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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.
I'll be on a panel tomorrow at OMMA Social at the Yale Club here in New York. We'll be discussing how best to mine social media behavior to build brands. Consumers are doing a lot more on the web and they're having many more conversations about brands. How can a brand take advantage of that? That's what this panel will be about. David Honig, Co-founder, Media6° will be moderating and Dr. Joseph Plummer, Adjunct Professor, Columbia School of Business, Matt Jacobs, Vice President & Group Director of Strategy and Analysis, Digitas, Melissa Davies, Research Director, Healthcare, Nielsen Online and Bill Alena, Vice President Advertising/Business Development, myYearbook.com will be on the panel with me.
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.
While at O'Reilly Graphing Social Patterns East 2008, I heard Adam Nash of LinkedIn make the pitch for advertisers and developers. Notable was the fact that LinkedIn acheived a 361% growth rate in the last twelve months. That's more than any of the other social networks. According to Neilson Online, they had 8 million unique visitors in April 2008. See Adam's slideshare presentation for more details.
What's also interesting is that the average household income of a LinkedIn user is greater than those at WSJ.com, Forbes.com or Businessweek. Last fall, I sat on a panel at Office 2.0 with Adam Nash that was moderated by Shel Israel where we all talked about social networks in general. It was good to hear him talk about LinkedIn specifically. More at the LinkedIn Events Blog.
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.
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.
If you missed the Graphing Social Patterns Conference here are some links that you'll find interesting reading.ReadWriteWeb - They give a good overview of what happened each day and discuss some of the major product announcements too. Amit Kapur of MySpace admitted that social networks are hard to monetize.
Dan Farber at News.com - He discusses Charlene Li's keynote speech. She said that by 2013 social networks will become open and ubiquitous. Ironically, at the DMA Leader's Forum I said that would happen by 2010. I suppose I'm more of an optimist.
Jeremiah at Web Strategy - He covered some of the sessions in quite a bit of detail. Especially interesting was his coverage of the MySpace developer platform presentation.
MyBloglog Folks - They attended and talked about their new APIs at the conference. The MyBloglog blog includes video clips of their announcements. Fun to listen and feel for their world.
Andrew Chen - He has an interesting overview of the conference and specifically of the Facebook viral marketing panel that he sat on with Dave McLure and Justin Smith. Don't miss his Facebook viral marketing post too.
For all the talk about social networking fatigue, Facebook is quickly evolving into a global phenomena. Granted its usage maybe dropping slightly here in the United States, but internationally it is growing by leaps and bounds. Andrew Harrison sent me this graph. It tells an important story.
Maybe all social networks go through an evolution. Their usage shoots up as the buzz attracts more users who in turn attracts more users themselves (the Duncan Watts phenomena). But then as Jesse Pickard stressed to me last week, some users realize that they need to return to their daily lives and can't carve out time for activity on the network. The network plateaus as the wannabes leave and the platform begins a growth phase in a new market. The cycle repeats in each market.
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.
Take a look at the Amnesia Blog to learn about our Aussies friends. They won the Adnews Interactive Agency of the Year award for the second year running. While you're there, poke around their blog. It'll certainly give you a good feel for our Australian office. 
Over at Forrester, Mary Beth Kemp and Peter Kim have published a report titled, "The Connected Agency." As Mary Beth Kemp explained to me during a conversation, they believe that as consumers trust brands less, the interactive and advertising agencies will have to get closer to the consumers. Getting closer to the consumers means nurturing consumer connections and facilitating conversations. Mary Beth and Peter believe that within five years the agencies will get closer to the consumer communities and will eventually become an integral part of them. I couldn't agree more and it supports the Social Influence Marketing thesis. Consumers aren't trusting brands as much as they used to, they're trusting and are being influenced much more by each other. It's not a new concept by any means but with the advent of the Internet and the proliferation of social networking websites, it is getting a lot more important.
In my conversation with Mary Beth Kemp I did raise two points that were bothering me - how much can an agency facilitate conversations and nurture connections? I feel this is primarily a job for the brands themselves. They need to become participants in the conversations and connect with their own consumers more directly. Outsourcing those activities to agencies won't be healthy.
Secondly, I'm not sure if I agree with the point that within five years the agencies will get closer to the consumer communities. The reality, at least at Avenue A | Razorfish, is that we're very much a part of those consumer communities. Our employees participate in them everyday as individuals with strong personal identities. In fact, we specifically recruit employees who are active online. Our agency doesn't need to have a formal voice in those communities if that's what the report implies. We're there already in a multitude of ways. I'm sure this is the case with other agencies too.
Some of my thoughts on Social Influence Marketing were published in Chief Marketer recently. You can find the article which was written by Dave Friedman over here.
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.
Everybody seems to have joined the data portability group and appear to be excited about the OpenID and OpenSocial initiatives. But the reality is that a lot of backroom deal making is going on. Most of the vendors who have joined these initiatives are more interested in plucking each other's social graphs than actually opening up their own networks. For example, the OpenSocial initiative is turning out to be little more than an OpenWidget standard. Is this all we're going to get?
Watch Google's PR on OpenSocial
The reality is that the social networks see their member data as one of their most valuable assets. They're not going to be in a rush to open them up. LinkedIn is probably the one exception as it allows services like NotchUp to import user data. Plaxo seems to be a little more open too. But for the most part the social networks are happy keeping their worlds private. Will it always be like this? Hopefully not. I believe that it is only a matter of time before the social networks are forced to open up and let their users carry their own data out of the networks. It'll happen as users get more and more social network fatigue. I believe that in a few years we will be able to carry our social graphs wherever we want to - whether it be to other networks or to other platforms.
Watch Google's PR on OpenSocial
The reality is that the social networks see their member data as one of their most valuable assets. They're not going to be in a rush to open them up. LinkedIn is probably the one exception as it allows services like NotchUp to import user data. Plaxo seems to be a little more open too. But for the most part the social networks are happy keeping their worlds private. Will it always be like this? Hopefully not. I believe that it is only a matter of time before the social networks are forced to open up and let their users carry their own data out of the networks. It'll happen as users get more and more social network fatigue. I believe that in a few years we will be able to carry our social graphs wherever we want to - whether it be to other networks or to other platforms.
Plaxo appears to be up for sale according to Techcrunch and the New York Times. Originally an online address book service, Plaxo morphed into a meta-social network in the last year with their Pulse product. Their network address book has approximately 20 million registered users and appears to be growing fast. But why sell then? Is it because Plaxo has discovered that building a strong revenue model around a social network can be a challenge? They are apparently expecting as much as $100 million for the sale. Approximately, $30 million has been raised for the business so far.We're all suffering from social network fatigue. I liken it to car purchases. At the end of the day, you can only drive one car at a time. You may have two or three but one will be your primary vehicle. The same applies to social networks. And Plaxo competes directly with LinkedIn and to a lesser extent with Facebook and the upcoming Google Social Networking service. Either Pulse is not doing as well as they hoped or Google and LinkedIn are worrying them.