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Here's the presentation that I gave at our 9th Annual Client Summit. This was presented to 600 odd senior marketers from industry leading companies. My key messages were that in the social realm one big idea is not enough, you need many little ideas that work in harmony with each other. I also pushed for the reorganization of the marketing department, a focus on what I referred to as Social CRM and the necessity in innovating with others. Take a look at the presentation and let me know your thoughts.
Big Ideas for Social Influence Marketing
View more presentations from shivsingh.
Less than a week ago Alltop launched its Personalized Feed Reader. Alltop is an online magazine rack that aggregates RSS feeds of every major topic from wine to personal finance and everything in between. It saves a reader from having to identify and add RSS feeds to a personalized Google page. All the best feeds on a given topic are easily scannable and can now be added to a customized page with a single click. Alltop is a simple, useful service for those who don't care to spend time creating RSS feeds and customizing them.
But Alltop has been bashed in the technology community. And in my opinion this bashing represents the worst of the technology community. This can be summed up in one phrase - technological determinism. I feel that many of the digerati and even folks in the social media space suffer from a technological determinism bias ( I do too at times). Technological determinism's doctrine is based on the premise that a society's technology determines its cultural values, social structure or history. It is the belief that technology is good for humanity and that it shapes humanity for the better. Got a problem - solve it with better technology. Technology is defined as the central causal element that promotes social change.
Continue reading Alltop fights technological determinism. The experts are wrong.
Last year a group of renowned scholars and business leaders got together to discuss the future of management. Organized by Gary Hamel of the Harvard Business School, the two day event was designed to think about the fundamental principles, processes and practices of management that will drive success in the future. The group identified shared beliefs and after much contentious deliberation also "moonshots of management."
The shared beliefs included the notion that management is one of humankind's most important social technologies, a recognition that current management models are seriously out of date and third that management must be reorganized to become more adaptable, innovative and inspiring places to work. Of the 25 moonshots of management, a few stood out for me which I'm discussing here because they jive with social influence and the role it plays inside and outside of organizations.
Continue reading Reinventing Management in the 21st Century.
A year ago, here at Razorfish, we developed a hypothesis that the way people were influencing each other -- online, in small groups, through peer pressure, reciprocity or flattery -- was giving rise to a whole new form of marketing that we called Social Influence Marketing™ (SIM). This post also appears as an article in the Razorfish Digital Outlook Report and was quoted by Guy Kawasaki at Open Forum.
We defined it as marketing to the network of peers that surround and influence the customer across social platforms and on brand Web sites. The rise of SIM reflected the emerging thinking in our agency that the social Web and the mainstream Web were converging and that digital marketers needed to deliver better value exchanges to consumers and allow for influence more directly.
Today SIM is not just a hypothesis. It is a driving force that affects everything we do as an agency, and, as we're impressing upon our clients, it matters more than ever in this economic downturn as consumers across the country are losing faith in large institutions and experts and instead are turning to each other for advice. In fact, we believe it is as important a marketing dimension as the traditional pillars of brand marketing and direct response. It is even bigger than we thought it was.
Now, as SIM becomes more mature, 2009 will be the year in which differentiating between good and bad SIM will get easy -- a year in which every campaign, every marketing effort and even every digital business transformation activity (where digital is used to transform core business processes) will need a social influence component. It will be a year in which companies realize that social influence must be harnessed strategically if they want to transform their brands, their relationships with their customers -- and their businesses too. It will also be a year in which marketers discover which agencies truly grasp SIM and which ones have only a tenuous hold on it.
With those broad themes as a guide, what exactly can you expect in 2009? Here are ten specific trends to look for. Tell me whether you agree with them at the end of the post.
1. Social media usage will result in more influence. As social media adoption climbs exponentially, so too will the influence conversations in a social context will have on brand affinity and purchasing decisions. Participating in a conversation online, sharing an opinion and influencing a purchasing decision explicitly or implicitly are becoming second nature for more and more consumers. The only thing that will prevent these messages from spreading is that a lot of this influence happens in small groups within the walled gardens of the social networks and therefore goes unnoticed. That will change in 2009 as social network analysis vendors help us peek into the walled gardens and as a result marketers will pay more attention. An event like the Motrin episode, in which a group of social media-fluent mothers managed to force Motrin to pull down an online video they found offensive, will not happen quite as this year because marketers will focus on SIM more.
2. The focus will shift to influencers. Who are these people that influence your customers and how does their influence actually work? This will come into sharper focus, as reaching the influencers gets easier via the social graph and the plethora of technology vendors that make targeting easier. Different influencers will matter at different stages of the marketing funnel, too. For example, at the point-of-purchase, friends and family may matter the most in determining what a consumer buys, while at the awareness stage, key influencers, like the bloggers at Edmunds.com ,carry more weight. We'll also find a way to put a valuation on each consumer's potential influence for specific product categories. Google and a few others are already taking a crack at defining your influence rank.
3. Top-down branding will experience growing impotence. Most brand managers are used to defining their brands in relative isolation of the marketplace -- or they do extensive customer research and see it as their jobs alone to define the brand or the manifestation of the brand in different forms. That's going to change as consumers define the brands by the sheer volume of their opinions. They'll be shaping the brands more than the brands will be shaping them. As a result, in order for them to be remembered, brands will be forced to deliver much stronger value propositions to their customers Cute advertising won't be enough as the focus shifts to value exchanges. If you're a brand manager, you can either fight this or treat it as an opportunity to take your career in a different direction.
Continue reading Trends in Social Influence Marketing.
We just published our 2009 Digital Outlook Report this morning. This is the fifth year that we're publishing the report and the findings are culled together by aggregating our media spending patterns across advertisers around the country. The report also includes insightful, thought provoking articles on the future of digital. Here are some highlights:We are in the second year of a major shift away from portals toward niche targeting over a wide array of media choices. This fragmentation reflects a trend in consumers' media consumption behavior toward "snacking" on a wide array of digital content. Although scale is still important, the media choices available that deliver breath and depth outside the portals continue to rise.
Advertisers continue to support search because it delivers a stronger ROI than many other tactics, especially in an economic downturn. We don't think search is recession-proof though, and do expect some budget tightening in 2009.
There was significant increase in paid search this past year; it grew from 31% of total ad spending in 2007 to 36% in 2008.
Television is undergoing a fundamental shift - it is going digital in all aspects and is becoming more niche in terms of both audiences and programming.
A long tail of television is emerging as audiences are increasingly dividing their time between computer screens, TV sets, mobile devices, gaming systems and set-top boxes. This will cause both content providers and marketers to reinvent the way they present content and experiences.
Social media and Social Influence Marketing™ exploded this year partly due to the economic downturn. Consumers began losing faith in large institutions and experts and turned to each other for advice. Marketers embraced SIM this year too because it's a very cost-effective means of reaching their customers.
We predict "your CEO will join Facebook" this year. The traditional C-Suite is finally responding to the pressure that social influencers have on their brands, and they're getting onboard. The ability to measure the value of social influencers is also expanding with the introduction of technology like our proprietary Generational Action Tags.
Social media advertising will finally hit its stride in 2009 as advertisers figure out better ways to embed social media into ad units. Display advertising on the web will begin to regularly incorporate widgets and user-generated content.
Retailers need to create a shopping experience in their brick-and-mortar stores that delivers the same level of personalization and service that customers receive online by deploying modern tools such as digital in-store signage, coupons delivered via mobile devices and interactive store floor plans and merchandise directories.
What do you think of these trends? Do they resonate with you and your business? You can download a PDF of the report and view the graphics on Flickr.
Razorfish just released the results of a study done in partnership with Cafe Mom that examined how Mom's live in a digital world. Digital Mom consists of two companion studies. The first study, conducted by Razorfish focuses on how digital moms are adopting social and emerging technologies. The second study, prepared by CafeMom--the largest social networking site for moms-- concentrates on the role that social media play in helping to inform purchase decisions, among other key trends.1,500 "digital moms"--defined as women with at least one child under 18 in the home who have engaged with two or more emerging technologies and who have researched, sought advice or purchased a product online in the last three months. Results confirm digital moms have moved beyond email and search, and are now active users of Web 2.0 technologies. The majority of moms are using social networks (65%) and text messaging (56%). More than half of these moms are also gamers, with 52% of them playing games online or via a console.
Some of the Key Findings include:
- Moms with children 12 and older are motivated to adopt new technologies to stay in tune with their children. Of those who use social networks and blogs, almost half (47% and 40%, respectively) monitor their children. Likewise, digital moms of children 12 and older, versus moms with children under 12, are more likely to watch online video, (40% vs. 34%), game (57% vs. 51%), read online consumer reviews (38% vs. 30%), and watch or listen to podcasts (13% vs. 9%); This trend can be explained by different leisure time patterns among women with older children and a compelling interest in understanding their teenage children's digital lives.
- The gap is closing between TV and digital channels in terms of creating awareness and affecting product decisions, and social influence channels are increasingly important. Although TV still has the most impact on creating initial awareness for a product (31%), social influence channels such as online consumer reviews, blogs, social network sites and RSS are highly influential in the learning/researching stage (29%).
- Moms' interests are broad; some interests change by life stage, and some do not. More moms show interest in clothing/fashion and food than in parenting information, with the exception of moms with children under six.
Take a look at the report which is freely available here and let me know what you think. Needless to say, Mom's are an important audience for any marketer and their use of digital technologies is changing at a rapid pace. It's no surprise that word of mouth and social influence marketing play a large role in their worlds. The study was led by Terri Walters who's our VP of Emerging Media and a partner in crime for all things Social Influence Marketing too.
Here at Razorfish, we're seeing Social Influence Marketing touch many parts of our business. Needless to say advertising campaigns is one of them too. With our strong quantitative roots, we're spending a lot of time figuring out the ROI impact of social. Marc Sanford and a few others have been spending time on the viral engagement piece of it specifically. The details have been released in a report titled, "Social Media Measurement: Widgets and Applications" and the findings are interesting.
The data shows that the more deeply engaged someone is with social media, the more likely he is to make a purchase. More specifically, there's a noticeable difference between those who engage with widgets through media versus those who are referred by friends. Those who were referred to the widgets by friends were four times as likely to download the application. They were also more likely to spend much more money on the client site and more time there too on average.
The other major findings include how dramatically "engagement" effects page views and revenue. The following charts demonstrate that consumers who spend 5+ minutes with a widget spend significantly more time and view more page views on a given publisher's web site. We found a similar impact on revenue, where engagement with a widget for 5+ minutes had large revenue upsides.
We know measurement of social media is important but those numbers tell us a few important things. Firstly, we listen to our friends more than we pay attention to advertisements. It also demonstrates the importance of widgets and distributing content. And as we've highlighted in our Feed reports, it furthers the point that there can be very strong connections between off domain activity and on domain purchasing behavior. Widgets are the trojan horses for a brand.
Discuss this with more on Twitter and also check out Garrick's post for more insights.
Last year when I first started talking about peer and anonymous influence and social influence marketing, it was new to most people. My research at the London School of Economics & Political Science had given me a fairly unique perspective on how social influence works and why it matters. It amazing how much changes in a year as the subject has become extremely topical and recognized across the board as being important to marketing. In fact, personal influence is one of Harvard Business Review's Breakthrough Top Ideas for 2009!
Take a look at this presentation from someone I met while I was down speaking at the Social Networking Conference in Miami late last week. He's exploring the different types of peer influence focusing on the details around the user experience. Good stuff.
Take a look at this presentation from someone I met while I was down speaking at the Social Networking Conference in Miami late last week. He's exploring the different types of peer influence focusing on the details around the user experience. Good stuff.
As the recession hits us the pundits are busy prophesying what the downturn means for marketing and digital in particular. Marketers themselves are focused increasingly on direct response activities, as Christmas sales look dismal. But it is at this very time, that marketers need to retool their departments and organize for the future. Just as the downturn has turned innovation into a necessity from being the luxury it once was so too must the innovative thinking be applied to how marketing departments are organized.
Today a typical marketer’s existing cost structure is probably already untenable, his core customers are aren’t as loyal as they once were and his products aren’t flying off the shelves as they did six months ago. How can the marketer respond to these worrying circumstances? What does it mean to restructure a marketing department? We believe the answer is by organizing the marketing department to truly take advantage of social influence marketing.
This article was written with Andrea Harrison and was first published in Slant.
Continue reading Reflecting on the Third Dimension of Marketing.
We've talked a lot about social influence marketing over the last year and what it means to account for social influencers. From the trends, to the academic research, our client work and our own experiments we're methodically bringing social influence marketing to life for all our clients and for all our disciplines as well.
Well, now we've taken that a step further with a patent filed on how to measure social influence. This is one more proof point of how measurable and meaningful social influence marketing can be for marketers everywhere. Its not the whole solution but a key piece to understanding the measurement and why and how things go viral. Please tell me what you think about this. Is it a big deal, is it a no brainer, does it add value?
The Data Problem:
Today social media apps (widgets, applications, viral media, etc.) cannot track or account for unique individuals other than those who download the application and those that download the application from a friend. Couple that with the lack of known quantitative methods for identifying key influencers within a social network in regards to a specific application and you’ve got a big problem for the industry. Certainly a billion dollar problem and one that matters a lot if we want to make social influence marketing more real for marketers.
Core Questions We Tried To Answer:
- What is the value of a key influencer?
- How viral or how many generations of influence has my social media application achieved?
- What is the value of someone who receives a social application from a friend versus someone who receives it via media or a paid seeding strategy?
The Razorfish Incrementing Action Tag Solution:
Our solution is the Incrementing Action Tag which is a set of functions within a social media application that creates a variable that may be read externally based on where the user acquires the application. When a user downloads the application from the original source, the Incrementing Action Tag notes the source and assigns the downloader the value of first generation (or one). When another downloader obtains the application from somewhere other than the original source (e.g. a friend, other website, etc.), the Incrementing Action Tag looks at the variable (or generation) assigned to the current source and increments it by one; thus making the next downloader generation two or other appropriate generation number.
The Incrementing Action Tag is thus able to identify (via a cookie and unique identifier and not through personally identifiable information) and track social media, identify how far removed (generation) cookies are from the original source of the social media, and identify key influencers (again no PII- see note above) of users of social media. In essence, this technology enables our agency to create a system that allows us to value and reach key influencers across the Internet, regardless of property.
In everyday language, this is very important as social media spreads through the viral influence. Brands really need to know how and why something goes viral so that when they optimize who their efforts, they can target and seed more efficiently.
Successes Thus Far:
We’ve successfully used the action tag in three instances with three different clients. We’ve seen as many as four generations of pass-along for these social media applications and are now looking to begin using the Generational Tag on all social media applications so that we can build our knowledge of social media applications.
Thought this is still in its early days, we’ve definitely taken a big step forward towards tracking social influence across the web and maybe, just maybe, starting to crack a billion-dollar problem. We're excited about it and hope it contributes in its own small way to the evolution of our industry and social influence marketing in particular.
Congratulations to the Seattle team that made this all happen: Marc Sanford, Sandy Schlee, Steve Ebeling, Kelley Maves, David Niffin, Christopher Castle, Frank Kochenash, and Jesse Drogin.
Also visit our Digital Design Blog for more information on digital trends and consumer behavior.
Adweek just published a piece by me on how we should start leveraging insights from academia once more to really tap into the power of social influence. A lot of what we talk about and practice has deep foundations in academic research and the goal of this piece was to draw attention to some of that research. Needless to say, each time I write an article like this it turns out to be a humbling experience as I learn how much I don't know!Marketing has always had an uneasy relationship with academia. However, with the rise of social media and its transformative impact on digital marketing, there's a new imperative to look towards academia -- to understand how people form networks, influence each other and organize into online communities.
This article highlights some of the thinking we should look towards while navigating the uncharted territories of marketing on the social Web. It is impossible to be comprehensive, so treat this as a sampling encompassing some key thoughts in academia and how they should impact marketing.
Continue reading Academia meets Social Marketing.
On Friday I presented at our Razorfish Publishers Summit in LA to 400 publishers - the people on whose websites we buy media for our clients. I discussed what social influence marketing is, the new imperative for publishers and how it is up to them to deliver the social graph to advertisers. Here's the deck.
Businessweek and MediaPost are reporting that Google is going to study how influence actually works on social networks. This is a welcome change and if you've been reading this blog regularly, you can guess its something that I've been hoping for.
Now we don't know how exactly Google is going to do this but we do know what they're trying to do. They're trying to understand (as they should) which friends in a social graph play a bigger role in social influence than others. They're going to figure out which friends in my network do more to spread information, which start conversations rather than end them and which influence most other people to take specific actions.
Google is trying to create an influence rank, sort of similar to what folks like SocialMedia.com tried to do within the confines of a social network ad network (Facebook in their case). I can only manage how much easier it will be for them to sell ads once they have something in place especially if it also includes YouTube. Sounds pretty exciting, doesn't it? It is and a marketers dream.
Continue reading Google to research Social Influence.
This post was originally an article for Avenue A | Razorfish clients across the country and around the world. Ray Velez and Jesse Pickard coauthored this piece with me.
The explosive growth of social networks across all age demographics is largely because of our social graphs. It’s the mapping of who is connected to whom within a network of peers. And as a result, people are increasingly surfing the social networks and the broader web through the context of their friends and acquaintances—what those friends talk about, what they recommend, and what they consider to be relevant.
Two years ago, this online behavior was not that common online. That’s changing now. According to a Fast Company magazine article, the affect of the social graph on marketing is going to be even greater than that of radio, the telegraph, or television. We tend to agree.
Continue reading A New Frontier of Social Influence: Portable Social Graphs.