Should Barbie Tweet?

For any social media follower, it’s no news that there is an active debate right now – how should large brands monitor social media conversations and what internal departments should manage the online conversations? PR? Marketing? Customer service? Market research?

That answer remains elusive as each industry is fighting to come up with the best answer under the pressure that the immediacy of social media brings. I want to look at the market research industry in particular and explore its recent enthusiasm toward tracking social media conversations.

To be fair, I'm not a trained marketing research professional. I don't belong to ARF (the Advertising Research Foundation). I think it's funny to say ARF to my 5 year old. I feel a smug kinship with Bernard Loomis, the iconic American toy developer and marketer who helped market toys including Barbie, Hot Wheels and Strawberry Shortcake when he said, "The trouble with research is that it tells you what people were thinking about yesterday, not tomorrow. It's like driving a car using a rearview mirror.”



I’ve initiated informal research surveys in my day. Often times, my surveys are a lighthearted and fun way to extend a PR campaign. What do Americans think about cell phone etiquette? What celebrities are listed the most in open source code? My experience is that media eats this stuff up and resulting media coverage is off the charts.

Outside of my examples, market research is a serious activity. In 2005, American businesses spent more than $7 billion a year on market research – worldwide it was closer to $20 billion.

This past Monday on September 22, the best of the best of the market research industry gathered in New York City at the Advertising Research Foundation's half-day event on the role of social media as it relates to market research.

Panel members included Jonathan Carson, president, international, Nielsen Online; Jeff Flemings, SVP/director of renaissance planning at Publicis' new account planning shop, VivaKi; and Jim Nail, chief strategy and marketing officer, TNS Cymfony.

Joel Research, the Chief Research Officer at ARF excitedly wrote in his blog leading up to the conference that social media was making researchers “the new rock stars” of the business world.

Why the enthusiasm?
- Research is showing that consumers trust other consumers (friends, colleagues, etc) more than any other source.
- Consumer postings online are the 3rd most powerful influencer
- Marketers' marketing and research has traditionally been limited to the "brand backyard"--forums like customer care and the brand's Web site. It is now shifting to the "consumer backyard": Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Tweet, Twitter and the like.

So it is no surprise that the market research industry is all abuzz about the monitoring of social media. And the big prize is like Cold Fusion at this point – we’ll see who figures out the best strategy, but as of yet, the race is simply on.

Dell social media is soooo 2007 - What about Joe's House of Sushi?

Dell has received a lot of high praise for its social media efforts since the beginning of 2007, especially since the launch of the Dell community site IdeaStorm (where, among other activities, members can give and vote on Dell product ideas):
- Jon Fortt from Fortune Magazine featured Dell in his Sept 4 piece on how Dell has listened to and communicated with customers online on IdeaStorm, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Dell has won a number of awards, including the 2007 Forrester Groundswell Award; the Wired.com 2008 Rheingold Award; and the 2008 PR Week "PR Innovation of the Year 2008".

So Dell gets social media. Dell gets media. Or maybe Dell gets self promotion. As Fortt's article points out:

The real question is whether customer-friendly operations like IdeaStorm translate to better financials. The jury's still out on that. (Dell's gross margins have increased to 19.1%, up from 16.6% last year, thanks mostly to cost cutting. Staying at that level won't be easy - Dell has been lowering prices, which helped cause a 17% fall in profits last quarter.) The jury's also out on whether IdeaStorm reflects the opinions of the average Dell buyer. Many of the sites' most popular ideas involve adding the open-source Linux operating system instead of Windows. If IdeaStorm votes were a true gauge of customers, Linux PCs should be flying off the shelves. They're not. "How much better is this as a way to measure customer demand?" wonders Mike Gotta, analyst at Burton Group, a consulting firm. "It's not proven yet."

Or we could take a look at the Dell stock price since the social media campaign started in early 2007 (note the increase of stock price from around $26 in early 2007 to about $26 in Sept 2008 before last week's financial madness):



I wonder if there is another, less-hyped business that deserves as much visibility as Dell for its social media efforts. Or maybe thousands of businesses. My colleague recently blogged on how her friends are getting responses from restaurant owners after posting restaurant reviews/comments on Yelp. In one case, a person complained about a restaurant opening - and was offered up free food by the restaurant.

So as we wait for Dell financials to prove out that their much celebrated online initiatives make business sense - maybe we look toward the work of small restaurant owners for true social media innovation. Unless of course they go out of business giving away free food.

The Candy Conspiracies

This morning on the Today Show, I saw a segment on Hershey and how the candy company is moving away from milk chocolate in its products to save money. The big savings come from swapping out cocoa butter for less expensive vegetable oil.

The conversation has been bubbling for awhile. In May, Cybelle May, a blogger for Candyblog.net, wrote in an LA Times op ed that a citizens group was petitioning the FDA so that a new legal definition of milk chocolate would be allowed. A definition that would allow for cheaper vegetable oil instead of cocoa butter. This "citizen's group" included reps from the Chocolate Manufacturers Assn, the Grocery Manufacturers Ass, the Snack Food Assn. Hah. That's kind of funny.

Fast forward until August 25, when the Wall Street Journal reported a story on it - the American Dietetic Association suggested that the move away from cocoa butter could lower the overall health benefit of eating chocolate.

Now, with today's Today Show segment, maybe the controversy will get more play. It will be interesting to see how Hershey responds online.

As of 7:22 a.m. PT on Friday, Sept 19 after the Today Show piece ran:
- There were 17 tweets this morning on Hershey - all of them about the controversy.
- There were 0 articles on Google News from today (nothing actually happened today other than the Today Show segment)
- There were 94 blogs (blogger)

Will be interesting to see if and how Hershey's deals with this reignited news cycle online.




http://www.typetive.com/candyblog/

SourceForge listens

I had a nice chat with a reporter from BrandWeek and our client SourceForge yesterday. The reporter was looking for input from companies who monitor the Web for negative customer comments and then respond to those customers.

SourceForge, a premier media site targeting techies, is one of our most forward looking accounts in this regard. Ross Turk, the community manager for SourceForge.net, has been very good about reaching out to people (on sites like Twitter and Facebook) who appear to be disgruntled for one reason or another regarding SourceForge.

You can follow Ross for yourself on his Twitter feed.

Ross said that reaching out to people directly, even when they are strangers who are unhappy with his brand for one reason or another, has yielded quite positive feedback. Not only have the people he's reached out to appreciated his candor - he has anecdotal insights to bring back to the marketing and management team at SourceForge.

Social media monitoring tools - Review of Radian6

On Friday, I got a demo of Radian6. This is among several social media monitoring tools I'll be evaluating over the next week.

Radian6 came recommended to me by a friend who handles PR for Mars Candy. If Radian6 is good enough for M&Ms it's good enough for me (for those inclined you can follow Ms Green M&M's Twitter feed).

Radian6 is among a new breed of tools that search blogs, Twitter feeds, Flickr pages and other social networking sites and looks for key words and phrases. The way these tools present the information is key in making them useful.

I liked the UI and some of the search mechanisms of R6. Also, the price is reasonable. My only observation is that it appears (although I'm double checking this) - that Radian6 only monitors certain types of communities. It would be nice, if licensing allowed, if Radian6 allowed users to add their own feeds into the system.



For example, there are 6 dove chocolate fan sites on Facebook that my friend at Mars would have to monitor manually. If you are a vendor curious about Linux, you'd have to still manually monitor mailing lists.

Radian6 would be unable to track any of this.

As Todd Defren at Shift Communications mentioned on a recent Radian6 webinar (they call it twebinar - bringing twitter into the loop) - social media search is still a very manual process, even with automated search tools.

The role of listening in business – is it really new?

Hip tomes like Groundswell (2007), The Clue Train Manifesto (1999) and even a recent webinar done by monitoring service Radian6 all point to the importance of corporate listening. It’s seen as one of the foundational components of social media strategies.



A few quotes:
• “What is listening in the Groundswell – it is learning what your customers are saying. It’s tapping into that conversation. They are talking about your company, if you can listen, the information can flow back into your company.” – Forrester research vice president Josh Bernoff and co-author of Groundswell.
• “And if a company is genuinely confused about what it is, there’s an easy way to find out: listen to what your market says you are.” Clue Train Manifesto, 1999
• “Marketers are trained to do nothing but talk. Listening is not part of the traditional marketing profession.” Paul Gillen, Paul Gillen Communications, 2008 Radian6 webinar

I actually disagree a bit with Gillen’s take. The best marketers over time have been unapologetic and great listeners.

For example, in 1991, Regis McKenna, the legendary PR and marketing consultant who helped launch brands such as Apple – wrote “a feedback loop is making advertising's one-way communication obsolete.” Paraphrased from blogger and VC Brad Feld in 2007: http://www.askthevc.com/blog/archives/2007/07/critical-market.php

Today, it’s more than listening. It’s active listening. Companies need to hear, analyze and engage in the uncontrolled conversations that are taking place about your company and your market. It’s analyzing what is being said and using that information to improve your brand.

At my current pr agency home we do more than listen. Sure, we use tools to monitor. We build the strategy and plan for how we respond. And we analyze the information in a way that is packaged back to various stakeholders to our clients. Product managers listen for one thing. Marketing/ad folks listen for something else. Crisis communication folks listen yet for something different.

One of our clients LogLogic had marketing guru Andy Lark work there for a period of time. Lark is now at Dell – which is one of the most acclaimed big businesses in terms of how it participates in uncontrolled conversations. Its entire business infrastructure is set up around active listening. Dell community members directly impact new product functionality. They help create ads. Heck, community members even help each other with customer service.

At our agency, we see the power of listening and engaging with our client’s communities – we don’t see it as new, but we do see it as a foundational component of any company committed to success.