emergencemarketing.com

Reveries.com conducted a survey on the potential of social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Myspace as media for marketing activities (pdf download of survey summary results and analysis are here). The main finding seems to be that marketers are in the very early stages of truly understanding the potential of these new networks – with only 18% of the respondents calling the potential of online social networks as a medium for marketing “huge”.

Other interesting tidbits from the survey include the fact that marketers see “word of mouth” as the most promising aspect of social networking sites, and that many pointed out that marketers should participate in the conversations that take place on those sites without interrupting them.

Unfortunately, the reality is that many spammers have already invaded Facebook, Myspace and other similar sites. Go check the walls of the most popular interest groups in Facebook to see for yourself – many are littered with posts that are total sales pitches or with information that is totally irrelevant to the group’s conversation.

[Tags: marketing social networking conversational marketing social media facebook myspace linkedin]

Pete Blackshaw has a great post on the value of a FaceBook group which has 53,395 members who are self-proclaimed Starbucks “addicts.” Taking into consideration the Word of Mouth effect, he estimates the value of this advocacy group at $100M.

Debi Jones from Mobilejones.com has a great article on attention and the mobile web 2.0. With mobile phone operators knowing exactly who you are, and increasingly knowing where you are, the mobile user click stream is rapidly becoming much more valuable than regular web user click streams. Look for powerful datamining capabilities coming to mobile operators to help marketers take advantage of this goldmine – and for bad marketers to pester you with spam on your mobile phone…

What do you think happens when a geek decides that he spent too much time in the office, and quits to go travel around the world with his son?

(here is a link to the video for the RSS subscribers)

6,500,000 million views on YouTube, a sponsor paying him to do it again…fame!

Very cool.

Here is another great example of consumers making the ads for large companies – in this case McDonald.

Notice – almost 5,000,000 viewers so far!
(link to video here for RSS subscribers)

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]

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 thought I was buying quality and reliabilty.” (07/27/06)
• “Like some other people, I decided I shall never buy or even hire a Mercedes car again.” (06/22/06)
• “Funny that I stumbled on your site googling MZB’s home office customer service…I should have learned my lesson the first time. I will never lease/own a Mercedes again. They do not stand behind their quality, or service. I hope people read this and take notes.” (05/26/06)
• “I’ve run an independent MB repair shop for over 20 years & believed in the quality of their cars…until now. I’m loosing customers left & right. I can’t, in good concious, recommend a new merecedes to my loyal customers, some have been with me since I started & wish to keep me as their mechanic.I am seriously thinking of switching to Lexus,since Mercedes stated this is the car it will try to get as good as by 2009.” (04/22/06)

There is no way that these stories could have affected that many people over such a long period of time in the off-line world.

[Tags: Mercedes Mercedes customer satisfaction consumer generated content word of mouth wom customer service]

AdAge today picked on the recent corporate ode to the Bank Of America and MBNA merger, which was caught on video, uploaded to YouTube and viewed hundreds of thousands of times- calling it a “Ghastly Brand Embarassment,” and saying “you’ll feel a deep-seated embarrassment unparalleled since you were caught in flagrante by your girlfriend’s father.”

I think we called the other kind of CGC – Corporate Generated Crap.

[Tags: cgc viral marketing consumer+generated+content cgm]

This is a great CGM piece on the last elections (via Susan Getgood)

Thankfully a marketer at Lexus did…and it works great – sort off…(see movie)

I just found this clip over at Servant of Chaos, where the author wonders if this truly qualifies as consumer generated content or whether it amounts to culture pollution.

Maybe it’s a different kind of CGC all together – corporate generated crap.

[Tags: cgc viral marketing consumer+generated+content cgm]