Node XL Maps for #standardbank and #FNB on twitter during the ASA firestorm
These network diagrams have been uploaded to illustrate my interview on SAFM on the media show at 9:20am Sunday March 4, 2012. Live streaming here (obviously this link will be no use unless you are listening live)
The first map describes the conversation for #FNB.
To help you understand it the size of the pictures is in proportion to followers, The green line are “followers” and the blue lines “retweets
#FNB 16/2/ to 24/2/2012
This is the same methodology but a picture of the #standardbank over the same period.
#standardbank 16/2 -24/2/2012
I work with Marc Smith who does these maps and we can do them for you – you need merely to contact me by clicking on this link and filling in the contact form
In: Customer Service, Marketing, social media, Uncategorized
The ORM riddle: When is an Apple not an apple?
Tim Shier announcing the new Brandseye
When I started the Digital Academy a few years back it was because I realised that technology does not always save on labour. In fact effectively marketing on the internet will probably require even more people. You will require crowds to analyse and interpret the wealth of data that is available.
One of the huge issues with online reputation management (ORM) is how to judge sentiment because it requires an intelligent response. What does the description “sick” mean as in “wow that’s really sick” are we talking about amazing or putrid. In the same way is an apple a fruit or a tech company. This confusion in interpretation, which is often regional, makes for incredible complexity in judging the sentiment of comments made online.
Local business Brandseye have come up with an elegant solution; they have crowdsourced it.
Crowdsourcing is a simply asking the crowd (anyone in the world), usually in an open call to solve a problem. The crowd is massively scalable and can be accessed regionally.
In this case in addition to the algorithm built into Brandseye, the system allocates members of the Brandseye crowd real-time mentions, the rater gauges if each mention is relevant and judges the sentiment, the location of the person that made the mention and the media type. Local context and local language subtleties are critical – along with the intuitive sense humans have for what other humans are trying to say. Computers are not great at picking up irony, sarcasm, humour… or rage. People are. Based on their peer-reviewed accuracy, the BrandsEye Crowd are paid for their effort.
The benefits for Brandseye and Brandseye clients is greater accuracy, for the raters a source of income in the form of micro employment which they can access anywhere where they have an internet enable device and an internet connection.
I think that this is a really clever and an elegant solution and although I have not experienced it in real life I can’t see any reason why this won’t work. Well done Tim Shier and the Brandseye team.
Declaration: Tim is a member of a think tank I have organised called ideaorgy, a place where ideas come to meet and mate. But we have never discussed any of this I regret to say.
In: internet, Marketing, social media · Tagged with: brandseye, crowdsourcing, online reputation management, ORM
Come on – That’s not Social Media
A profound lack of understanding of social media is being used to support the reluctance of agencies and marketing companies to fully embrace it.
I was passed along a link to a post on the brandgym blog titled “Social media yet to show me the money” and I felt the need to comment.
The argument calls social media a fad which is sexy but yet to deliver. The argument is based around the following 5 points.
- Engagement is not new.
- Engagement is a means to and end not an end in itself.
- That the thought that interruption marketing is dead is an oversimplification.
- That it is penetration not loyalty that drives growth.
- The point the writer regards is a killer is that people have no appetite for participation.
Without addressing each one of the points I must point out that the argument is a straw man, although probably an unwitting one. It confuses social media with using social media platforms as a media channel to carry advertising messages.
To briefly clarify then, we need to understand that all marketing is about spreading ideas. My brand is an idea and that choosing my brand is a better choice than choosing your brand is also an idea. Brands and ideas only exist in the minds of people.
Interruption marketing is the process of interrupting people doing stuff with a message which if repeated often enough is expected to change attitudes. The people interrupted could be people driving down a road interrupted with a billboard, people catching up on the racing results on the newspaper interrupted by an ad or people watching football being interrupted by a banner or a branding message.
This works when people are prepared to be interrupted, when they trust the source of the message and when the message is unchallenged as the only real source of information on that particular idea (product, service, brand, category etc). None of these conditions hold true any longer.
The emphasis in social is connections. Its how ideas spread through massive networks of connections that needs to be understood.
When you run an ad on facebook you are doing interruption marketing, tightly targeted mind you, but interruption none the less, Google Adwords are also interruption but they make up by being incredibly relevant based on keywords. If you run a “viral” youtube ad once again you are attempting to interrupt. The Old Spice man is an example of using digital media to extend an interruption marketing campaign.
When you are operating in the social realm you are doing something completely different, you are engaging in the conversation between people who are talking about your stuff or things like your stuff. You are providing them with the tools to help them talk about it and you are facilitating that conversation.
Your objective is to engineer some kind of new discourse around the idea, not to get gather meaningless hoards of facebook fans or “loyalty,” as the point is correctly in the blog post, loyalty is more a personality characteristic than a brand one.
Interruption marketing is certainly not dead and will continue to play a role in social campaigns, the growth in social is slow to begin with and can be helped with traditional announcement awareness provided by broadcast communications. But interruption is extremely expensive and pretty ineffective for the reasons mentioned above, we can compensate but make it even more expensive by buying bigger and bigger audiences so that the we can successfully interrupt more albeit at still a low percentage.
Contrary to the view stated by the brandgym blog, social is not a “nice to have” add on to the media plan – its the core element for the simple reason that people trust people they “trust” and act on the recommendations and the opinion of their peers and less on the self interst of brand messages. In this world the media plan now becomes the “add on” to support the launch and facilitation of that conversation. Its likely to stay a huge budget item not because of its effectiveness but the opposite.
It’s kind of obvious that the bulk of people in any social network will not generate content. People fulfill differing roles in society, some are discussion starters, some are question people, some are answer people some are bridges or connections but most are followers, but that does not minimise the impact of the people they are following, they form tribes around ideas and the conversation is between people as it moves between online to face to face and back again.
The final reposte to the claim that social media has yet to show the writer the money is to suggest that he ask ex Egyptian President Mubarak what he thinks. Time magazine names the protester its person of the year 2011. The movements it referred to, the Arab spring, the Occupy movement, the Russian unrest, slutwalk and many others beside are all social media enabled movements. None would have happened in 2011 without social media and some like the Occupy movement which spread around the world in a few weeks would never have happened at all.
Advertising agencies and marketers need to start facing the overwhelming evidence, instead of doing the ostrich thing. To remain relevant they need to start trying to understand how ideas spread in a world where media is no longer only a source of information but a site of coordination.
Picture by Roads Less Travelled Photography
In: Advertising, Marketing, social media · Tagged with: Advertising, Marketing, social media, South Africa, WalterPike
Changing my posterous blog
I have decided to change my posterous blog at walterpike.net to be more of a personal blog my personal musings – If you are following the Pike’s thinking (marketing and such like) type posts here – please find them on http://walterpike.com
For some reason Ive ended up duplicating content.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
In: Uncategorized
How Woolies Lost its Mojo
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But, on Wednesday, 1 February 2012, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) upheld a complaint by Frankie’s regarding Woolworths plagiarism of its slogan and Woolworths, feeling that consumer sentiment was against it, announced that it would remove the product from its shelves.
The word of mouth has changed.
The way you build a word-of-mouth brand is to deliver a remarkable customer experience and hope that people would tell their friends and, if they had a similar experience, they would tell their friends in turn and so on until the market all agreed.
Used to take a lot of time
In those days, this took a lot of time because people could only maintain a relatively small network of connections and would only tell two or three or five or a dozen friends. Now, when the marginal cost of publishing is zero, in an instant the average connected consumer can publish to thousands of readers and reach millions in a few seconds. The word soon spreads
I was the client service and strategy director for Woolworths’ early advertising agency when it crossed to “the dark side” and became an advertiser.
It did so because of the market’s perception that quality, certainly in its clothing section, had declined. This was also the time when the Woolworths’ food stores were still being set up. Advertising was the price Woolworths was paying for the reduction in standards and quality and the strap line “adding quality to life” was designed to turn that perception around.
Revealing
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When the Frankie’s story broke on Talk Radio 702 end of last year and spread like wildfire through the social networks, I could not help thinking how far from the word-of-mouth brand Woolworths had moved. Apart from the absolutely appalling manner in which it handled the social media firestorm, it was revealing in how it was defended by some.
In essence, the argument ran that, because all the big retailers behave this way, it should be expected. But in a connected world, a social world, you don’t want to be like everyone else; you want to be remarkable, you want to be spoken about, you want people to share their experience with their friends. It’s about the buzz you generate by the special experiences you deliver that grows your brand.
In the absence of any research to prove it, I suggest that the reaction on the internet and then in the market was so vocal, not only because this was the powerful corporate bully riding roughshod over an entrepreneur, but because Woolworths has taken a position of quality, integrity and doing good and its customers and fans felt cheated and let down when suddenly they could see a new truth.
Trust has already gone
Woolworths can paper this over and things will go on as they were but, as with the wife who was cheated upon and forgave, the trust has already gone and when something like this happens again, all hell will break loose.
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I think that many people would have wanted to believe Woolworths and it would have been easy to see Frankies as an opportunistic startup with nothing to lose. Not now, though.
Ironic
The irony is that Woolworths were once one of the best in the world at generating the buzz it needed to be a standout brand. What happened with Frankies and how it handled the incident demonstrates something completely different. It demonstrates that it has lost the set of skills and attitudes it needs to be amazing and get buzz. It has joined the pack with the rest of the retailers.
If the price of a poor product and a poor customer experience is advertising, this is really good news for broadcast media owners – you should be getting a boost to your turnover.
Woolworths, you seriously need to look at how you curate your brand in the future; all the clues are in how you used to do it. The lesson is that you are no longer in control – your customers are.
In: Advertising, Marketing, social media · Tagged with: Brand, Frankies, Marketing, Woolworths
@RBJacobs showing understanding of ORM
Digital Promotions are not the same as Social Media marketing.
Takumi Sushi – I am sorry but you lose.
In this new world customer service is the new marketing – you have to give people a great experience – and if you do they will tell their friends. You behave badly they will do so as well.
If the management at Takumi Sushi had accepted responsibility the incident would have died away in seconds – instead its been floating through the interwebs and here I am sitting a good 12 hour drive from wherever in Cape Town this place is and writing about it, and some people will even read this – maybe even a lot.
I can’t possibly judge what is the the real truth but like any normal person I did a few searches on twitter and using Google and on the whole the Desmarais sisters come across a reasonable – Takumi on the other hand come across as defensive and their behaviour as aggressive and completely unacceptable.
Sorry Takumi that not the way to do it. You lose.
In: Advertising, Customer Service, internet, Marketing, social media, Uncategorized
What’s the point. Bid or Buy?
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