How Social Media Changes the Way Brands Communicate

We Interrupt This Program

The Martians landed just after eight o’clock on the evening of October 30, 1938 in Grovers Mill, New Jersey and promptly incinerated its residents with their heat rays.  At least that’s how it seemed to the six million people listening to Mercury Radio Theater’s infamous broadcast adaptation of H. G.  Wells’ classic novel War of the Worlds.  The program began, harmlessly enough, with the music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra but was soon interrupted by news bulletins about unexplained atmospheric changes, strange explosions on Mars, space craft landing near farms, and eventually, by eye-witness accounts of the murderous Martian conquest as it advanced amid plumes of poisonous gas through futile defenses toward New York City.

Panic ensued. 

Despite repeated disclaimers throughout the broadcast, nearly a third of the listening audience thought the attack was real, according to some estimates.  People variously hid in basements, readied weapons, or prayerfully knelt in churches anticipating the end of the world. 

The War of the World’s broadcast is more than a curiosity from our past.  It contains an important lesson for marketers.  The circumstances that transformed Radio Theater into panic that night also empowered advertising for the last century, but no more.   

Well Connected to Mass Media, Poorly Connected to Each Other

A single radio broadcast could incite widespread panic because people were well connected to mass media but poorly connected to each other.  At the time of the broadcast nearly 80 percent of American homes had a radio while only 36 percent had a telephone.  This meant nearly everyone could hear the gruesome reports dispatched from New Jersey, but few could corroborate their validity.  Without other sources of information radio’s authority was absolute.

During the last century, one-way mass media technologies were developed before and adopted more quickly than two-way interpersonal communications.  AM radio debuted in the 1920’s followed by television twenty years later.  FM radio arrived in the 1960’s and the 70’s produced cable TV and the VCR.  By 1962 90 percent of American homes had a television and a radio, but it would be almost ten more years before the same percentage homes also had a telephone! 

By contrast, technologies that allow us to communicate with each other like the cellular telephone, the pager, the fax machine, the answering machine, the camcorder, message boards, the PC, digital cameras, and the Internet are products of the last twenty five years.  Innovations like VOIP, Instant Messaging, Blogs, Twitter, video conferencing, and online social networks are more recent; many of them emerging within the last five.

Another reason for mass media’s rapid adoption was its instant utility.  When people bought a radio or a TV and switched it on, the broadcasters’ signals were already present.  By contrast, interpersonal communications devices like the telephone had no value until a person’s friends and family also had them.

Not only did interpersonal communications lack instant utility, they cost more too.  Local TV and radio signals arrived freely but a telephone call to a friend in another town incurred long distance charges and those charges increased with distance.  These differences rewarded people for consuming free mass media but penalized them for connecting with their friends.

Communities of Convenience

When people are well connected to mass media but poorly connected to each other, as they were for most of the last century, they tend to organize by proximity into communities of convenience.  Unable to find programming or relationships that precisely match their interests, people settle for those that are physically near.  For most of the last century people watched local television, read their local newspaper, and listened to local radio.  Their best friend probably lived next door.

These circumstances produced the traditional mass advertising model where brands blanketed metropolitan areas with advertising monologues through mass media.   DMA’s were simply communities of convenience defined by the coverage limitations of the mass media at their center. 

This model worked wonderfully for the latter half of the last century until two trends that began in the 1980’s tipped in the new millennium.

Loosely Connected to Mass Media, Well Connected to Each Other

Over the last twenty five years, technology spawned new media vehicles whose specialized programming splintered audiences into ever-smaller niches.   During the decade of the sixties an advertiser could reach 80 percent of all the women in America by running a single spot simultaneously on the three television networks.  A similar “roadblock” today would require hundreds of channels at a prohibitive cost.

Expanding channel choices did not similarly expand people’s range of interests. Between 1994 and 2003 the number of televisions channels available to the typical American grew from 40 to 100 but the number of channels they actually watched rose only from 10 to 14.  So, while more channels increased consumption slightly overall, individual audiences shrank. 

As advertisers wrung their hands over media fragmentation another equally important but less visible trend was changing the advertising landscape; Consumers were connecting to each other on an unprecedented scale. 

Between 1984 and 2006 cell phone subscribers in the United States exploded from 340,000 to more than 233 million.  Each month the average American spends 13-22 hours wirelessly talking with friends, relatives and business associates.  Americans sent a trillion text messages last year and that figure is increasing at 154% per month.

Blogs, virtually nonexistent five years ago, number more than 57 million today and the number is doubling every 230 days according to Technorati.  Globally, there are 1.3 million new posts per day—about 15 per second.  Thanks to blogs and the search engines that find them, anyone can have a global platform for expressing their ideas.

Eighty four percent of Americans are in online communities.  MySpace swelled from two million members in 2004 to more than 160 million today and that figure doesn’t include members of Facebook, Orkut, Bebo, Hi5, Eon, LinkedIn, Plaxo, and the other social networking websites linking friends, students, and business associates through text, photos, and video. 

We video conference on the Internet, share photos from cell phones, express creativity on YouTube, collaborate on wikis, and communicate moment to moment with IM, Chat, Twitter, Voice Mail, MMS, faxes, and email.

These changes matter to advertisers because much of the attention people once reserved for commercial media, they now devote to each other.  More significantly, this shift has altered the way people organize with each other and it is this change, more than any other, which has altered the marketing landscape. 

 A New Way for a New Day

The circumstances that enabled mass marketing in past decades are reversed.  Today people are loosely connected to mass media but well connected to each other.  Under these conditions people organize by affinity into communities of interest.   They can now find the programming and relationships that precisely match their interests and connect to them.

“Homophily,” a term meaning, “love of same,” describes people’s natural tendency to gather with similar others.  Impossible previously, these days the Internet lets people find and build community with others who share their passions and interests; whether religious beliefs, political leanings, or passions for a hobby.   Once people find similar others, cheap interpersonal communications technologies help them sustain those relationships over time and great distance. In this new world markets are defined by people’s passions and interests not media coverage maps or even geography.  Atlanta is no longer a market.  Atlanta is merely a city.  Interests like a love for hiking or Ty food or the Green Bay Packers, now define markets.

What’s more, the connected consumer is more than advertising’s target; he or she is also a conduit through which brand messages flow.

Interest-Centric Planning
For decades most planning has been media centric.  Decide a media mix, select some DMA’s, and run your ad campaign.  That’s fine when people organize by proximity, but less effective when consumers organize around interests.  Today brands must identify affiliation networks whose interests identify them as likely customers and connect with them first.

Monologue vs. Trialogue
In this new era, advertisers must employ a “trialogue” where brands connect to consumers, consumers can contact brands, and consumers are encouraged to communicate with each other. 

Passive to Active
People used to watch whatever came their way.  Now they seek out precisely what they like when they want it. This requires brands to establish a permanent presence like a website and a blog because you don’t know when people may be searching.

Centralized to Decentralized Distribution
Time was when advertisers spoke to everyone through centralized media.  The advertiser was the hub.  Now there is no hub.  Everyone speaks to everyone else. The gatekeeper is gone.

Consumer is a Channel
Every person is a station broadcasting to an audience of friends, family, and coworkers via email, telephone, Instant Message and other new technologies.  Each has a direct audience numbering in the hundreds and increasing to millions just three degrees away. But be careful. Don’t trespass on interpersonal communications technologies.  The cell phone belongs to the consumer, not the advertiser. The question isn’t “how can you place your ad on their phone?”  The question is, “What will cause them to voluntarily add your brand to their programming?” 

Finally, to thrive in the new marketing environment, you must recognize and accommodate a few other changes.

Then	Now
Centralized Message Distribution: Few-to-Many	Decentralized Message Distribution: Many-to-Many
Media-Centric Planning: What media shall we buy?	Consumer Centric Planning: Which people must we reach?
Passive Consumption: Consumer is the target	Active Participation: Consumer is a channel
Monologue: Brands preach at “consumers.”	Trialogue: Brands to people, people to brands, and people to each other.
Geographic Borders: Markets are defined geographically.	Ideological Borders: Markets are defined ideologically.
Company Controls the Message: Brand perceptions were formed by advertising messages through institutional media the company controlled. No one else had a voice.	Consumer Controls the Message: Consumers speak for the brand by sharing their experiences through social media.  Brands merely influence the message by controlling the experience they give consumers.

 

The Chaos Scenario Educational Video

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll change your business model.  The Chaos Scenario is a movie and Bob Garfield plays himself.

Here is a 33-minute video by Fabian-Baber that takes you on a whirlwind tour through the changes to the traditional mass media/mass marketing symbiosis wrought by the digital revolution.  Garfield claims that "advertising no longer works" and introduces you to something that does; "the art and science of Listenomics."  Warning: Bob uses one naughty word about a minute into the video.

Consider sharing the video with your staff, you clients, or your college class and feel free to add it to your website, blog, or social media platform. 

This video is part of the 30 Days of Chaos program Bob and I created to help share the information in his book with the marketing and advertising industry.  Spread the fire. GS

The Chaos Scenario from Greg Stielstra on Vimeo.

Are Smoking, Obesity and even Happiness Contagious?

Obesity spreads like a virus.  So does smoking and even happiness. That's the finding of Nicholas Christakis, a social scientist and internist at Harvard and James Fowler, a political scientist at UC San Diego, who studied the records and social contacts of 5,124 male and female subjects from a heart study begun in 1948.

Their research revealed the profound influence of our social network on our decisions and behaviors--a wonderful affirmation of PyroMarketing.  For example, if one person in the study became obese, the likelihood that their friends would follow suit increased by 171 percent.  This means that a person's social network is more predictive of obesity than the presence of genes associated with the condition. 

Our social sphere also influences positive behaviors. When a subject in the study quit smoking, their friends were 36 percent more likely to quit as well, but the influence disappeared after three degrees of separation.

The influence was true for emotions too.  By evaluating the self-reported moods of people in the study, the researchers found that happy people tended to have happy friends.  What's more, this was also true online.  By studying smiles on Facebook profiles, they found the same pattern.  Social networks gather around joyful expressions.

The researchers didn't find any million dollar smiles, but they learned that almost every smile is worth $22,500.  That's because each happy friend increased an individual's happiness by 9 percent, while an extra $5,000 of income only increased it by 2 percent. 

The implications for marketers are significant.  If smoking, obesity and happiness spread through social networks, why not books, beer, and Snuggies?

Stop marketing to individuals, and start targeting social networks with a two-step strategy. Start with the driest tinder-- individuals within each network predisposed to your offer--and then leverage their influence to reach the rest of their group.  

You can find more information on the study in the current issue of Wired or in the book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives.

Spread the fire. GS

'Chaos Scenario' for Mass Media

Bob Garfield discussed the end of mass media/mass marketing and the rise of the Listenomics era with ABC News.  The content comes from his new book, The Chaos Scenario, that I'm helping him publish.  We are building a PyroMarketing plan to reach the media, advertising and marketing world and I am very excited by the results so far.

The book has two ingredients that give it a chance to go viral.

1. It's a really good book.  The book blends information with entertainment (Bob is really funny) into an irresistible combination.  People love the book and want to tell others.  But don't take my word for it.  Download the free sample chapters and see for yourself.
2. The book addresses a topic that is affecting an entire industry simultaneously-- how the digital revolution is currently disrupting the mass media/mass marketing symbiosis that has sustained the media and advertising industries for almost 400 years and how business can survive by adopting an approach Garfield calls Listenomics. 
   
   Typically, businesses suffer from a range of different problems and look for answers from an equally diverse collection of books.  This spreads demand across the entire business book category.  But in this particular case, the most pressing problem faced by media companies, ad agencies, and marketing departments, is the very topic Bob addresses in his book and could focus all of those sales on a single book.  When whole industries suffer from the same problem and also tend to know and connect with each other regularly, it creates the potential for massive adoption spurred by word-of-mouth.  Remember what happened with The Purpose Driven Life in the church.

Enjoy the sample chapters and get a preview of the book's content by watching and sharing the following ABC video. Spread the fire. GS

'Chaos Scenario' for Mass Media Shared via AddThis

Help Choose the Cover for Bob Garfield's New Book

I'm working with Bob Garfield of Advertising Age magazine to help him publish a new book titled The Chaos Scenario.  In addition to chronicling the changes to the mass media/mass marketing model wrought by the digital revolution, it teaches the skills required to thrive in the post-advertising age.  One of those skills is "Listenomics" which means involving your customers in many aspects of your business from advertising to new product development.  Accordingly, Bob is inviting you, the reader, to help him choose the right cover for the book.

Take a moment to visit http://thechaosscenario.blogspot.com/, read the book's descriptive copy, review the three cover choices and vote for your favorite using the survey in the upper right hand column.  You can vote until midnight June 19 and Bob will announce the winner from the blog on Monday June 22. 

I've already voted for my favorite and hope you will too.  Hey, Bob may have written the book, but we all can contribute to its cover.  Spread the fire. GS

Vanderbilt Accelerator Presentation

I am speaking to students in the Accelerator Program at Vanderbilt University's Owen School of Management today about social media marketing.  Rather than provide a handout (so old school), I am putting my presentation online at this blog post.  Today, when I speak, I will ask students to take out their cell phones and send a text message ("pyromkt" to 41411).to an account I created at www.textmarks.com.  When they do, the system will automatically reply with a message that includes the URL for this post.  Once every student has the reply on their phone, I will fan the flames by asking them to forward the text to one friend who isn't in the room, but who they think will enjoy the material.

I gave two talks.  At eight o'clock I gave a PyroMarketing Overview and at 1 pm I introduced them to a collection of social media tools.

Here are pdf's of those presentations. They don't translate particularly well to pdf since they use builds and they may be a bit cryptic for those who weren't there, but here they are nevertheless.

Download Accelerator_PyroMarketing_Presentation

Download Accelerator_Social_Media_Tools

Here is a quick list of the resources I mentioned during my talk with links to their websites.

Radian6 is a social media monitoring service that allows you to track every mention of a brand, word, or phrase across the social web including blogs, comments, forums, mainstream news, images and video.

Tweetreach lets you see the number of social media impressions generated by tweets on particular words or phrases.  What are people saying about your brand?  How many others are seeing their messages?

Twitalyzer analyzes mentions of your brand on Twitter and provides reports on the strength, signal, favor, passion, and clout of those mentions.

Google Trends for watching how people are searching for a brand or product.

Technorati for finding blogs or individual posts related to a brand, product, or topic.  It's a great way to find affinity networks.

Compete.com for comparing search traffic between multiple sites, discovering where that traffic is coming from or headed to, and also which search terms are generating those visits.

Textmarks for creating the automated text message response system I used to give students this URL.

Broadtexter for broadcasting SMS messages to a database.

Ning for creating social networks

Frappr social maps, for mapping the location of your customers so you can find them and they can find each other.

Meetup.com for creating face-to-face affinity groups around topics, brands, and even products.

Facebook for creating a social media presence for the brand and a magnet to attract its existing fans.

Two New Twitter Tools for your PyroMarketing Plan

What influence does Twitter have on your brand?  Who is talking about you on Twitter?  What are they saying?  Is it positive? Negative? How far is that message traveling?  Who are my brand's biggest customer evangelists and how can I find them in order to encourage them?  Thanks to a couple of web applications it's now easy to find out.

TweetReach
Use TweetReach to see how often people have tweeted your brand in the last 30 days or 50  tweets (whichever comes first) then explore how many people those tweets reached, how many impressions resulted, and how often those tweets were forwarded or replied to. 

Best of all, from a PyroMarketing perspective, you can see who is commenting on your brand.  These folks, in many cases, are your driest tinder.  If your brand has a Twitter account, consider joining the conversation.  But, be careful to connect to them using Twitter and not some other method. 

After a friend recently tweeted about a brand, that brand contacted him via email rather than joining the existing Twitter stream.  It felt creepy to him--like the brand was stalking him.  He said it would have felt much more natural had the brand simply joined the Twitter conversation.

Twitalyzer
Twitalyzer analyzes your brand's Twitter presence to provide five metrics.

Strength: Is the likelihood your brand is being discussed on Twitter.  It's brand citations divided by total citations.

Signal: Twitalyzer publishes a "signal to noise" ratio. Signals are any tweets containing a link or a hashtag that allows the reader to easily explore further.  Noice are brand specific tweets without further connections.

Favor: The ratio of citations that are generall positive compared to those that are generally negative.  A computer makes this determination based on the presence of certain keywords.  The system is not infallable, but does a pretty good job of sorting the good stuff from the bad.

Passion: Measures the likelihood that individuals talking about your brand will do so repeatedly.  Again, this is gold when looking for your brand's driest tinder.

Clout: The number of unique individuals referencing your brand divided by the total number of individuals.  In other words, your brand's clout is determined by the percentage of the totel Twitter universe is talking about you. 

WARNING: If you check your brand strength on Twitalyzer they will Tweet your results without your permission for the world to see.  If you are an emerging brand with a low brand strength score this can be embarrassing and harmful.  If people see your score and perceive your brand as weak, they may disregard it. 

I am very disappointed Twitalyzer does this.  They are willing to sacrifice the privacy of a customer's analysis for their own self-promotion.

The base level of service is free for both TwitterReach and Twitalyzer so click through, type in your brand, and give them a try.  They could be valuable tools in your PyroMarketing arsenal.

Spread the fire. GS

Affinity is the new proximity

The law of affinity is replacing the law of proximity.

In Gestalt Psychology the law of proximity teaches that "spatial or temporal proximity of elements may induce the mind to perceive a collective or totality."  In other words, we assume that things that are near each other physically belong together.  This, in turn, leads us to define people by their geographic location.  E.g., "We are Americans" or "They are Michiganders."  It's assumed that we are similar to the people that surround us.

For most of history this was true.  Without far-reaching communications technologies we could only connect with people who were physically near.  And, as we interact with our neighbors we exhibit motor mimicry which causes each of us to adapt our own behaviors to match the behavior to those with whom we interact.  After a while, and because of mimicry, people living near each other often become quite like one another.  This explains geographic cultural differences.

But the arrival of new digital communications devices like cell phones, email, SMS, video conferencing, social networks, et al, has changed the equation. Our social interactions are no longer limited by geography.  I Skype with my sister in Prague at no cost.  I interact with high school friends on Facebook though we are separated by hundreds of miles.  I swap text messages with my wife from an airport barstool without ever exchanging a word with the people sitting beside me, each of whom is using their cell phone or laptop to engage with his or her own social network.

Proximity no longer governs our social interactions.  Affinity does.  I ignored my neighbors at the airport bar because they were strangers.  Proximity was no longer enough.  Digital technology enabled me to connect with people I already knew and loved instead.  I mean no offense.  I'm sure my bar mates were nice folks and I might have enjoyed a convversation with them, but I like my wife a whole lot more and so I connected with her because...because I could.

Ideology is the new geography.  Affinity is the new proximity.  When digital tools make time and distance disappear, people can organize with those who share their beliefs, their passions, or their history.  And they do.

Once, markets were vertical, named for cities and defined by the coverage patterns of their media.  Campaigns would target Atlanta, Chicago, and New York.  But those places are markets no more. 

Now, because people can connect around their affinities, markets are horizontal; cutting across every city and hamlet and jumping from continent to continent.  Markets are "people who love icecream" or "people with athlete's foot" or "outdoor enthusiasts."

Keep an eye on this trend.  It will shape the future in important ways.  Spread the fire. GS

7 Minutes to Reinvent the Internet: Live Stream

What happens when you give 7 smart people 7 minutes each to reinvent the Internet to better connect people and brands?  Find out today at 1:30 pm Eastern time.  Gather your marketing staff around a computer and watch the event live as it happens in New York.

You can catch the live stream and read all the details at 7 Minutes to Reinvent the Internet.

I have a special interest in this program because Bob Garfield of Advertising Age and National Public Radio is one of the seven participants.  Bob's presentation comes largely from his new book, The Chaos Scenario, which I am helping him publish and promote. 

Bob gave me a sneak peak at his presentation and I can assure you it is typical Garfield; funny, informative, insightful and, for once...short.

Judging the Winner by Applause

I contributed one idea to the event.  VideoEgg, the event's creators, had planned for a panel of judges to grade each presenter and declare a winner...American Idol style.  But since the event was about social media and the Internet, I suggested they assign each participant a unique hashtag and let the audience vote by repeating their favorite idea (along with its hashtag) on their Internet real estate (blogs, Twitter, etc.).  A week later we could use social media monitoring software like Radian6 to count the posts related to each hashtag.  Each post counts as a vote.  The presentation with the most votes win.  It's the digital-era equivalent of judging the winner by applause but it also dramatically increases the event's reach and exposure by equipping the audience to spread the word via their social network (fanning the flames).

I hope you get a chance to watch the presentations and participate by reposting your favorite idea.  Spread the fire. GS

Trialogue: Marketing in the New Economy

Here's a piece I wrote for a banking client's internal newsletter.  It describes the transformation from the mass media era to the digital media era and the implications of that shift for marketers and so I thought I would share it here.  Enjoy and, as always, spread the fire. GS

_______________________________________

A revolution in media and marketing triggered by recent digital technologies has fundamentally changed the world.  Most companies see it as a threat.  You can see it as an opportunity. 

 For the last century advertising involved a monologue.  Brands spoke to consumers through mass media with powerful results.  Brands also enjoyed a message monopoly.  The cost and complexity of television, radio, print, and outdoor prevented consumers from participating, but no more.  Personal computers, smart phones, affordable software, social web applications, and ubiquitous broadband connections have equipped and empowered nearly everyone to take part and people are using this new-found power to express their love or loathing for brands.  This groundswell of connected consumers’ represents a threat to companies entrenched in the past, but a vast resource to businesses prepared to engage them in new ways.  But how?

 Trialogue

Thriving in this new environment requires engaging audiences in a Trialogue™.  Trialogue is more than a communications tactic; it is a strategic platform that routes the true experience of a brand among all its constituents.  In a Trialogue, messages and experience move along three dimensions:

 B:A - From the brand to the audience

A:B - From the audience to the brand

A:A - Among audience members

 All brands exist in a Trialogue.  The only choice is whether and how to participate.  Those that strategically leverage it can develop more relevant brand strategies, expand their advertising impressions, better manage their image, and enhance the trustworthiness and authority of their messaging in a marketplace they no longer control.

 Trialogue by Fire

Dell discovered the need for Trialogue when, in 2005, blogger Jeff Jarvis began recounting his customer service nightmares on his BuzzMachine blog in a post titled “Dell Hell.”  Like a magnet, his post attracted other unhappy customers who left similarly scathing comments.  Soon it was all over the web.  Search “Dell” on Google at that time and “Dell Hell” was on the first page of organic results.

 To its credit, Dell embraced Trialogue and transformed a nightmare into a vision for the future.  

·        It built a system for tracking online conversations involving its brand and began proactively reaching out to people with problems. 

·        It joined the conversation by starting its own blog; winning praise from customers for authentically addressing positive and negative issues.

·        It launched IdeaStorm, a site where customers can suggest and prioritize ideas from new products to service improvements and Dell can report on its plans and progress.

Today Dell relies on Trialogue interaction with its customers to support its rejuvenated business.

 Implementing Trialogue

Implementing Trialogue in your business involves three steps.

Listen

The best brands, like best friends, are good listeners.  Begin by uncovering brand conversations.  The Buntin Group recently built a Brand Monitoring Dashboard for a client that monitored websites, blogs, chat rooms, forums, and even Twitter in real-time for conversations involving the client’s brand or its competitor’s.  It tracked the volume and tone of that chatter and identified the people making those comments so the client could connect with them online.

Lead

The most effective way to influence your brand image in the Trialogue era is to control your customer’s experience.  With a quality product and excellent customer service in place, you can further lead by:

·        Creating venues for brand discussions like social networks and forums

·        Inviting your customers to participate in new product development and service improvements.

·        Designing systems that enable customers to more effectively engage with your business.  ATM’s and online banking are good examples from the financial services industry.

·        Joining the conversation by commenting on existing blogs and forums, and/or starting your own.

·        Reinforcing brand truths with targeted advertising through traditional channels. 

Leverage

Equip the audience with tools that leverage its connectivity to help them share your brand message with their social network. New digital tools make this easy and affordable and can radically extend brand strategy, communications reach, and advertising impressions. 

 At The Buntin Group, the agency in Nashville where I work, we believe Trialogue is a transformational business driver and also a unique business intelligence tool and have retooled our creative, media planning and digital functions to enable brand-fluent Trialogue solutions that deliver business results.