How to get CEOs to buy into WOM

Extract from Lois Kelly.

#1. Make meaning, not buzz
"Talk" marketing isn't about superficial buzz that sizzles fast and fades fast. The goal is to help people make sense of information through conversations. The more meaningful the conversations, the faster people are able to connect to your organization, product, or service. This shortens sales cycles and helps employees buy into change more quickly. For companies selling a considered product or service -- which includes most business-to-business companies, professional service firms, and pharmaceutical, health care, and educational organizations -- the goal is making meaning, not making buzz.

#2. Listening leads to innovation
Conversations are at least 50% listening -- and perhaps much more. Marketing's purpose today isn't just pushing out information and producing things; it's listening and bringing ideas back into a company. Ideas that can spark innovation, influence product development, and pinpoint ways to get access to and attention from decision makers. Listening is a new strategy, and it happens through conversations, whether those conversations are face-to-face or in online communities and social networks.

#3. Points of view are more interesting than your products
Unless you're Steve Jobs talking about the iPhone, people don't want to talk about your products or capabilities; they can look that up on the web. What they do want to talk about are your points of view about the industry or category. What common mistakes do you see? What are one or two emerging trends you believe may upset business as usual? In what area are most people wasting money and don't even realize it? What "best practice" do you think is a waste of time? Points of view jumpstart meaningful conversations and distinguish your organization on more than products. And every CEO has those points of view to share with their organization, with customers, with media, and with employees. So share those interesting views. They'll get talked about.

#4. Nothing to talk about is why people don't talk
The reason everyone in a company is often telling a different story -- or not saying much at all -- is that they don't have anything interesting to talk about. Elevator statements, product messages, and mission statements are -- let's face it -- pretty boring and not something that makes you want to get together with a prospect or an analyst. Nor are they something employees want to talk about when they get together with company partners and agencies. Take your points of view and set them free. Share them with everyone in the company and encourage everyone to talk about the ideas, as well as what they hear from the resulting conversations. People will remember and will talk about fresh point of views that get people to say, "Gee, that's interesting. Tell me more." But they're not going to talk about messages and value propositions.

#5. Measure involvement vs. awareness
The new measure of marketing effectiveness is involvement. The more involved people become with your ideas or your sales reps, the more vested they become in those ideas and people. More importantly, involvement is the prerequisite to action, whether that action is changing your mind, asking for an RFP, or making a decision to buy. The objective is to engage people in conversations that get them involved with you and you with them.

One last point that resonated at that skeptical CEO meeting: I played the new Paul McCartney song,"Fine Line," which includes the lyrics, "There's a fine line between recklessness and courage." Not embracing conversational marketing and letting go of some control is reckless because it puts a barrier up between you and your customers, I reminded the execs. Change that makes a big difference, however, requires just a small bit of courage.
And what CEO wants to be seen as lacking courage?
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Lois Kelly is author of "Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing" and a partner in WOMMA member company Foghound. She also blogs at http://blog.foghound.com/.

How online advertising influences search volumes

Published: 04 June 2007

Mike Teasdale, Planning Director at Harvest Digital discusses the connections between online display activity and search and reveals some interesting consumer trends.

A recent Atlas survey on the ‘halo effect’ between display and search discovered an average uplift on conversion rates of 22 per cent on searchers who had recently been exposed to a display advertisement from the same company.

Research using adserving data like this has the advantage of using massive amounts of customer data across different companies, but there are some issues with the accuracy of the data – for example, cookie deletion by users can skew the results.

So we turned to primary research with consumers to ask them directly whether display advertising influenced their subsequent searching behaviour.

We ran a survey in conjunction with Adviva, the leading advertising network, to assess attitudes to online travel purchasing. Research was conducted and compiled by Nielsen//NetRatings with over 900 respondents.

Research findings
Respondents were asked whether they would click on an ad, do a search or go directly to the advertiser’s website if they saw an online advertisement.

We expected clicking on a banner to be the most popular option – but surprisingly only 26 per cent of our sample said that they would click on a banner to respond.

In fact search was the most popular option. This was split between searches for the advertiser’s name (26per cent) or for a general term relating to the advertisement (31per cent). So more than twice as many people are being driven to a search engine by banner advertising than by clicking directly on the banner!

Retail channels also benefit, with 4 per cent claiming they would visit a high street store having seen a banner.

What’s going on here?
At first, these findings seem counter-intuitive – after all, what could be easier than clicking on a banner?

Much web activity is task-driven. How much is that flight? What’s the weather like in Hull? Clicking on a banner distracts from the completion of a task, people tend to follow up on the advertisement afterwards. Many consumers seem to be treating the activity more like posters or TV.

Implications of this research
One key implication is in how we judge the effectiveness of online activity. Focusing on the last click before a transaction will often rate search marketing as the most cost-effective channel, underestimating the part display advertising plays.

Alex Burmaster, European Internet Analyst at Nielsen/NetRatings observes, "The unrivalled ability of the Internet to provide marketers with detailed information on direct user response to online ads often means the whole story is ignored. Our research highlights how 'click-through-tunnel-vision' ignores the larger or delayed impact that the ad can have on viewer behaviour or perception. After all, you don't just measure the success of a poster by how many people buy the product advertised from the nearest shop."

Todd Treusdell, CEO at Adviva comments: “Display activity gives clients the opportunity to reach large numbers of internet users at a relatively low cost. It’s important to appreciate (as this research underlines) that direct clicks are only one way that the advertising is working. Consumers are also doing searches, going directly to your web site and even visiting your retail store – all prompted by an online advertising campaign.”

The importance of an integrated approach to search and display
The most striking finding is how many searches are being prompted by online display activity.
Unfortunately for brand owners, the research suggests that more searches are going to generic terms like “package holiday Cyprus” than to the brand itself.

Search needs to be optimised to work with banner advertising, by anticipating searches that are likely to be prompted by the banner and ensure a higher rank for search results.
Although the speed and accuracy digital marketing enjoys is the envy of other marketing channels, the numbers do not always give a true indication.

Just as online is influenced by activity in offline channels, different online channels also seem to have a profound influence on each other.

This research strongly suggests that measuring display activity by CTR alone underestimates the impact of that activity. For every click on a banner, our research implies at least two related searches and a further direct visit to the advertiser’s web site.

Research on the Adviva network conducted by Nielsen/Netratings

What's a widget?

Extract from ClickZ Experts

Widgets have a single, simple purpose: to connect you to a primary source of information. A weather widget looks up your local weather from a source like weather.com so you don't have to. An interactive widget may let you participate with a site while you're on another.

There are different kinds of widgets. You could have a Web widget on your blog that manages a user poll, a list of del.ico.us links, or even Flickr photos. You could have a desktop widget that captures the latest MLB headlines, provides calculator functionality, or even offers quick driving directions. Mobile widgets can run on your phone or a wireless communication device like Nokia's Widsets project, to provide mobile access to Web services. It could also be simple code embedded in a consumer appliance that provides local weather while you're making coffee.
The industry needs a little bit of clarification, so I'm pleading with this new vertical medium to better qualify its offerings before speaking with marketers. Otherwise, you may only be adding to the collective confusion.

What's an Ideal Usability Experience?
Widgets' essence, regardless of format, context, or intent, is usability. That's their primary reason for existence. Widgets that are too complicated violate their own intent. Widgets must be simple or they won't serve their prime directive.

How Do I Make a Widget?
Widget development isn't rocket science. Most Web developers will tell you developing widgets shouldn't take very much time if you're working with content that's already syndicated via platforms such as RSS feeds. Advanced functions require more advanced skills, but if you're already making services and content available, you're halfway there. Widgets should also be considered part of an overall Web production strategy.

Widgets are for people who want to be directly in touch with your brand. If you offer e-mail newsletters and RSS (as part of your Web development strategy and budget), you should also include widgets. There can be some variable costs, such as media streaming fees if you include rich media. However, as I said at the conference, I've never met a client who wasn't more than happy to pay for success.

How Do You Make Widgets Relevant for Different Platforms?
Furthering the point about usability, widgets must be contextually relevant and respect the user's environment. Desktop widgets reside on the desktop, so they can afford to be interface-rich and offer more options. A mobile widget, on the other hand, must be simple to reflect the complexity of a mobile user's situation: simple interface, immediate access, and lightweight results.

In consideration of context, it could be the development and use of widgets that could make the Web browsers on home video game consoles relevant -- optimized interfaces for living room content: YouTube video viewers, weather, and more. Widgets can help bridge the gap by giving users unique interfaces to get the information they want, when they want it, but in a contextually appropriate format.

What About the Users?
Users are at the heart of all of this. Let's not forget about them. Remember, they've downloaded or copied the code to bring your widget along. They like you and what you're offering. Respect users and be happy they've agreed to spend more time with you. They shouldn't have to suffer a flurry of advertising or over-communication. Users have let you in to their world. Instead of spending more against them, why not invest time and money in a deeper relationship? Enhance your widget's functionality and give them a reason to spread the word.

Managing towards virality

Extract from Managing Toward Virality» Intellectual Capital
BY Gary Stein July 02, 2007

Creating a viral campaign to catching "lightning in a bottle."

Certainly, it's true it's nearly impossible to plan for a viral campaign. We can certainly create sites and films and banners that are clever and compelling and just beg to be shared. We just can't really plan they'll be spread, friend to friend, and become an Internet phenomenon that multiplies the ad's effectiveness and your reputation.

But we are still marketers? On the agency side, it's frustrating to have to tell a client something can't be done. On the client side, no one wants to hear her agency feels something's impossible. So we find ourselves in a stalemate over viral campaigns. Everyone wants one, the client's asking for one, the agency can't promise one, and nothing ever gets complete.

But there is an answer: You don't build a viral campaign. Instead, you manage toward virality.
Viral spread of your message is absolutely your goal. But we can't be so naive to think any old clever video slapped up on YouTube is going to spread like mad. Instead, we need to make extraordinary use of the data and the tools available to us to monitor and adjust campaign element performance, so we're driving toward a viral spread.

If virality is your goal, you can actually measure against it. And if you achieve just some percentage of your goal, you can begin to see a campaign as having a measure of success, even if it doesn't circle the globe 10 times.

The Tools of Measuring Toward Virality

There are three parts to any ad campaign:
The message
The medium
The measurement

Managing toward virality, as a practice, uses all three of these. Let's start with the message.

The Message
While we don't know everything about virally spread messages, we do know one thing: boring stuff has no chance at all of being passed along. The message itself must be viral-ready. It must generate either the pleasure of laughter, the shock of surprise, or the irritation of doubt. That's pretty much it. You can combine them in exciting new ways, but a GIF banner that claims your new soap powder will get whites whiter is pretty much a nonstarter.

There's absolutely, positively no short cut for this. The bottom line is you need a strong, clever creative team. And you'll probably have to pay for this. Rather than have them come up with the one grand scheme, have them come up with a few. You want to go toward virality with a portfolio of options, not just one thing you think is funny.

The Medium
The medium is a significant, critical element in this puzzle. There's been almost a bias away from media in discussions about viral spread. In fact, viral spread --where friends are sending content to one another -- is often offered as a new, exciting alternative to media. That's a huge mistake.

The sites on which the content appear and the people to whom content is trafficked are the hidden key to virality. Some campaigns spread not because of what they are but because of who first pointed to them. With blogs, in particular, the media is the message. The infamous SlashDot effect (define) is testament to that. The solidity of a media plan that understands which sites and which people have the greatest probability of spreading a message is often the simple secret to getting something to spread.

The Measurement
The last piece is measurement, but not the sort of measurement we've grown accustomed to: put it out there, see how it does. Instead, the practice of managing toward virality means you put the thing (hopefully, the portfolio of things) out there and watch each one very closely. When there's a hint of viral spread, the optimization process has to kick in.

Let's say you created five videos and posted them on YouTube. One really connects with consumers; it gets more views and comments. That video must then become the star of the campaign. That's the one that must be posted in other forums and placed in other buys.
Alternately, you may see video A does well with one demographic and video B does well with another. Maybe men like the funny one and women like the one with a message (or the other way around). In that case, you can begin to create a more targeted plan to get those videos spread to demographic communities that may be more likely to pass them along.

All About Management
It's pointless to give advice like "give your consumer's something great and watch it spread!" Certainly, it's inspiring to believe consumers will communicate for you. But the fact is, we're marketers. We create messages and manage their distribution toward the goal of increasing sales.

We can do the same thing with viral campaigns. We simply need to have a solid vision of what the goal is and manage toward it with discipline. Next time you're asked to create a viral campaign, don't roll your eyes. Accept the challenge, but make sure you communicate that virality is a goal, not a guarantee.