Marketers and PR pro’s will dump mass amounts of data into clients laps saying “look, it worked”, and this data then ends up in front of the CFO to justify the budget spends, which in turn has the CFO and CEO discussing budget spends - with too much data to make a truly effective decision. The issue then becomes over-analysis, getting to the minutiae that may not support a good decision by both marketers/communicators and finance.

Metrics are important, analysis should be done, it can help shape better financial and marketing/PR decisions. A CFO will spend money if it is justified, but it’s all about the “right” amount of analysis. So when running campaign or event analysis, concentrate just on the factual data that matters. Set the end metric first, then a few milestones to measure on the way to that goal. Good marketing is a managed investment, and managed properly the return is “growth” however that is organizationally defined. We often advocate heads of marketing and finance working together to align the strategic goals, while the “implementers” or tactical folks in marketing/communications and finance iron out the details.

Today, many financial managers have much a broader understanding of business. Working together you can set expectations on what amounts of data you really need to measure successes and failure and avoid analysis paralysis.

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Marketer Tom Hespos railed on about the waning of terrestrial radio and cited the writings of Adam Gerber of “media potholes” those dark spots where “advertising” doesn’t reach, or consumers who don’t listen to channels with any advertising messages.

The once crisp lines of media channels are blurring. Usage patterns are shifting and we are seeing a greater diffusion of how and where people consume media of all types. As video blurs across the Web between professional and consumer generated, the “value” of that media is disrupted. I suspect the major networks currently laying off employees due to “falling advertising revenues” is not entirely due to the “recession” we are/aren’t in. Rather, the marketing dollars are being spread around.

What we may come to find is that not all cuts being made now in various media channels are the actual result of an economic downturn nationally or globally - but of the disruption in value because of so many diverse channels and the growing shift in how, what and where consumers consume media.

The cost of delivering media en masse is lower than ever in human history, as is the cost of production. The cost of accessing the channels that deliver the media, and the pervasiveness of those channels has contributed to this.

I believe we may be seeing the start of the result of value disruption in the economic ecosystem of media, it just so happens to be tying in nicely with the “recession” if that is what we are in. What do you think?

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We come into the area of Online Reputation Management here, but from the angle of competitive intent. What is often overlooked, is that sometimes an individual, business or stock is not under attack by a “random blogger” or group of legitimately frustrated consumers. Sometimes the attack is planned and highly coordinated; by a competitor or rival celebrity. It’s an aspect of Social Media that until now, has not been generally discussed. Through our experience however, we know it’s very real. We also predict it will become an element in corporate competitive strategy in the future.

So how come we haven’t heard about it much before? If you’re the company under attack, you may never know it was coordinated, or the way in which an outcome is settled is not one you want to announce publicly. Just dealing with the ensuing crisis is expensive enough in terms of brand reputation, PR costs and stress on internal resources and stakeholder communications. The ability to gather evidence of “where” the issue started or by “whom” can be challenging at best and is murky in legal terms.

Our case was with a petrochemical company (I can’t give any data other than the industry) who faced a sudden upswing in public complaints and was registering increased hostility from consumers and government. The story was close to hitting mainstream media. Instead, quick research was done and the story was countered effectively before it spread across more of the blogosphere or hit traditional media.

So in what way are these attacks occurring and why? A competitor can “plant” information with “apparent” evidence with a series of bloggers known to have the right following, or in bulletin boards used by retail traders, as an example. The story is usually “emotional” in nature, designed just so it will be shared and incite discussion. Then the consumer takes over, adding to and building on the story. The primary objective is to have the “issue” hit traditional media and accelerate it further.

So, why then, and who? Social activist groups are learning the power of targeting companies they feel are committing social wrongs - no surprise there. Competitors can discredit a product on launch to either stop or divert their competitors attention on the product, culling marketing and sales efforts. Damaging a brand via Social Media can result in setting a victim back many months and weakening their market position. There are a number of tools including “splogs” or “Spam Blogs” that can aid in driving a negative attack, seeding misleading messages through anonymous accounts, link spamming and more.

Such actions, if a person, organization or company is caught, can lead to serious litigation, defamation of character and slander suits. Is it happening? yes. What can you do? Certainly a monitoring tool helps, but there are certain indicators that can be analysed to give indicators an attack is not random. Proof can be challenging, but there are ways. Caught quickly, most attacks can be diverted, but monitoring remains an essential element.

(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Partner)

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Why then? It’s all about human behaviour and Video Conferencing is the prime indicator. If video phones were so desired and the market really wanted them, we’d all have them on our walls at home or office desks by now. If we really, as consumers, wanted them. We would have quickly adopted those clunky early versions and the demand would’ve driven technical innovation. But it hasn’t. Perhaps Cisco’s Telepresence has the potential. Perhaps. Today, the costs remain prohibitive even to 97% of businesses.

While Social Media is changing our society and enabling greater communication than ever before, we still crave physical contact. To clearly see facial expressions and full body language; all vital parts of building rapport and trust. This becomes obvious when even the Social Media space is filled with all kinds of events that bring people physically together in the same space. Even that Microblogging wonder Twitter has a word for Face-2-Face meetings - Tweetups. Then there’s Podcamps to record podcasts as groups, and SobCon and Unconferences along with the other Social Media events, conferences, gatherings and dinners.

So it is with the sales function. Social Media tools enable you to prospect in new ways, then connect initially, using Social Media tools to provide “evidence” of who you are and progress a deal to the point where it’s time to meet. And meeting is and will likely always be, vital. After the deal is closed and the delivery commences, Social Media comes back into play in helping work through the delivery and after delivery to stay connected with your clients increasing client loyalty. Thus the Horizontal Hourglass Theory (which is a bit cheeky, but we like it anyway.) So while Social Networking and Social Media may not actually “close” the deal, it can certainly help you find more prospects, get closer to the deal point for less cost (reducing your COGS on the balance sheet) and improve loyalty. That’s still bottom line positive impact.

(Author: Giles Crouch, Managing Partner)

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The practice of “marketing” for the past 60 years has been very one-way. A business saw marketing as either supporting sales directly as a function of sales or as creating awareness to drive sales leads. Even worse, sales was (and often still is) either pitted against marketing or valued higher than marketing, since marketing is often (wrongly) seen as a spend item and sales results can be measured faster and more quantitatively. True marketing is a managed investment, since the the ROI in marketing is longer term. That said, marketing had limited channels to broadcast it’s message (TV, radio, mail, print, Web 1.0) and the feedback channels to measure and obtain “input” for ROI analysis and revisions to strategy were even worse - focus groups (with inherent bias), phone surveys (high rate of false data), unsolicited snail mail or trade shows. In too many organizations it’s also sales vs. marketing so the two don’t trade data, creating a gap in understanding front line needs. So what does Social Media change?

The fundamental change in Social Media is that there is now a zero cost to the “market” a business is engaged with to communicate to the business. Conversely the marketer now has increased and often more targeted, ways of reaching their market. In the broader sense of a business, “marketing” a company is not just customer acquisition and retention anymore. A business should use “marketing” to attract new employees, retain employees, find investors, reduce retention costs, gain product insights and develop better integration with sales. In other words, for the first time ever, Social Media combined with traditional marketing channels enables a business to Market itself as the Whole Business - a holistic approach. And metrics can be put in place in each area of the business (Finance, Sales, Marketing, Administration and Operations) to understand the ROI. SMB’s will gain a huge advantage in this regard in the coming years.

If a business can Market itself as a whole entity, at lower transactional cost, then it can grow. By staying narrowly focused on it’s marketing activities, opportunities to new segments and true, real-time customer feedback are missed. This is a huge shift in thinking, best practices need to be re-invented, cultural shifts need to happen and the C-suite needs to adapt. It’s not easy and it represents risk. But it is also inevitable as Social Media adoption and usage by consumers who buy products and services will force this change. Once businesses start to see how they can Market themselves in so many ways, and measure it, a whole new approach to Marketing will evolve. This is just one way Social Media is changing business practices. What do you think?

(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Partner)

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To engage in Social Media as a consumer, our research shows the average consumer has 4 Social Media services they use; Social Network (i.e. Facebook), Microblog (i.e. Twitter), Blog (i.e. Blogger), email (according to eMarketer most active Web users have 3 email accounts) and a preferred photo sharing site. The issue then becomes “which” of these services do they use? Some behavioural research we did showed that the average user will sign up for 4 additional Social Media services (such as calendaring, video sharing etc.) over the run of a six month period, but there is only a 20% chance that these additional services will be used more than 2 times after sign-up. You can infer a lot in user behaviour patterns and churn rate issues for the providers of these services.

Now we increasingly see the rise of “aggregation” services in Social Media applications (Friendfeed being an example.) These are services that pull information from multiple sources or broadcast to multiple services creating Pull Aggregators and Broadcast Aggregators. The failure of most of these however is that they limit “what” they pull or push. For example, Ping.fm pushes (to a fair number of services, but not all) and others only aggregate RSS feeds. Granted that the major issue is each provider allowing these connections. Something OpenID is aiming to solve, and looks to be doing so. The best Services Aggregator (pull and push) we’ve seen so far is Digsby. We wouldn’t call it a “professional” type of service yet, but for people active in Social Media and just “conversing” it is a great tool. It is still only for Windows, though we think it will work best when it resides purely in the browser and can have total platform and device independence.

What we are seeing though, is a definite need for such aggregators, perhaps better called Information Arbiters than aggregators. As SmartPhone adoption grows there will be more apps developed, and thus the need for arbitration will need to tie with aggregation the more society learns to leverage Social Media.

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We monitored 6 juniors and 6 seniors in the U.S. and Canada on the NYSE and TSX over a 4 month period, so we had some pre-meltdown data. Although we’ll say up front that due to the sudden volatility over the past 30 or so days, there is some cause for trepidation in these initial findings. To be sure, we will expand this monitoring since we need to compare different sectors as well, since we only monitored commodities.

What we found however, was the the Small Cap companies who used blogs or engaged with bloggers and other forms of Social Media enjoyed less overall volatility over the past 30 days (20% less in fact.) The larger, more established companies were not engaged in Social Media and only used traditional media channels to communicate their messages. We also note that the Small Caps had a significantly larger number (by 40%) of retail investors who tend to hold only for short periods and are not “builders” when it comes to investing.

Our initial conclusion is that Small Caps have a larger following of retail day traders, who are also very talkative on Bull Boards, Forums and Newsgroups and who share prolifically any amount of information no matter how small it is. So if you’re a Small Cap, you might find Social Media to be a valuable way of engaging your retail traders for your investor relations.

(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Partner)

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Essentially text is very much alive and well with no signs of slowing. In fact, the use of text is growing, we argue, more so than video. We see the reason for text as being predominant over video as a mix of issues, mostly that there are bigger barriers to video than text. More technology is required for video; camera, editing software, the right PC and the knowledge to make truly effective use of these tools. We also noted some key changes in the use of text, noted below in this article.

As monitored blogs we found that using estimations by eMarketer, Gartner and Forrester (all respectable research houses) we see there are roughly 60 Million text-based blogs. Then there are the microblogs like Twitter, Plurk and identi.ca, all text driven. Add in the increasing use of SMS to blogs,  microblogs and participatory services, you have about 60% more text than video. In our research of monitoring daily blog entries we found that there is on average over the past 4 weeks a ratio of 3:1 for text over video blogs. Additionally, underlying the use of video on video sharing sites is that user comments are 95% text based even when video commentary is an option.

It is still easier and faster to produce text-based content than it is video. Additionally, we find that video when shot personally using a Webcam on a PC tends to be more “personal” and a quick survey found that users were less comfortable putting their “face” out there versus writing a blog entry in text. The other factor was that with a Webcam mounted on a PC or in a laptop creativity has limits; the person must operate within a restricted field of the cameras range. So to really make video interesting, you need a camera operator to create more movement, since this is how broadcast television and movies have trained us to view video productions.

We believe that video will continue to be very strong, and predict that video and text will grow closer together in the coming years. The ability for Smart Phones to have higher quality video, quick in-device editing and lower cost uploading will impact the increased use of video as well; but these technologies need to develop and become easier to use.

The changes we have noted in text are interesting as well. This article/blog post actually exceeds the average blog post by a few hundred words. We found that of 10,000 blog entries (we though “n” should be about n=10,000 as a minimum representative number) the average entry was 150 words or 3 paragraphs. We found only 30% had poor grammar and found 70% had spelling mistakes. We found a common use of contractions as increasingly popular (i.e. LOL, IMHO etc.) which we think is carried over from mobile device usage and microblogging. We’ll post more on these findings later.

So why does this matter? On the one hand it is a signal to how we are evolving our communicating styles and preferences as a society, and on the other hand it can be a good guide when developing a Social Media strategy to determine a good mix of video and text and where to place effort.

(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Partner)

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Why do we need to understand this evolution? Because understanding the evolving Social Web is critical to understanding global economic shifts, consumer spending and saving and political changes. The Social Web is the enabling technology  that will have an impact on our society even greater than the first Social Media tool - the printing press; which lead to the Christian Reformation. I point out Twitter simply as a reference point, and this topic could go very long and very deep.

Taking a look at what one might call Twitology (or spin-off apps leveraging Twitter that form a transaction economy of information) we can see that Twitter, the service  pundits only a year ago pondered it’s worth on, has now grown an ecology just like the iPod, only in the Social Web, with no apparent monetization plan. So what is the ecology of Twitter?

Without compiling a whole list (some of which can be found here) in this entry, suffice to say we’ve counted over 30 different spin-off applications that feed off of Twitter. Other microblogs like Plurk and Identi.ca have not seen this kind of uptake spin-off. Clearly Twitter has become a phenomenon. Services range from seeing your own and others ranking, feeds to Smart Phones, tracking topics, graphing trends and sentiment ranking. Whole conversations take place with Twitterers using the “#” sign followed by a letter/number sequence which can be followed in real-time or later.

We see this as an indicator of how we’re still learning a new set of communication skills. We marvel at the stories of Twitter on saving lives or as a terrorist tool and a social safety net. These are all small and early indicators that Twitter and similar tools are playing a role in an evolving style of community the world hasn’t quite seen before. So it’s not the technology - that is just an enabler - it’s how we’re using that technology in our daily lives and how services like Twitter will hekp us shift how we organize and foment change locally, regionally and globally.

How do you think Twitter will evolve?

(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Partner)

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But even as participants we’re watching each other as well. Take Twitter Grader for example. People seeing where they “rank” in terms of popularity with Twitter. Plurk awards Karma Points based on your participation. Then there’s tools like MyBlogLog from Yahoo! Friendfeed gives you Stats and Posterous tells you quickly how many people have viewed your posts. You can put a widget on your blog for RSS feeds so others can see how many get your posts via RSS (whether they read them or not seems to be irrelevant.) I’m sure there are others I’ve left out.

So we’re all watching each other. We’re looking at each other to determine how popular a blogger or microblogger is. Blogger and social media researcher Dan Zaralla discussed this to some degree in a recent blog post calling it Social Proof - essentially proof of who you are and the “value” of your content. We call this Social Value with our clients.

So why all this analysing? Does it matter? The why is easy for businesses and government; to understand what’s being said to make better marketing, PR and HR decisions on their reputation and brand efforts. For consumers or individuals, as Dan points out, it’s Social Proof that others think you know what you’re talking about, that you’re relevant to the topics at hand. This is a form of social acceptance behaviour, validated through the number of tools that quantify participants. Essentially this two-way monitoring is akin to how we behave socially in school, at work or at parties and other social functions. I’m sure much more can be covered on this topic, but for business and participants in Social Media, it shows how the Social Web is evolving and developing peer recognition, and there are implications.

(Author: Giles Crouch, Managing Partner)

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