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Life begins to get easier when others talk about a topic that you've been going hoarse evangelizing. In an interview in Fast Company, BJ Fogg discusses the power of Social Influence Marketing and why it is so new and important.Calling it interpersonal persuasion, Fogg sees it as something potentially bigger than radio. I for one couldn't agree more. He focuses on Facebook in particular but I believe the subject extends beyond Facebook to every digital platform and device.
For reference, Fogg is an authority on persuasion and also one of the people behind Stanford's first Facebook class. Here's a key quote from the interview.
Facebook is the precursor of something I'm calling mass interpersonal persuasion. That is a new phenomenon and the most important thing to happen in the world of persuasion since the advent of the radio over 100 years ago. Radio changed the game for persuasion because it allowed a message to be broadcast to thousands and millions of people, which was previously not possible. TV was an extension of that, but I don't think it was the big leap that radio was.
Facebook takes very strong interpersonal influence dynamics -- the way people persuade each other face-to-face in small groups with peer pressure, reciprocity, flattery -- and allows those to be used on a mass scale because your social networks are built in. Friends influence friends, who influence friends, and that keeps rippling out. They can reach people very quickly for very little cost and ordinary people can set these in motion. It doesn't require a big broadcasting company or a big PR campaign. If you get the right message in the right way, you'll effect millions of people. Facebook has been the best platform for that, but I think in the future it will be commonplace.
Read the full interview over at Fast Company. I briefly met BJ Fogg last year while speaking at a conference in Denmark and found him to be insightful. He understands persuasion better than most people and its great to learn that he's looking at it in the context of social influence too.
Is there any such thing as a digital brand? Here at Avenue A | Razorfish, we certainly think so. Joe Crump, Vice President of Strategy and Planning explained it best when he spoke on the topic at Cannes recently.
In a nutshell, Joe contends that brands need to view the digital world differently as consumers form opinions of your brand in milliseconds. If they don't like what they see, they can shut you out forever or worse still use social influence to hurt your brand by telling their friends and the rest of the world how boring you are. Here's the slide deck.
The most digital brands are Google, Apple, YouTube, Flickr and Netflix. These brands scored the highest when we measured them against atributes like immersion (how easy it is for a consumer to become engaged with your digital home), social (whether a consumer finds your brand worth sharing), and adaptive (how well a brand responds to a consumer’s digital environment), among other qualities. Interbrand's top brands are Coca Cola, Mercedes, General Electric, Nokia and Microsoft. Download the Brand Gene Scorecard.
In a nutshell, Joe contends that brands need to view the digital world differently as consumers form opinions of your brand in milliseconds. If they don't like what they see, they can shut you out forever or worse still use social influence to hurt your brand by telling their friends and the rest of the world how boring you are. Here's the slide deck.
The most digital brands are Google, Apple, YouTube, Flickr and Netflix. These brands scored the highest when we measured them against atributes like immersion (how easy it is for a consumer to become engaged with your digital home), social (whether a consumer finds your brand worth sharing), and adaptive (how well a brand responds to a consumer’s digital environment), among other qualities. Interbrand's top brands are Coca Cola, Mercedes, General Electric, Nokia and Microsoft. Download the Brand Gene Scorecard.
Knowing how to tap into that social influence can be challenging for an auto manufacturer. Here are five tips for automakers as they attempt to harness the social influence.
1. Market to the peer influencers as well
Auto purchasing decisions are rarely made in isolation. Think hard about the spheres of influence both online and offline that affect a specific customer segment’s decision-making process and find ways to target those influencers as well. For example, if you’re selling a car to a college student, you can also promote the vehicle online (as a great college car) to the parents of the buyer.
2. Allow for the social influence to take place more naturally
A passionate customer’s relationship with an auto brand is never a private relationship. The customer invariably wants to showcase that relationship in some public form. Provide him or her with enough digital artifacts to do so. There’s memorabilia in the offline space, but what about memorabilia for a social network? Is it available on your website? And I don’t just mean screensavers.
3. Market to your current car owners more aggressively
Most auto manufacturers don’t do enough to harness the passions of current car owners. They’re your most valuable marketers as they strongly influence their peers. Find ways to keep them excited and engaged with the brand on an ongoing basis. Now with marketing through social media, this has finally gotten easier. Take advantage of it and give them more excuses to talk about your brand when they socialize online.
4. Redesign your website to allow for group purchasing decisions
Growing up, my father always made my mother, brother and me active stakeholders when he went shopping for a new car. We’d look at brochures together; visit car dealerships, debate over dinner and vote for our favorites. No auto manufacturer lets me take that experience online. Auto purchases invariably are group decisions, so provide customers with the tools to share information, debate (via social networks or otherwise) and make decisions as a group. You’ll win more customers.
5. Direct customers to third-party experts online
Web behavior has changed, whether you like it or not. Customers will hop between third-party review sites, social networks and competing auto manufacturer websites as they make the purchasing decisions. Instead of ignoring this behavior, embrace it. Point your site visitors to the most authoritative blogs and auto review sites and let those customers tag and catalog that information. They’ll become more informed buyers and you’ll build vital trust by pointing them to the right places. Don’t worry; they’ll come back to your site when they’re ready to buy.
Arguably, over the last few years auto manufacturers have taken some great strides in the social media domain. The challenge now is to lead the way in the next phase of social influence marketing. It’s when the auto manufacturers can truly go social and allow for those peer and anonymous influences to take place naturally. We’re all waiting to see who will do that first and how.
View other articles pertaining to Digital Automotive Trends on the Headlight Blog.
Another issue of the Headlight Blog is out and this time it focuses on social influence marketing. As you may remember, last month's edition covered everything green in the automotive space. Grant, Mary Butler and the team have done an excellent job again. The posts featured that are worth reading include -
- The art of talking with your customers, not at them by Ben Bloom
- The untapped power of owner communities by Jesse Pickard
- An automotive social influence marketing wish list by yours truly.
My article is published in the next post as well.
Some of these statistics are probably old news for us in the industry but they're still worth drawing attention to. This is from Edelman's Trust Barometer via eMarketer and highlights how people trust each other as credible sources of information about a company.
Why is this important? Because when we design web experiences and online marketing programs, we generally ignore the fact that people trust each other more than any other form of communication. We also don't recognize that people trust their known peers much more than the anonymous blogosphere. To effectively reach consumers today, you have to reach them through people like themselves.
Finding those people is the challenge. That'll be the subject of one of my upcoming articles on Social Influence Marketing.
In another example of how we make decisions as members of a social network versus as isolated individuals, the New York Times ran a story titled "Study Finds Big Social Factor in Quitting Smoking" on Friday that discussed research showing that people quit smoking in groups. Rather than individuals stopping smoking one person at a time, three friends would quit all at once. The implications of this are that it is more important to target groups rather than individuals when it comes to encouraging people to quit. Similar results were found in the case of the spread of obesity. The study showed that smokers clustered in groups of three. Over the years the number of smokers declined but the clusters remained the same in size showing that people were stopping in groups.
Interestingly, the study showed that education played a role. The more educated people were, the more highly influenced they were by their friends and the more likely they were influencing their friends in turn. A friend quitting was more powerful than a sibling quitting. Co-workers only had influence in small firms where everyone knew each other.
Social Influence takes many different forms as does marketing too. This is a case where anti-smoking organizations should really harness social influence marketing. It also goes to show that we invariably are more influenced by our social networks than we realize. That influence is not a bad thing - it just means that marketers need to target the network and not the isolated individuals.
What's also interesting is that no major marketing or social media blog referred to this story. It appears that in the social media domain a lot of practitioners still do not make the link between social media and social influence. Is that a missed opportunity? Leading blogs like Marketing Roadmaps, Trendspotting Blog, and Buzz Networker take note :-)
On Wednesday I spoke at Mediabistro Circus on User Experience & Social Media. It was a fun experience and I met some interesting people. I discussed five reasons why its a circus out there in the world (yes, that pun was intended!).
Probably one of my most provocative points was that globalization has resulted in a weird kind of standardization. For all the talk about cultural nuances needing to be accounted for when designing for specific regions, countries and cultures, increasingly we are borrowing ideas from each other around the world. As a result, sites are starting to look more and more similar.
In highlighting the Facebook newsfeed design feature, I also explained that sometimes its the relatively small design features that can make all the difference. Newsfeed launched in September 2006 and the eight million Facebook users at the time were extremely upset about it. They saw it as an invasion of their privacy and threatened to boycott the social network. In retrospect, that one feature has arguably contributed more to Facebook's success (and the adoption of some of the applications) than anything else that they have done. Today, Facebook has 70 million users and is fast catching up to MySpace.
You'll find coverage of my session with some kind works from the MediaBistro folks at UnBeige which is where I picked up the photograph above.
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, Word 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.
Sometimes, its best to leave the words to someone else to express. Clay Shirky talks about how social media is changing business and discusses some social influence marketing concepts too. Also, don't miss his new book - Here Comes Everybody.What do businesses need to know: Businesses need to know that the old simplicities of dealing with their customers are disappearing, because customers are now able to coordinate their actions in groups. The old model of engaging with your customers involved two modes -- en masse and personal. Messages were sent out over mass media, in hopes of affecting the behavior of individuals.
Now, thanks to social media, customers are part of active groups, groups that form and dissolve quickly in response to people's interests or needs -- most messages in this media flow within social groups, rather than from businesses to individuals.
Sometimes these groups are creative, as with the group that has created Wikipedia almost literally out of thin air. Sometimes these groups are oppositional, as with the amateur group that has brought the airline industry to heel with new laws regulating their treatment of passengers.
The airlines spent millions trying to prevent that from happening, and they failed, beaten down in less than a year, by a bunch of loosely coordinated amateurs with no budget to speak of. What the amateurs had going for them was that they now have media like weblogs and mobile phones that let them join together and take action quickly and effectively.
There is both opportunity and threat in this environment. The opportunity is getting these groups to amplify your message or help improve your product. The threat is that the group can upend your strategy, or even abandon your offering in favor of self-created material. (It's a bad time to sell encyclopedias.)
What do you think? Is coordinating actions in groups at the heart of the issue for businesses as they think about social media affecting their businesses. Can these groups amplify or improve your product significantly? I believe they can and have talked about it quite a bit (see previous post). But maybe there's more to this than just that. Only time will tell.
Our 2008 Digital Outlook Report is out. Register for your free copy. Domestic advertising media billings for the agency grew to $735 million
on more than 1,800 web sites in 2007, up 36 percent from 2006.
Publisher web site spending slipped to 19 percent of billings, down
from 24 percent in 2006. As Jeff Lanctot highlighted, customers don't live on a handful of web sites or portals anymore.
Advertisers still value large sites, but they realize the web presents
a seemingly endless number of advertising options.
And not just that, social influence marketing is changing the way marketers do business in 2008. Don't miss the Social Influence Marketing section in the report which includes social media trends, the six "C"s of social influence marketing, an argument for rewarding users on social networks and the social technographics profile. All the charts from the report are on Flickr too.
Feedback has already started pouring in with Advertising Age and News.com doing pieces on the report. I'm most interested in learning what the bloggers like Rohit Bhargava, Peter Kim, John Bell, Jay Deragon, Matthew Peters, Paul Gillin, Jeremiah Owyang, Shel Israel and Brian Solis have to say about it and specifically the various social media thoughts articulated throughout the report.
And not just that, social influence marketing is changing the way marketers do business in 2008. Don't miss the Social Influence Marketing section in the report which includes social media trends, the six "C"s of social influence marketing, an argument for rewarding users on social networks and the social technographics profile. All the charts from the report are on Flickr too.
Feedback has already started pouring in with Advertising Age and News.com doing pieces on the report. I'm most interested in learning what the bloggers like Rohit Bhargava, Peter Kim, John Bell, Jay Deragon, Matthew Peters, Paul Gillin, Jeremiah Owyang, Shel Israel and Brian Solis have to say about it and specifically the various social media thoughts articulated throughout the report.
Here's an article from the MIT Sloan Management Review which describes what a lot of us who work in this space have been talking about. It discusses the concepts thoroughly and is peppered with interesting articles. Its a must read.
People are connecting with one another in increasing numbers, thanks to blogs, social networking sites like MySpace, and countless communities across the Web. Some companies are learning to turn this growing groundswell to their advantage. More at MIT Sloan Review.
People are connecting with one another in increasing numbers, thanks to blogs, social networking sites like MySpace, and countless communities across the Web. Some companies are learning to turn this growing groundswell to their advantage. More at MIT Sloan Review.
Forrester Research has published video clips from its Consumer Forum event held in Chicago last month. You won't want to miss Charlene Li's take on Social Computing, Christie Hefner talking about social networking in a media environment and Richard Eldman on Corporate Image In The Age Of Social Technologies