On Innovation

There’s been a lot of interesting discussion recently on how to best leverage channels like Twitter to communicate. This post talks about a bit about the co-creation of new social experiences that drive conversation and engagement in innovative ways, with the potential to then communicate the co-creation activity across multiple channels - including Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Flickr.

More than ever before, people have tools to help them co-create products and services in social environments. It’s an exciting trend that’s still very much in its infancy. Many of us are familiar with Cafepress, Zazzle and Nike’s custom shoes NIKEiD program. These were early - and still successful - examples of firms that help people remix and create everything from shoes to skateboards.

We’re now seeing signs of continued evolution of this general trend, in areas as diverse as fashion, fabrication and finance. The ideas these companies are introducing will change the way a range of industries introduce, sell and market products. For marketers, these companies all demonstrate useful and innovative approaches to genuine engagement of audiences around co-creation.

Instructables (DIY)
Part of the rapidly growing online “fab” and DIY trend, this site provides one of the best communities centered around creating almost anything - including an Electric Umbrella, Pulled Chicken, a Cardboard Frisbee and even Homer Simpson’s 3D Doughnut Trophy. The site reaches over 4 million monthly unique visitors globally.

John Bell and I formally introduced the Conversation Impact(TM) measurement model at the Advertising Research Foundation’s Audience Measurement 4.0 on June 23rd.  Here’s a brief overview of the model, its goals and planned evolution.

The model was developed by our team to provide brands with a comprehensive, recognizable framework for tracking social media campaigns.   We relied heavily on our experience with a range of social media campaigns for both B2B and B2C clients, and considered the types of questions and reporting requests we receive with every new project or request for information.

We focus on simplicity and comparability across media - the latter, to help guide marketers with media allocation.  We categorize our metrics into 3 areas, corresponding roughly to objectives and “marketing funnel” stages; each is shown below, with representative metrics (the metrics are selected based on unique client needs).   Included are both familiar and new metrics.

Image courtesy of Crimson Hexagon

A new experimental site, Photocracy.org, is a crowdsourcing initiative to explore whether images are useful in providing brand identity information. The people behind the site, Princeton University student Josh Weinstein and Sociology Professor Matthew Salganik, are currently collecting information on perceptions of 3 countries - the United States, China and Japan - using votes on images of those countries.  Visitors from each country are asked to choose which of 2 pictures is more representative of the country.  Since the site’s launch a few weeks ago, over 100,000 votes have been cast for comparisons like this one:

Photocracy.org US comparison images - cowboy on horse vs. Obama

Why is this useful?  To find out, I asked the people behind the project some questions.

Many of us are familiar with Techmeme, a useful news aggregator with a focus on aggregation of tech stories across the web and the blogosphere.  Techmeme has an entertaining sister site (Wesmirch) that aggregates celebrity gossip.   Other popular blog news aggregators include Technorati and search services such as Twingly.

Polymeme is an interesting new entrant attempting to focus a bit differently by clustering stories from a database of over 25,000 blogs across the following relatively unusual categories:

In an earlier post, I summarized the results of a study suggesting that several characteristics of movie word of mouth or buzz correlated well with expected total revenue over the movie’s release cycle.

There’s been a tremendous amount of word of mouth buzz surrounding this past weekend’s release of The Dark Knight, so I wanted to see what types of opening box office might be associated with pre-release buzz.

As a comparison, I also looked at volume of word of mouth around Hellboy II (the top release last weekend).

Direct marketing has long relied on good experimental design and techniques such as A/B testing to optimize ROI.  One of the appeals of Internet marketing has been the ability to optimize and track ROI on campaigns, and that’s also one of the ways that early Internet advertising was able to secure a foothold in the savvy marketer’s budget.

The use of (and buzz around) social media has been growing rapidly.  Is it possible - and, just as importantly, appropriate and desirable - to bring a comparable level of experimental and planning rigor to social media?

My short answer: yes, it is possible, appropriate and indeed very desirable for at a subset of social media and a subset of objectives (specifically, for branding/advocacy and for purchase/intent to purchase).

The art commissioned by the Spanish Olympics organization (ADO) struck me as an example of a creative and authentic campaign with high passalong potential: the artwork is striking, original and appealingly non-commercial.

The art is by Jaume de Laiguana.  Here are some representative examples portraying Spain’s boxing, gymnastics and synchronized swimming teams; visit ADO’s online brochure to see the full set.

In deciding how effectively a new product (or service) can leverage social media, among other factors, I look for whether the product offers a genuinely different/unique and communicable benefit that’s relevant to a socially addressable demographic, i.e. a market that can be efficiently reached or influenced through social media.

As a pet (dog) owner, I’m interested in solutions that can help clean up after my happily shedding dog.

Let’s take a quick look at Eureka’s recently launched Boss 4D pet-friendly vacuum cleaner.

There are some brilliantly creative uses of social / conversational media - desktop apps, conversation monitoring, customer service programs, word of mouth and buzz creation services, facebook and myspace apps and games (to name a few) - that could potentially be very helpful for a brand seeking to expand its presence online and gain market insights.

From the perspective of a brand manager, marketing manager or agency seeking to maximize the value of their company’s /client’s marketing budget, however, it’s very important to understand how to allocate funds.  What metrics make sense to use for allocation optimization?

Here are some suggestions based on popular social media objectives. A TNS Media Intelligence / Cymfony late 2007 phone survey of 71 marketing professionals in the US, Canada, the UK and France suggests that marketers generally have the following objectives for social media:

I asked the Travel Channel’s Head of Digital Marketing, Pete Dorogoff, some questions about how the Travel Channel is currently approaching digital media, with a specific emphasis on social media.   Here are the questions and Pete’s answers:

What’s your title?

Head of Digital Marketing, Travel Channel