This post is part of a series entitled The Four Pillars of Social Media. For this post we will be focusing on the first pillar: Research. Our other research topics, as part of this series, included:  

• Human Analysis in Social Media Monitoring: 5 Simple Steps to Navigate a Sea of Records
• Buzz Monitoring Tools Can’t Tell You Everything

How Audience Research Can Help You with Your Traditional Marketing Efforts

As traditional marketers, we have years of experience understanding our markets, what products and services they need/want, how to communicate best with them, and how they regard our brands, right? 

Well, maybe not… 

We have often relied on marketing research (primary or secondary), sales team feedback, customer satisfaction surveys, etc. to provide insights into those areas. The issue with most of those forms of feedback is that they tend to provide the answers we want to hear or find necessary to meet our internal business goals (either as an organization or a professional). 

Audience research, on the other hand, uncovers specifically how markets use products and services, speak about them, form communities, etc. It’s like watching a pride of lions in their natural habitat. Regardless if it’s a B2B or B2C market, when we take the time to watch people in their natural – or comfortable – habitat, we will see their true behavior and opinions surface. If you haven’t done audience research, it can be quite eye-opening. But more importantly, it can’t be fabricated. As an organization it’s your choice to ignore it (at your peril, potentially) or to embrace what’s really going on in the market. 

So how can audience research help traditional marketing efforts? 

Products/Services: If we build it, they will come… Not always. And more often “not” is the outcome (unless, of course, you are Apple). Many times startup companies fail or new products or services fail because they are built from the internal premise that people actually want to buy your product or service. And throwing your marketing communications budget at it isn’t going to help move the buying needle. Why not start with your customers and prospects and identify what their needs/wants actually are? If you aren’t a ‘social’ company, audience research is one way to tap into what’s being said online while standing on the sidelines. If you are a social company, why not just simply ask and then collect the data that the audience shares? 

Communication: There is large misperception in marketing that people respond specifically to tactics (i.e.  ads, direct mail, messaging, emails, etc.). That is not the case. People respond only when they have a brand relationship (see below). When there is a brand relationship, people are open and receptive to receiving your message. Your task is to make sure you send the right message, at the right time, in the right format. Audience research can help you to determine receptivity levels. 

Branding: While organizations do control their brand identity and messaging, what they don’t control are the relationships that people form with brands. Are you aware of how people (customers, prospects, clients, employees, stakeholders, shareholders, etc.) see and talk about your brand? Do you know what the sentiment (positive, neutral, negative) levels are for your brand? You might just be surprised! The  goal of using audience research is to understand how people perceive your brand(s), to take that feedback internally and to adjust your branding efforts accordingly.

What would you add to the list? How have you used audience research in your marketing efforts?

[Image: BG-Hotel International]

The opening keynote to kick of Search Engine Strategies New York was definitely well worth getting up early for and getting a front row seat.  I was rather excited to be attending this keynote since I had just finished up reading the speaker’s latest book, World Wide Rave.

David Meerman Scott is just as engaging in person as he is in his books and his presentation was chock full of great information for any audience to take back and implement into their own marketing strategies.

David started off his presentation just like his book starts off, by relating the story of Cindy Gordon from Universal Studios Parks and how she launched the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.  She only told 7 people.

That may sound like a small number, but those 7 people were very influential in the Harry Potter world of fans.  From those fans over 350,000,000 now know about the new theme park that Universal Studios is launching. It’s all about how big is YOUR world.  Sure you likely don’t have a “Harry Potter” in your arsenal of marketing strategies, but that doesn’t mean creating a World Wide Rave is going to be impossible for you.

It’s about knowing your audience and creating triggers for them.  Triggers are valuable content that just naturally want to be shared with others. During this keyknote David explains the 5 rules he sets out in more depth in his book and had some really great examples to go with the rules.

1. Nobody Cares About Your Product
   The most overused word in press releases is “Innovate” the 3rd most overused word is “Unique”.  Who searches on that stuff really?  This tends to be insulting to your customers, just like those stock photos of models who you choose to represent your company.
   
   
2. No Coercion Required
   Here David speaks to an ad he saw that featured a Fly V style guitar.  It was an advertisement for parents against explicit lyrics.  He clicked through and was lead to a landing page for the Toyota Matrix.  This is REALLY stupid, why trick people?  If your content is valuable, you don’t need to trick them.
   
   
   David shares the story of Girls Fight Back and how at the beginning of every session Erin has the girls turn off their cell phones.  At the end of the session she has them turn them back on and use them to take photos or videos of them doing the moves they learned in the self defense session.  What happens is these girls share the photos and videos, without even being asked.
   
   
3. Lose Control
   This is about understanding you don’t really control the message, no matter how you craft it, or spin it, you just really can’t control how other people interact with it.  When you loose control it allows the world wide rave to happen.  David starts to explain about how the Grateful Dead used this to their advantage by allowing people to record their concerts and share it with their friends.  To this date the Grateful Dead is still the most successful touring band.
   
   
4. Put Down Roots
   Don’t just be a lurker in social media, get involved in the community and make it your home.  Create relationships that are meaningful.  Henry Poser from B&H Photo does this so well that people in the photography communities he’s involved with find him to be a valuable asset because he helps them with their problems, not pitching the products B&H sells.
   
   
5. Create Triggers that Encourage People to Share
   You need to think about what makes people want to share.  David relates his own story of being asked to ring the closing bell for NASDAQ as his book was being released.  They told him he could bring 50 friends.  He shared this on Twitter and 50 people signed up, it was the first Tweetup ever that happened at NASDAQ and it made the main stream news.
   
   

These five rules can really help you when you are entering into the world of online marketing, but there’s something that companies wrangle with even more.  Fear.

Fear of loosing control, fear that they can’t do this or that, fear of the negative.  You can’t be afraid if you are going to be successful in engaging your audience.  Right now over 25% of companies still limit the access that employees have to the internet because they are afraid of what they “might” do.  This hurts companies more than they know.

David points to the US Air  Force and their use of Twitter and social media.  His story was even picked up and reported on by Wired magazine and he brought one of the US Air Force’s commanding officers to South by Southwest with him to speak to them using these social media channels.  They want to have 330,000 employees in public affairs – all of their soldiers.  When asked about restrictions and worrying about “what could happen”, the officer had the perfect answer:

“If these generals are trusting a 23 year old with a 50 million dollar jet airplane, why can’t they trust them to be on the internet?”

Lots of food for thought if you are a company entering into the online marketing space.  If you haven’t already, make sure you pick up a copy of  “World Wide Rave”, where David goes into more stories about how companies are finding success online every day.

By now you’ve probably gotten wind of the KFC ad heard round the world (embedded below). If not the Guardian has a pretty good write up on the facts of the case.
Let me quickly sidestep the racism issue and allow you to make your own decision.

This ad was only meant to run in a specific locality. So the creators theoretically only needed to hold it up against a certain set of social norms and mores within the Australian/New Zealand area. But the ad inevitably found its way to YouTube. Americans with their own set of social norms and mores took one look at the ad and cried fowl (sorry, I had to).

Although we Americans are accustomed to exporting our culture, we rarely see someone else’s culture exported to us, particularly not one that, on the surface, seems so similar even if it is deeply different. The Australian arm of KFC ended up pulling the ads due to the American fury, not Australian. In fact many Australians attempted to defend the ad as light hearted and sports team related. They explained that the stereotypes Americans saw furthered in the ad don’t exist in Australia. Australians also seemed less than happy that Americans could so easily push their own agenda, even through chicken.

There are two major takeaways from this
1. Any ad, no matter how regionally focused, can become global on the Internet. Either putting your brand on the defensive in all parts of the world for serious allegations perhaps unrelated to the ad’s intent, or, when done correctly, can spread your brand’s greatness to the ends of the Earth.
2. Americans (and people in general) attempt to put every piece of marketing into their own context i.e. the audience brings something to the ad, whether it’s knowledge of the predominant teams in a particular sport or several hundred years of oppressive stereotypes.

A couple of posts ago I wrote about a gentleman from the UK who had made some mistakes that had been captured and spread across the web. How did he get caught up in his situation?  Two men were masquerading as a woman online, basically sitting behind a fake persona.  Is this ethical? No it’s not.  Yet people do it.  On the internet you don’t have to be who you are in real life.  You don’t have to be a spotty 16 year old with a weight issue, you can be an unquestioned expert on lepidoptery.

But what about companies?  Is it fine for them to have employees not identify themselves as employees, or take it even further and pretend to be a member of a different demographic to subtly push the agenda of the company?  Again, no it’s not.  There’s even a term for it – “Sock Puppets”.  What tends to happen is that Brad in marketing slips up when posting as “Brenda, a 58 year old grandmother from Arkansas”, and the community gets suspicious and outs ‘Brenda’.

It’s true that Brad could keep up his persona, indefinitely, and be a ‘secret agent’ for the company.  Yet he could still be found out, especially if he’s posting from work (most forums log the IP address of posters, and it’s a simple process to do a reverse lookup to see who owns that IP).

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Social media isn’t a fad, and it’s no longer for the early adopters.

 Companies have realized the benefits of integrating social media into their communications strategy, and the downsides of not doing so.  But, there are bound to be companies that make mistakes, running out and implementing ideas that seem great rather than sitting down and thinking them through. Companies that think using social media means that they have to ‘shoot from the hip,’ and companies that just don’t get how to play nice with others.   Given the news of the last few weeks, I though it was a good time to throw together some examples:

Boring Boring Facebook

How many times have you been talking to a friend / spouse / relative / co-worker and said or heard:

• “I hate my job”
• “My job’s boring”
• “My boss is a @#&@*(@$(@*”

Sixteen year old Kimberly Swann of Clacton, England wrote on her Facebook page that her job was boring.  She didn’t identify her company, and only her friends could see it, so it shouldn’t have been much of a problem.  However, she then began adding co-workers as friends on Facebook, and one of them reported her to management, which resulted in her instant dismissal.  So now, instead of only her friends seeing her say that Ivell Marketing & Logistics was a boring place to work at, everyone who performs a Google search for their name can see 8 out of 10 listings (plus a Google News listing) that talk about the firm firing a 16 year old for being in the natural state for her demographic -  bored.

Ryanair hates bloggers

A blogger by the name of Jason Roe though that he’d found a flaw in low cost airline Ryanair’s booking system, whereby flights could be booked for $0.  It turned out that he couldn’t actually complete the transaction, and it was really just a gui error.  His post did get the attention of Ryanair, with one of their representatives thanking him for informing them of the error by saying

jason!  you’re an idiot and a liar!!

erm… well, then another staffer chimed in to continue praising him with

Website is not perfect, Life is not perfect…
If you would work in your pathetic life on a such big project in a such busy environment with so little resources, you would know that the most important is to have usual user behavior scenarios working rather than spending time on improbable and harmless things. We very well know about these anomalies and unless it is not critical we are not going to sacrifice time to this.
If you would be a serious programmer you would know these things and would not post any of this on the web if you would think it can cause us troubles, but you would report to us directly.
Even you did not discover anything major you are still trying to benefit from this.
If I would be you I would think of consequences this can have.
If you would be a serious developer you would work out your About page as well. Or is this really about you? What is that bunch of links there? I could give my review of those websites and it would not be positive probably, but really I don’t know if you actually worked on them or what exactly you did and how big influence you had to make changes there. So keep working on yourself and don’t post bollocks.

Wonderful customer service.  But surely when management found out what their staff had said they’d correct the situation and smooth things out with the blogosphere?

It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy in corresponding with idiot bloggers, and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again. Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves, as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.

Ok… that cleared it up… Maybe they didn’t care because they knew that they were going to release some news a few days later that would knock this off the radar?  Yes, when they announced that they were thinking of instituting pay toilets on planes.

Twittering Skittles

Skittles.com has recently changed to be completely social media generated (bar the contact form).  Their site has links to their Flickr page, YouTube page, Facebook fan page and a twitter search stream on “skittles”.  Even their product pages aren’t company created, they instead point to the wikipedia pages for each product.  Their home page currently shows their ‘chatter’ page, which is the aforementioned twitter stream.

Is this innovative, risky or both?  More importantly is it working for them?  If their intention was to increase the chatter around skittles on Twitter, then I’d have to say that they’ve accomplished that as I’m seeing a lot of mentions in the feeds I’m subscribed to.  Now, as to whether that chatter is worthwhile chatter is another matter…

As for risks; right now people are having fun with the feed, writing anything they want and including skittles in the tweet.  That will naturally calm down as people get bored with it and move onto something else.  However, that doesn’t mean that someone with an agenda couldn’t disrupt this for them.  Say for example that an animal rights group decided that they wanted to publicize the fact that Skittles contains gelatin.  All they’d have to do is set up Twitter accounts and push that out every so often for it to get visibility on the Skittles home page.

Then there’s the issue of how a regular searcher would see when they hit the site.  I would think that they’ll think that there’s something wrong, or maybe even that the site’s been hacked, especially if the text on page is of an off-color nature.

For those that get social media, where’s the participation by Skittles?  All the feed shows is other people mentioning Skittles, there’s not even a mention of an official Skittles twitter account for people to follow.  This would have been an ideal opportunity to build such an account up, and have it engage with Twitterers (Tweeters?), as they do on Facebook, etc.

They’ve taken an interesting tack with their site, but I don’t think it’s the right move to make it stand-alone (sure, there’s participation on the Facebook page, but that’s not the focus of the site).  Ideally there should be at least a content wrapper around the site, explaining why the site is structured this way, and how people can interact with it, and with the people at Skittles.

ADDITIONAL: After writing this post, Skittles moved the Twitter feed off their home page, and instead made the Facebook page display as the default page.

So, who’s Stuart Slann, why does he need advice, and why from us?

Stuart is an Englishman who decided to cheat on his wife with a Scottish woman he met on Facebook.  Affairs of the heart are things that happen all of the time, the world over, so what’s special about this one?  Well, the ‘woman’ turned out to be 2 men that had met Stuart on holiday in Mexico several months earlier.

Back then, they’d got into an argument over their soccer teams, which ended with the 2 Liverpool-supporters throwing Manchester-United-supporting Stuart (sporting a broken ankle and rib from an earlier para- sailing incident) into the hotel pool.

Rather than letting this be the end of it, these 2 then decided upon a new way to get at Stuart, and ‘Emma’ was born.  Over the next few months, Stuart and Emma had several, increasingly intimate discussions.  This culminated in Stuart agreeing to drive 9 hours from his home in Sheffield to a remote location in Scotland outside of Aberdeen to consummate their relationship.

Upon arriving, they communicated by text, with Emma asking Stuart to take a video off himself performing a NSFW (not safe for work) act with a sex toy.  He complied and sent it to her, then waited for 3 hours for her to ‘get off work.’

At the appointed time, he received a phone call from ‘Emma’, which was where the ‘joke’ was revealed to him.   Surprisingly, he seemed to take it quite well…maybe because he realized that ultimately, he’d put himself in this position.  Sure, the 2 ‘gentlemen’ had played him, but he’d made the decision to cheat and drive 9 hours to meet someone he’d never met.

What’s happened to Stuart in the month since this happened?  Well, the 2 Liverpool fans released the tape of the phone call as a video, with the video of Stuart and the sex toy as the background.

As you may imagine, this has been picked up by quite a few news sources – from international newspapers, to blogs, to soccer sites.  Many talk about the cruelty of the prank, but all of them giving the facts, talk about what happened to Stuart, and link to the video.  A Google search for “Stuart Slann” returns 702,000 results.  I went through the first 100 to see what was out there… and not 1 was unrelated.  Everything was about tale of deceit and treachery (that applies to both parties).

Reputation management wise, Stuart has one heck of a job on his hands.  With hundreds / thousands of pages that talk about him, some on very respected news sites, and the video having over 500k views…what should he do?  Can he do anything that will get rid of all of this?

Well, honestly, not really.  He has 2 options at this point.  The first of those is to lie low, and just wait until the story dies down.  Some of those articles will fade from the search results; as some sites expire their stories, with some fading due as their postings become stale over time.  However, in all likelihood, there are probably still going to be quite a few that stick around for his name – for the next time a new employer wants to find out about him or a potential girlfriend wants to check him out (his wife left him after the story broke).  Sure, he can build up sites and profiles for his name to push them off the front page, or even further down.  But, it’s going to take time and effort.

Stuart’s second option is to embrace it, sell his story to the press, and make some short-term cash off his experience.  Everyone knows about it, his marriage is over, so why not get his side of the story out…(not that it would particularly alter the search results given that the story that’s out now is apparently fairly accurate)?

Personal reputation management is a concern that everyone should have. Anything that you do can and may be used against you by anyone.  It’s all well and good believing nothing can happen to you in a protected community, where only your approved friends can see what you’ve said or posted.  But, all it takes is one upset friend or a fake friend to take what you’ve done and put it elsewhere.  Suddenly, you’re ruined.  Your boss finds out what you said about him.  Your spouse finds out about the pictures of you and your co-worker at the company party, etc.

Everyone has done and said things that they don’t want others to know about.  But, in this instant, connected world; there’s more of a danger than ever before that the lid of your personal Pandora’s box will open up and everything gets out…never to be placed back in the box.

So, think before you share.  Think before you put it on the Web.  Think before you post that photo.

…and most definitely, think before you video yourself with a sex toy to send to a person you’ve never met…

Facebook owns you!! That’s right.  Everything you’ve ever put on Facebook can be used by Facebook however they please.  Think by closing your account everything will go away?  Wrong.  It’s now property of Facebook FOREVER!!

On February 4th, Facebook updated its Terms of Service (TOS) to basically take away any rights you have to any content you’ve added to Facebook or any other information you’ve provided them.  Consumerist.com has a nice write up on the changes to the TOS and it looks like Facebook may have a growing backlash to the changes they’ve made.  Twitter is a buzz (or should I say a tweeting) about the topic and over on Digg, the consumerist.com article is one of the most digged articles in the last 24 hours.  There is also a Facebook group that has formed and is exploding with new members. 

It will be interesting to see if Facebook listens to its users whom they depend on for success or ignore the growing backlash and keep the changes to their TOS.  One thing is for certain…now you never really know for sure what’s going to happen with your content once you’ve uploaded it to your Facebook profile.     

So, the next time you’re about to upload new pictures, videos, or other content – take a second and think if it’s really something you want to make available now and more importantly, forever!

Back in the first post of 2008 on this blog, I predicted that 2008 would be the year of Reputation Management.  Given the trends we’d seen in customer referrals, it seemed like a pretty safe bet. 

Over the course of the year, we did indeed gain some buzz monitoring / reputation management contracts, which we successfully completed.  However, reputation management was not an over-riding discussion point throughout the year.  Just as Local Search wasn’t in 2006 or Mobile Search in 2007, it was just a part of the bigger picture of internet marketing.  Although, you could say that each was indeed a larger part of that picture by the end of each of those years.

SEO and potentially, PPC can be large parts of your reputation management solution, social media involvement can help your SEO and reputation management, and so on and so forth.  What you really need to look at for 2009 is that bigger picture.  Where does everything fit together?  Where are the holes in your internet marketing plan?  Where should you focus your budget, and how flexible can you make your spend?

In 2009, what I’d like you to do is not to focus on the shining promise of ‘the next new thing’ at the expense of everything that’s already working for you.  But instead, keep an eye out for the potential of that next new thing, and be prepared to test and see if it can / will work for you, either now or in the future, and how it plugs in with what you’re doing now.

There have been several instances of companies using social media to apologize for their mistakes, whether for a policy, or product, or a situation that they were responsible for, either directly or indirectly.  Whether it’s the CEO of Jet Blue apologizing for leaving their customers stranded on the runway, or Google saying sorry for an email outage, companies recognize that by saying sorry, they can head off a potential reputation management nightmare, and engage their customers at the same time.

Today, I came across an example of a city using social media for the same thing.  Napoli, in Italy, has a soccer team that’s currently enjoying what looks like their best season for ~ 15 years.  One of their star players is a Slovakian gentleman named Marek Hamsik, who has been linked with a big money move to teams across Europe. 

Last Thursday, Mr. Hamsik was out for a stroll when he was robbed at gunpoint of 800 Euros, and his Rolex watch.  Fearful that this would hasten his departure, and perhaps doom their season;  fans of the Napoli team jumped onto Facebook and created a group with the sole purpose of saying “Sorry.”  Four days later, this group has over 4400  members all wanting to apologize, and let him know that the regular people of Napoli don’t condone what happened.

Marek Hamsik has responded by saying that he’s just looking to put the incident behind him.  And, when told of the Facebook groups that have sprung up about this situation he said “Don’t worry, I am not leaving.” 

It’s doubtful that the one incident would have forced him to relocate, after all … there are robbers with guns in most major cities around the world.  But, when one of the major European clubs comes in with an offer for his services, he may now stop and think about the support he received from the Napoli fans as they came together on Social Media sites.  And maybe, just maybe, that’ll be enough to keep him in the blue of Napoli, at least until the end of the season.

“Twitter isn’t something that we plan to use right now.”

“We don’t have the resources to invest in a site like Digg or Mixx.”

“Plurk? Never heard of it, not something that we want to bother with until it reaches some kind of critical mass.”

Do any of these sound familiar? These aren’t a problem.  Not every company is ready for each social network, and not every social network is ready for your company. It may be that your company and social networks (some or all) never meet, because they’re just not a real fit.  So, what’s my point with this post?

Even if your company decides not to use a social network, you should make sure to secure your brand on each through user names. Because, if you don’t, the chance is that someone else will.  And, the potential is that that someone may be a detractor, someone who dislikes your brand, and uses that profile to spread messages contrary to your corporate message.

True, when you notice that someone is doing that you can, depending on the strength of our brand and the policies of the social network in question, have them turn that ID over to you  But, damage to your reputation may already be done.

So, you need to go out to social networks and secure your brand name(s). …and you might want to point this post out to a certain former President…