Entries Tagged 'Consumer Generated Media' ↓

Good morning from Los Angeles and the Forrester Marketing Forum. Harley Manning is on stage explaining the new environment for marketers. The decline of traditional channels and rise of new channels and the challenges they present. “How do we get back to strategic marketing” he asks…the new imperative is Engagement. Brian Haven, a great analyst from the Forrester team that we work with quite a bit, will be leading the opening session on Engagement and how brands can drive success via direct engagement with their consumers. We will be hearing from over the next two days from Casey Jones from Dell, Cathy Halligan from WalMart, and Nancy MacIntrye from Leap Frog Enteprises, plus many others. I will do my best to cover/post from as many of the session I attend today and tomorrow.

Blake

Visible Technologies

Last week I heard from Toby Bell at Gartner that we had been selected as a “Cool Vendor in High Performance Workplace” in their semi-annual report on emerging companies and technologies.

A thank you to Toby and the rest of Gartner team for investing time in learning about Visible Technologies and our solutions. The report from Gartner highlights vendors with a common goal of brokering better relationships, whether between users in an enterprise, a social community, or both.

Gartner defines a “Cool Vendor” as a company that offers technologies or solutions that are:

• Innovative; enabling users to do things they couldn’t do before.
• Impactful; have, or will have, business impact, i.e., not just technology for the sake of technology.
• Intriguing; caught Gartner’s interest or curiosity in approximately the past six months.

We are extremely honored to have been acknowledged in the report. Will follow up with more commentary and link to report on the Gartner site as it becomes available.

Blake

Visible Technologies

Dave Balter and his hive of BzzAgents have published a white paper to trigger some thought provoking discussion around ROI models for social media and word-of-mouth.

Called “Valuing Advertising’s Original Medium: The Conversation,” the Bzz team tries to make a case for assigning value to word-of-mouth in a CPM environment, arguing that while advertisers recognize the benefits of consumer-generated media they really don’t know how to calculate a value to the medium. That’s not easy to do.

It’s an intriguing idea, especially when you consider the team’s methodology resulted in a whopping $300 CPM for word of mouth campaigns. BzzAgent does great work and like many in social media circles today, the need for better measurement models and tools remains very high.

If you don’t like the paper you can at least check out why Dave has the coolest CEO photo on the Web.

Two of the world’s largest PR agencies - Edelman and Ketchum - have released comprehensive studies that contain numerous insights related to social media and a variety of other worldwide corporate and media trends.

Edelman’s “8th Annual Trust Barometer” takes a global look at corporate trust and credibility. Some of the more interesting findings from my perspective include:

• More people in Brazil, Russia, India and China use social media for company information than here in the states;
• Google is moving up the ranks as one of the most trusted sources for corporate information, right up there with CNN and the BBC;
• Social networks ranks among the lowest in providing credible information about a brand in the minds of most consumers; and,
• young people seem to show higher levels of trust in business than older influential consumers.

Ketchum’s Report, “Media Myths and Realities” focused more on media usage than corporate trust. It’s key findings included:

• the way professionals communicate is out of sync with the way consumers use media;
• communicators need to include focusing on connecting with individuals in addition to mass media channels;
• consumers in emerging markets are setting the pace for media use; and,
• social networking sites lag far behind other established media channels and sites in overall usage by consumers.

It’s good to see these agencies and others including social media analysis in these annual reports.

Mike Spataro

Business Week’s 2008 Customer Service Champs edition contains a variety of interesting rankings, facts and sidebar articles that underscore the new media challenges faced by those in corporate America today. Although we’ve all heard most of these customer service horror stories before, it’s still good to learn about the progress some brands made from last year to now. The trend for many brands to do more is definitely up from last year.

Unfortunately, Business Week plays the scared tactic card again (like many publications have done in the past) in its Consumer Vigilantes piece - profiling angry out-of-control consumers smashing their products to gain attention and rebates. While there is no question that some companies deserve such wrath and need to listen more closely to their customers, the vast majority of brands have exceptional customer service. If you’re in the business of honest measurement of consumer sentiment about brands like we are, then you know most companies do a pretty good job at taking care of their customers. I doubt we really need to constantly profile out-of-control consumers to gain the attention of most brands today.

Business Week was smart though to balance its coverage with a more realistic view from Jeff Jarvis called “Love the Customers Who Hate You,” that points out how and why customer service is fast becoming the new marketing of this century. Lots of others, like John Bell and Pete Blackshaw also offer their views on the new rankings.

Mike Spataro