On Innovation

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

Marketing messages that are delivered across multiple (overlapping) media are often more effective than those delivered across just one or two media - even if the reach and frequency in those one or two media is high.

It’s worth exploring extending this marketing campaign notion to the creation of “distributed branding” through a web strategy that creates brand presence wherever target consumers “live” on the web. This strategy effectively maintains brand awareness over time at a relatively low cost.

In implementing a distributed interactive branding strategy, it’s helpful to know both what your target users are doing online and by whom they might be influenced (friends, children and colleagues)*.  While you’ll probably want (or already have) more detailed use data for your target audience, below is a helpful overview graphic from Forrester Research / Businessweek (main article) that summarizes online activity by age segment. In a nutshell, for people age 18-40:

Organic recently (ok, about 3 months ago, but that’s how long it takes to catch up) posted an interesting perspective on how difficult it is to make branded Facebook apps work (along with some thoughts on similar issues in Second Life).  Their team also posted some tips on how brands could more successfully leverage Facebook, and the Digitas Digital Hive blog team also commented on the post.

One tip was to leverage existing successful apps - for example, take a look at Sony’s very successful use of the Vampires application to launch their new vampire movie 30 Days Night.   Sony rebranded the Vampires application (facilitates virtual biting) with movie-related banner ads and sponsored a contest with prizes.

So, which brands might use the existing most popular Facebook ads?  Here’s a recent list of some of the most active Facebook apps and some ideas on who could leverage them, and how.

Are you creative?  Share an idea or two in the comments (for either these apps, or others).

If you’re not already using word of mouth campaigns for new product/service launches because of uncertain ROI, you need to read this! Research recently released by word of mouth companies BzzAgent and ChatThreads suggests that word of mouth may be measurably more effective than one of the current gold standards for online sales conversion: search engine advertising.  Furthermore, word of mouth campaigns may be 20-60% more cost-effective for branding than other media. Read on for details.

Intent to Purchase / Sales Findings

BzzAgent’s research shows that intent to purchase among participants in word of mouth campaign conversations ranges from 10-15% depending on the sector (people apparently love talking about food & candy):