affect purchasing. And it focuses directly on driving consumers to a purchase as quickly as possible.

Social Influence Marketing is about social shopping but not just that. At its heart, it is about recognizing the importance of influence - influence at every point point in the marketing funnel. And SIM is concerned with the brand as much as it is with the sales. We know that a person's perception of a given brand is heavily influenced by his or her peer group - the known peer group and the anonymous one too. SIM deals with furthering a brand's image in the online domain by taking advantage of social influence. This may not drive directly towards sales.

The other question that comes up is whether social influence marketing is just another form of word of mouth. And if it is word of mouth, then what's so special and different about it. For this one must first understand that word of mouth is primarily about consumers giving information to other consumers. It is about spreading a message not necessarily allowing for the natural influencing of a decision making process. In fact, Wo rd of mouth marketing is defined as giving people a reason to talk about your products and services, and making it easier for that conversation to take place.

SIM certainly does borrow from those concepts but it uses social media in all its forms to influence. Unlike word of mouth marketing, it is centered in social media and social relationships within the digital domain. SIM also targets anonymous interactions in a non campaign sense. But most importantly, social influence is about recognizing that any purchasing decision (or brand opinion) is made with various social influences playing a significant role. SIM is about deploying strategies and accompanying tactics to take advantage of those social influences - to account for them in the customer life cycle and design and integrate experiences that map to how they affect consumer behavior.

At the end of the day, SIM is about recognizing that no opinion formed is completely devoid of external influence and therefore any online experience must accommodate and support the social nature of decision making. It'll make for happier and more loyal customers. For more on social influence marketing, read the reports published by Avenue A | Razorfish.

Pictured above is an image taken from Secret Prices. It shows how social influence on a network can play a significant role in purchasing decisions.

Is the web an advertising medium? Some people wonder

2008-03-19T17:18:41Z

And this time it includes reporters from Advertising Age which I'm reading with increasing frequency. Matthew Creamer discusses the question in a thought provoking article titled, "Think Different: Maybe the Web's Not a Place to Stick Your Ads". He questions some of the fundamental premises that drive the display ad business - do we really care to click on those advertisements and is that they best way for a brand to reach its prospective customers? Using Apple with its small online advertising budget as an example, he emphasizes that there are lots of other ways to market online too.(To the right is HP's viral marketing campaign from 2006 - a great example of non linear marketing.)

Talking of which, Creamer also discusses some social influence marketing themes. He argues that in the not to distant future consumers won't be "treated as subjects to be brainwashed with endless repetitions of whatever messaging some focus group liked". He believes that the world isn't about hidden persuasion but transparency and dialogue at its center allowing people to influence each other's decision making. I couldn't agree more with him but I believe we're in that not to distant future already.

The most successful brands are the ones that have been engaging with their audiences in more direct, meaningful and personal ways. Display advertising still matters but its just one component of the marketing mix. The audiences aren't passive and they're absorbing, critiquing and sharing their perspectives on the major brands more quickly and with more people than ever before. Figuring out how to take advantage of that is a challenge but that's at the heart of all of this. It's not something new either, its been happening since the dawn of the Internet and its rooted in our innate desires to share and communicate with one another.

And while providing "utility" maybe new to the advertising industry, its old hat for those of us who grew up in the web design business. You have to provide something useful if you want to attract, convert and retain customers via the web. You've gotten more choices in terms of where you provide that usefulness (it just doesn't have to be on your own website), and you can use it to influence purchasing decisions but providing it shouldn't be treated as something new. Just go ask your web product teams about usefulness.

In a sense, its not that utility is entering the marketing domain but rather marketing is getting broader.

Flights of Fancy? Adweek article

2008-03-18T00:55:48Z

Brian Morrissey discusses how social media is extending the life of ad campaigns in an Adweek article published today. As usual he's spot on and quotes me discussing what it means.

"The traditional campaign model doesn't work anymore," said Shiv Singh, director of strategic initiatives at Avenue A/Razorfish, owned by Microsoft. "If you have a social-media driven campaign, you can't stop it necessarily when you want to stop it. It's akin to having a dinner party and suddenly turning the lights off."

What are the implications of this? Its harder to budget for a social media driven ad campaign. While you can always turn the media spend off when you want to, you can't necessarily turn off the campaign. If a conversation has started and people are participating, linking and talking about your campaign you have to let that carry on. Problems may arise when the message gets tired or when the conversation degenerates into something you don't want but that can't be helped too.

That's why when you think about the social media in the context of a campaign, think carefully. The returns maybe awesome but the risks can be huge too.

Discussing the Semantic Web

2008-03-17T22:34:04Z

The web of the future will allow any person, object, or piece of information to be intelligently linked to one another says Tim Berners Lee in the Times of London where he talks up the semantic web. For those of who aren't familiar with the semantic web, its the term used to describe how any piece of data and not just a web page will be structured so that it can communicate with other information by built in semantic relationships in the information itself.

Now we've all know about the semantic web for a while. And before web 2.0 we thought the semantic web would be the next big thing. Now we believe it will be the next thing after web 2.0. Is it really just round the corner? The problem with the whole semantic web story is easy to understand - somebody or something needs to create all those relationships between the various data elements that we interact with everyday through the Internet. To date, there hasn't been the right tools around to create those relationships.

Well now with the whole social networking phenomena we're connecting to data elements ourselves using the social networks and each other as starting points. Sure, the semantic web and applications like Twine will take this a lot further but I have to wonder how much they will be adopted. Do we need those relationships created automatically for us? Will we use them? We're depending upon each other to create those relationships and so far that's worked fine. I suppose only time will tell but in the meantime, the search engines are preparing for the future.

Here's a link to the Scientific American article where the Semantic Web was first discussed.

Are Agencies Walking the Talk?

2008-03-17T01:51:58Z

Adweek had a thoughtful article on word of mouth marketing last month that I bookmarked and re-read this weekend. Notable were the comments by Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer of Nielsen BuzzMetrics who said, "Most brands do a pathetic job listening to consumers vis-a-vis existing tools, whether it's through 800 numbers, call centers, 'contact us' feedback forms." He then added "The reason I say 'pathetic' is those listening tools aren't terribly assimilated into the new Web 2.0 culture, where people talk with audios, photos, videos. Most companies assume consumers speak in one language and that language is text, when consumers actually speak in a much more robust language."

Blackshaw is spot on with those comments. Too many companies think of web based interactions as text driven sales or customer service channels. But customers want to engage with the the brands on a more personal level earlier in the marketing funnel before they are ready to make purchases. They want to draw the brand into their own conversations and decision making processes. They want the companies to participate on their terms. The current tools simply don't allow for that. Few websites are defined to put the conversations at the epicenter. Most focus on the product. That worked for a long time but not anymore.

Blackshaw also said, "there is such a viral effect being created by what brands do -- whether it's through products that work, customer service, the way employees behave -- that we also need to listen to understand the cause and effect between brand experience and consumer conversation." That's really the million dollar question. We're all trying to understand the relationship. Making it harder is the fact that the brand determines the type of conversation too.

I know I'll be spending a lot of time thinking about the relationship between brand experience and consumer conversation in the next few months.