Emergence Marketing

Posted by francois at 7:45 AM

Ridiculous Business Jargon Dictionary to the rescue of non corporate jargon users

The Ridiculous Business Jargon Dictionary has some interesting definitions for those of us who are not all that familiar with corporate speak (via lifehack.org). Here are some favorites:

Assmosis [v.] The apparent absorption of success that comes from sucking up.

Blamestorming [v.] Meeting to discuss a failure and find a scapegoat.

Bouncebackability [adj.] The ability to reverse a losing situation and then succeed.

Head shunting [v.] The secret hiring of a head hunter to persuade an ineffectual employee to take a position at another firm. Nicely eliminates the mess of having to fire someone.

Prairie dogging [v.] The simultaneous pop-up of several heads when something interesting is happening around cubicles.

Presenteeism [n.] The practice of working ridiculously long hours.

Zerotasking [v.] Doing nothing.

Posted by francois at 6:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts

January 30, 2007

More research on viral marketing - and supporting the limited role of "influentials"

Right on the heels of learning that the influentials may in fact not be all that influential in causing trends and other social "epidemics", here comes more research (pdf) confirming the limited role of the influentials and heeding marketers that some viral marketing techniques could easily backfire on them.

Jure Leskoved from Carnegie Mellon, Lada Adamic from the University of Michigan and Bernardo Huberman from HP Labs collaborated on this research project where they looked at the dynamics of viral marketing.

Here are some of their findings:

• We find that most recommendation chains do not grow very large, often terminating with the initial purchase of a product.


• Marketers should take heed that providing excessive incentives for customers to recommend
  
• product purchases are not far from usual 80-20 rule (the top twenty percent of the products account for 20 percent of the sales), with the top 20% of the products contributing to about half the sales


• individuals' likelihood of purchasing a product initially increases as they receive additional recommendations for it, but a saturation point is quickly reached. Interestingly, as more recommendations are sent between the same two individuals, the likelihood that they will be heeded decreases


• Marketers should take heed that providing excessive incentives for customers to recommend products could backfire by weakening the credibility of the very same links they are trying to take advantage of.


• ...we find that the probability of purchasing a product increases with the number of recommendations received, but quickly saturates to a constant and relatively low probability. This means individuals are often impervious to the recommendations of their friends, and resist buying items that they do not want.


• we find that there are limits to how influential high degree nodes are in the recommendation network. As a person sends out more and more recommendations past a certain number for a product, the success per recommendation declines. This would seem to indicate that individuals have influence over a few of their friends, but not everybody they know.


• Finally, we presented a model which shows that smaller and more tightly knit groups tend to be more conducive to viral marketing.

This paper also exposes the potential long term negative effects of commercializing relationships on the value of personal recommendations and word of mouth in general - a practice used aggressively by some well known marketers.

[Tags: influentials viral marketing trends social networks word-of-mouth WOM]

Posted by francois at 6:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts

links for 2007-01-30

• The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas for 2007
  Great list of ideas by leading thinkers - open till the end of February
  (tags: idea)
• eBay Australia: New Life for Sale!! (item 110078904033, end time 23-Jan-07 15:11:00 AEDST)
  Buying someone's "life" on eBay
  (tags: identity ebay)

Posted by delicious at 3:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts

January 29, 2007

Cool piece of CGM

This is pretty cool (via Crunchnotes)

Posted by francois at 2:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts

Breakthrough ideas for 2007

The Harvard Business Review just released their annual survey of emerging ideas (free until Feb 26th). It is a great read with some real cool nuggets of ideas (via O'Reilly Radar).

Some of my favorites include:

• "...influentials have far less impact on social epidemics than is generally supposed. In fact, they don't seem to be required at all." - Duncan Watts, reporting on recent research he conducted on the role of influentials in trends and other social epidemics.


• "Today, customers aren’t just voicing their needs to companies that are willing to listen; they’re inventing and often building what they want." - Eric Von Hippel, reporting on research that shows that the 70% to 80% of new product development that fails does so not for lack of advanced technology but because of a failure to understand users’ needs.


• "As businesses respond to this backlash—as they consider management styles and marketing messages that effectively meet people’s needs for relief from continuous partial attention and the sensory overload it creates—they can differentiate themselves by offering what their employees and customers increasingly crave: discriminating choices and quality of life." - Linda Stone, reporting on living with continuous partial attention.


• "By almost any measure, the larger a city’s population, the greater the innovation and wealth creation per person." - Geoffrey West, reporting on recent research that found a general mathematical relationships between population size, innovation, and wealth creation.


• "People who are social, religious, or political conservatives tend to have more children...In the United States, for example, fertility rates are 12% higher in states that voted for George W. Bush in the most recent presidential election than in the more liberal and secular states that supported his opponent." - Philip Longman, reporting on research that shows that we are headed for a more conservative period worldwide (YIKES!)


• "...the key to getting payback on investment in a network is to think hard about exactly what kind of value you want the network to create. In other words, you must put the work in “network” first." - Chris Meyers arguing that "work" needs to be at the center of collaborative environments to predictably succeed (something we clearly found when studying successful collaboration teams & projects amongst eRoom customers.)

[Tags: influentials conservatism consumer generated innovation woinnovation attention work]

Posted by francois at 8:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts

January 28, 2007

links for 2007-01-28

• Exploring Life Extension - Google Video
  Interesting documentary about life extension
  (tags: immortality)

Posted by delicious at 3:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts

January 27, 2007

Size does not matter

This is a great ad for the new Golf GTI with its tiny engine that still produces plenty of horsepower...(via the thinking blog)

Posted by francois at 6:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts

links for 2007-01-27

• New ROI of blogging report from Forrester
  Great way to develop an ROI for externally facing blogs
  (tags: blogs roi)

Posted by delicious at 3:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts

January 26, 2007

Skypecast did not work...so we recorded a Skype interview

The Skypecast session with Sylvia Marino from Edmunds that was scheduled for today did not work. Since I knew that many people would want to hear her story, we recorded a Skype interview which I posted on The Future of Communities blog.

I apologize for the technology failure and if Skype can fix their problem - which happened twice now - we will resume our series of Skypecasts. For now we will continue to do Podcasts.

Posted by francois at 4:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts

January 25, 2007

Skypecast - How Edmunds Leverages Wisdom of Crowds

Tomorrow, Friday (1/26) at 2pm ET, we will be holding our first Skypecast conversation leading up to the Community 2.0 conference. This one will be with Sylvia Marino, the Executive Director for CarSpace at Edmunds. Sylvia is responsible for all consumer-generated content and interaction on three web sites that make up the Edmunds Automotive Network: Edmunds.com, Inside Line and CarSpace. Additionally, Sylvia oversees all aspects of design, features, business operations and strategy for CarSpace, the online automotive social network for car and truck enthusiasts.

This discussion will center around how Edmunds is leveraging the wisdom of crowds in their business.

The Skypecast will be recorded and posted on the future of communities blog. During the Skypecast we will open up the mic for questions from the audience, but if you have any questions and will not be able to attend, or would prefer us to ask the questions, please put them in the comment section of this post.

[Tags: communities community management wisdom of crowds community 2.0]

Posted by francois at 6:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts

January 24, 2007

Online word of mouth is much more powerful (or dangerous) than offline word of mouth

The latest issue of Revenue magazine has an article on the impact of online research on off-line purchases. Quoting from comScore Networks research they found that in the "toy and hobby" category, 42% of people who did online research bought a product directly related to that research - except that 88% of those people made their purchase off-line and only 12% made their purchase online. In the Consumer electronics space, 18% bought based on online research - but 93% of those bought off-line.

Quoting from Opinion Research, they found that "77% of people who do online research before buying a product purchase something when they went to the store the last time they did online research," with "over half (52%) purchased just the item they did research on, while another 18% purchased that item and additional items."

Another Research paper, this one from Perfomics is quoted as saying that "the majority of consumers conduct research online during his year's holiday season and 43% plan to make both online and offline purchases based on that research." It goes further to say that "the majority of consumers become more brand- sensitive after conducting online research."

That pretty much confirms that unlike what some analyst firms pretend, online word of mouth has the potential of being much more effective or dangerous than off-line word of mouth.

Take the personal example of Mercedes Benz which was well documented on this site (Mercedes - a case study on how to squander a great brand, Mercedes says that cars fail in the first 50K miles - after that it's the fault driver, Mercedes Benz does not care about its customers, and Mercedes Benz - poor customer service ROI). For a long while, those rants came out on the top of a variety of Google searches. So if half of the potential buyers do online research before buying, a disproportionate number of them will run into my online rants and at least pause, if not decide against buying this product. The online negative word of mouth reaches a much larger audience than any off-line word of mouth recommendation would have, plus it spans over a much longer period of time, and it also attracts additional negative word of mouth, which only makes the case stronger!

As an example, witness some of the comment excerpts that are still being made on those stories on a regular basis:

• "Just read your blog, Just decided not to purchase a 60K Mercedes I was looking to buy." (01/04/07)


• "I drive a C180 classic kompressor 52 plate with 35K on the clock. Since day of purchase in Feb 06 the colland warning light comes on every few days. The feeder hose has been replaced, the cap and the head gaskett and still the coolant light comes on every few days. My local MB dealership are at a loss what else to do." (11/21/06)


• "I for one will never buy a Mercedes Car again and will continue to discourage others from doing so" (11/07/06)


• "I PURCHASED MERCEDES ML 350, 2006 IN APRIL 2006. FROM DRIVER'S SEAT, THE LEFT SIDE VIEW MIRROR IS ONLY PARTIALLY VISIBLE! I SHOWED THIS TO HBL DEALERSHIP IN TYSONS CORNER VIRGINIA, AND THEY AGREED TO THIS DESIGN ISSUE, WHIC CANNOT BE FIXED, EVEN IF IT IS A SAFETY HAZARD...THE BEST REMEDY IS TO SHUT OFF THE AC DUCTS ON BOTH DRIVER AND PASSGENGER SIDE! THIS IS THE RESPONSE I GOT, FOR PAYING HIGH PRICE FOR THIS EXPENSIVE CAR " (11/03/06)


• "I like most people who feel badly let down by MB will never buy another car from them, I