Dave Balter from BuzzAgent is up first and he is here to talk about what people are doing and why. He starts with some definitions. He puts up a picture of Paris Hilton, as a good viral marketing example. Using consumers to pass along marketing materials. He says that people are interesting sometimes in just entertainment, not the product. He next explains about Oprah and giving out the G6. What ended up happening was that car under perform about 30% then it was supposed to. The best thing about the car "was the sunroof" as one owner indication. He wagers a bet that all people have been had by a shrill marketer before. Example was Erickson, hired actors to watch around and get people to use their camera phones.
2/3 of the US economy is influenced by word of mouth. He says they spent a good deal of time looking at word of mouth marketing. He puts up some very complicated charts. The audience eyes rolled back, he says he will not bore us with more charts. There are 4 steps to engage word of mouth. 1. Enlist Volunteers - you don't pay people. 2. You provide experiences - they have to let them have there own opinion. 3. Educate them. They need help letting them know about. 4. Communication is extremely important - engaging with the customer, letting them know you appreciate them.
A little bit about word of mouth. Traditional media has changed, and all these things are good at generating awareness but we are so skeptical we want credibility to begin with. What are people going to do with my media once they get it. Who are they going to tell? 40% of word of mouth interaction includes communicatio0n about another media form. So which media forms are prevalent? 16% is TV. 8 is radio, and so on. He asks how much word of mouth occurs online or offline? 80% of word of mouth occurs offline. Interesting. Measuring word of mouth. Old models are out-dated and will not work. For example more people watch one tv station than another. That model doesn't work any more as you need to see it by rings. You have to ask whether someone will notice or tell others about the advertising. Person 1 tells, person 2, and so on. The message will eventually get spread 18 times. He says they look at it however as a G2 measurement, 10,000 = 540,000 interactions.
Next he discusses workd of mouth negativity. He discuses a home cafe machine, where 3000 volunteers got the cafe machine. 60 lit on fire as soon as they plugged them in. Big problem for P&G the company who made them. Negativity results from injustice on behalf of the brand. He says they also looked at people who wake up as quiet advocates. Either those that are negative or those that stand by the brand. People will come out in order to bash the product or support it. People who spread word of mouth: influentials, mavens, trendsetters, alphas, bees. Sometimes he said they look at different groups, such as the hip trendsetter, super loyal people (who don't want to share the brand), the mavens (specialized people who share opinion, but one small word of mouth potential), light loyals (the people who drove all the returns, and those that only go to the restaurants once a quarter). The light loyals where the people, the everyday people that make the returns back the restaurants. He ends saying. You cannot control your customers.
Pete Blackshaw is up second, and he is from Nielsen BuzzMetrics. Nielsen BuzzMetrics helps marketers promote and protect their brands through the measurement of analysis of online word of mouth - also known as Consumer-Generated Media (CGM). Some of his key questions are: How do consumers/customers feel about my brand.....right now? Howe many are talking and who's being impacted (reach)? What issues are being discussed? Which issues are coming around the corner? Who's talking and where and are they influential? Can I influence, control, or manage world of mouth? He says think of consumer generated media, just as that, media. Its is a diverse and fast-growing body of online content. It is very rapid expanding into multi-media formats. Studies increasingly show that consumers trust the recommendations of other consumers before marketers. A lot of purchase power is dictated by that. A couple points and take-aways. Speakers find seekers. Your brand equity is the sum total of your search results. He explains online content is having the most impact is finding other people who are receptive of it. CGM is providing more venues for users to archive their opinions. Blogs index at a much faster rate, and it is why they are having much more impact. He gives the example of Iams dog food user groups protesting the dog food.
CGM as a keyword discovery tool for paid search. See how consumers are really interacting around/with your product and brand and use that language or those terms as the basis of campaign. This also might help create segmented campaigns. Latter also creates the opp to buy cheap search inventory that no one else is bidding on. Defensive branding such as buying SEM to counter negative CGM here where paid search truly is a branding medium. Additionally viral sandbagging means tackling negative CGM w/ paid search.
Jim Nail is up last and says he will take a different look at Consumer Generated Content. He says CGM can give you an x-ray insight into consumers and has amazing potential for consumer insight that you can mine. He starts and talks about Teflon and how its under siege right now. Teflon is a 2 billion dollar brand. Teflon is the worlds most slippery substance. Its is in food ware, food packaging, fabrics, carpeting, and industrial equipment. They have been in a 3 year tangle with the EPA. PFOA's in Telfon as a potential carcinogen. Some of the headlines includes "Substance in Teflon may cause cancer". He displays a history of Teflon's problem such as PFOA's in blood of babies. There is a lot of conversation going on. Then the news dropped out of the media, and then it was back again in December. EPA then recommended that PFOA as a "likely carcinogen". So what did DuPont do? They separated Teflon from PFOA. PFOA is only used in processing and said only if the pan gets as hot as 660F then the Teflon substance breaks down.
Good session overall, every speaker had some great points and information to add.
SES NYC Tag: sesny2006