Frontiering Talk

Fleishman-Hillard Inc. and Harris Interactive have published an excellent white paper which examines how the internet influences the modern consumer.

The study is titled  “Digital Life Index Study”  and highlights how the internet influences shopping behaviours, making particular comparisons between the UK, Germany and France.

4 key insights of the study were:-

Digital Influence:

The Internet is by far the most important medium in the lives of European consumers — but companies are underinvesting in that influence.

Behavioural Framework: Consumer use of the Internet falls into five distinct classes of behaviours. 

Research, Communication, Commerce are the 3 more established behaviours. 
In the expanding web 2.0 environment Consumer Generated Content is rapidly rising in importance. 
The 5th behaviour is consuming Internet content on Mobile devices.
Smart marketers will clearly understand the mix of behaviours that is most critical to their business — and formulate integrated campaigns to address that mix.

Consumers use the Internet in different ways to make different decisions.

The differences are driven by the impact of the decision on their lives and the range of available choices. e.g. Buying commoditised items like airline tickets are made with less consultation with online consumers than choices that have higher personal impact such as healthcare, or major electronic purchases.

Consumers see the clear benefits of the Internet to their lives, but they still have strong concerns that need to be addressed.

Clearly consumers recognise the value of the internet as a medium, but are also voicing concerns over internet safety.

A new social network has launched in Australia which hopes to address some of the key insights from online social media research.

Vibe Village is a social network which is hoping to connect brands to social influencers, by targeting 3 needs.

Being First.

I still remember running home to tell my brothers that I had found a way to get through the lane way at the back of my house, only to be disappointed when it became apparent that the news wasn’t news to them.

One of the key motivators for research and discovery is to be one of the first to know about a certain product, service.  Being First can be a relative concept, for example there is only one Neil Armstrong.  Yet, it’s much more common to be the first person in our social group to communicate a new fact.

Free stuff.

We all like stuff for free, so much so that we are almost suspicious when we are offered free things.  Vibe Village lets its members chose products that match their interests, offering programs that members can register for, and obtain free stuff such as advance copies of soon to be released DVD’s and new innovative products.

Share and Shape.

Members are encouraged to shape the innovation of products by being given a direct voice to products, and are also given opportunities to share news by hosting parties.

In today’s world of advertising clutter, it’s more and more difficult to get your message in the hands of the people who can provide a genuine word of mouth communication.  Vibe Village is attempting to provide a targeted solution for brands wanting to recruit product evangelists, by providing access to individuals who are passionate about your category. 

Disclosure: Vibe Village has been a client of Frontiering

When I was young, radio shows such as American Top 40, or Billboard were the established authorities on determining the most popular artist or album.
The internet has revolutionised the distribution of music and it’s no surprise that there is no shortage of innovation in the delivery of informational services.

Recognising that popularity includes discussions, consumption as well as purchase, the BBC has created an index of bands and tracks.

The index is updated every 6 hours, using IBM’s Semantic Super Computing which scans sites such MySpace, Bebo, Last.fm, iTunes, Google, YouTube, monitoring conversations, music listened to, artists watched, and songs downloaded, to establish the most popular 1000 artists and tracks on the web.

The more conversations an artist or song receives and the more it is is downloaded or played, the higher up the Sound Index they are listed.

The Sound Index can also be filtered based on genre, location of people and age group.

Whilst you are unable to “click through” to the actual conversations for a given artist, this index represents a good indicator of their marketing performance.

I can see these type of measures being applied to almost any industry or category. The Food Index, The Restaurant Index, even the Agency Index.
Are you monitoring what is being said about your brand or service?

Social Media is becoming an important channel for hosting conversations as evidenced by US presidential candidate Barack Obama’s  response to an invitation by a leading social women’s network BlogHer.

Obama sat with BlogHer on Sunday to answer key policy questions developed by this community of bloggers specifically for 2008 presidential candidates.

Blogher is one of the largest collection of blogs by women, and therefore a ripe audience of influential people that brands should include in their communication plans.

Mike Murphy VP Media Sales Facebook (x-Yahoo) gave today’s keynote address and spoke on the Power of Social Media for Brands.  Some key take outs.

Facebook Australia Statistics
- now have 2.2 million
- that is 1 in 5 Australia people online.

Mike talked around the frequency of how Brands are mentioned in conversations without incentives.
For example, there are
- 118000 mentions of McDonalds
- 7000 mentions of Ikea in their profile

Polls
You can now run polls on Facebook, and in this example people were asked on their preference for Vegimite, Marmite or neither), and in 14 mins over 500 responses were received.

Trust and influence
People are discovering their friends various passion points, and this is being used to influence purchasing behaviour, as well as close friends being trusted for all topics.

Value of online media
Mike showed some examples of branded online media
Ali versus Ali (addidas)
Aussie Week (which was is a clever travel log showing real people experiencing Australia)

Distribution through Conversation
Mike talked through the social graph to explain social networking

Media spend
4 to 5 % of budgets are being spent online in Australia versus 25% in the US
He appealed to the industry to find better ways to measure engagement

Examples of companies doing social media right
1. Be a part of the experience
Gillette Venus Breeze razors, which asked women to interact with experiences

2. Maintain a daily dialogue
JP Morgan / Chase bank.
- Asked collegue students what was important to them in a credit card
- Results suggested that points were important, but that they didn’t feel they would accumulate enough points
- Chase responded with an application that enabled student to accumulate points together and then you could see how many points your network has
- This was the most successful credit card campaign that Chase has done

3. Give a reason to share
Cloverfield movie .. created a facebook application which could run as a widget on users pages.

What makes social media different and exciting? (some quotes from leading US ad execs)
- The power of conversation
- Like the difference between leaving a voice mail and the other person picking up and talking
- Putting your brand out their and letting people contribute to it
- How do you listen and engage consumer needs … over and above your brand needs
- Creating a fair value exchange - experience for their attention

Guinness book of records has just gone social, by adding an online community to their web site.

This will allow record holders, or those who "want to be", as well as fans to share videos, photos, audio and stories. Visitors can also create their own profile page including blog entries.

The site will allow discussion around actual record attempts ahead of the annual book publication. 

The community section is powered by KickApps and Guiness hopes the site will help to identify new record breaking talent.

Here’s an example of a photo submitted by John Evans who in his words says "Hello, I have been on more Guinness prometime and in the Guinness book in the last 14 years than any other record holder. Go onto Guinness videos and then strongest to see two videos of me car balancing and keg balancing."

Whilst it isn’t evident yet, Guiness could build this community by running online community powered contests.  I’d also like to see them allow members the ability to embed their content in other social networks.

Mattel and Hasbro who the worldwide rights to the Scrabble game are suing the creators of Scrabulous, one of Facebook’s most popular applications for copyright infringement.

Scrabulous attracts over 600,000 daily users and nets the 20-something Indian brothers who created the application, $25,000 worth of advertising each month.  So Hasbro has asked Facebook to take down Scrabulous.

This is where Legal deparments don’t understand social networks.

• The Scrabulous fans are passionate about the game and are not happy about Hasbro’s heavy handedness.
• Already, there are over 55,000 members in a Save Scrabulous Facebook Group that are talking of a boycott of all Mattel and Hasbro products.

So what should Hasbro and Matel do instead ?

• Consider buying Scrabulous and use the passionate fans to evangelise scrabble as a learning game.
• Hire the Scrabulous creators to develop online versions for other social networks.
• Sponsor competitions of the online game.
• Allow fans to create personalised scrabble games which they can design online.

My virtual model gives consumers the ability to try things on, before buying.

You enter in your measurements, upload your face and presto .. now you can see what you would look like before purchasing. Brands such as Speedo, H&M, Sears, Lands End, Best Buy and Marie Claire are represented.

In addition, the site allows you to share and comment on saved outfits to tap into others opinions.

To expand this capability it is now offered as a Facebook Application.

The site is not the fastest, so a little patience is required, but I can see the appeal to overcome some of the unknowns about purchasing clothes. I suspect technologies like this will only get better.

It would be great if they opened up their API (for turning designs into virtual clothing), as this would allow individual designers to upload their own outfits. I also think is a taste of how you might be able to integrate selling fashion with entertainment. Imagine watching a movie, and then clicking on an actor/actress to add their outfit to your virtual model, get some input from your social network before deciding to purchase !

Tags: retail

Don’t you hate it when you hire a DVD and it’s just not your kind of movie.

Social networks such Criticker and Filmtrust are helping and it’s no surprise that a company who’s very business is about renting movies is trying to improve the “success rate” of hire versus like ratio.

Netflix have announced a contest where the prize is $1 million, to the person or team that can create a better system for improving their movie predictions system.

I love their contest and they describe it here.

Netflix is all about connecting people to the movies they love. To help customers find those movies, we’ve developed our world-class movie recommendation system: Cinematch. Now there are a lot of interesting alternative approaches to how Cinematch works that we haven’t tried. We’re curious whether any of these can beat Cinematch by making better predictions.

So, we thought we’d make a contest out of finding the answer. It’s ‘easy’, really. We provide you with a lot of anonymous rating data, and a prediction accuracy bar that is 10% better than what Cinematch can do on the same training data set. If you develop a system that we judge most beats that bar on the qualifying test set we provide, you get serious money and the bragging rights. But (and you knew there would be a catch, right?) only if you share your method with us and describe to the world how you did it and why it works. To keep things interesting, in addition to the Grand Prize, we’re also offering a USD 50,000 Progress Prize each year the contest runs. It goes to the team whose system we judge shows the most improvement over the previous year’s best accuracy bar on the same qualifying test set. No improvement, no prize.

They even have a leader board to ensure transparency of the competition, and the 2007 winner was recently announced providing a 8.43% improvement on Cinematch.

Perspective: It’s great to see companies outsource innovation in this way, and rewarding the successful innovators. There are many ways to tap into the wisdom of consumers to help with solving challenges like this, it’s just that most brands / companies aren’t prepared to let consumers in.

A new study commissioned by Nokia suggests that as much as 25% of entertainment will be created and consumed within peer communities. Coined “Circular Entertainment” by Nokia, the research interviewed 9000 trend-setting consumers in 17 countries about their digital behaviors. The study entitled ‘A Glimpse of the Next Episode’ was conducted by The Future Laboratory.

Tom Savigar, Trends Director at The Future Laboratory suggests

Consumers are increasingly demanding their entertainment be truly immersive, engaging and collaborative. Whereas once the act of watching, reading and hearing entertainment was passive, consumers now and in the future will be active and unrestrained by the ubiquitous nature of circular entertainment. Key to this evolution is consumers’ basic human desire to compare and contrast, create and communicate. We believe the next episode promises to deliver the democracy politics can only dream of.”

Some of the key results were

Of the 9,000 consumers we surveyed:
- 23% buy movies in digital format
- 35% buy music on MP3 files
- 25% buy music on mobile devices
- 39% watch TV on the internet
- 23% watch TV on mobile devices
- 46% regularly use IM, 37% on a mobile device
- 29% regularly blog
- 28% regularly access social networking sites
- 22% connect using technologies such as Skype
- 17% take part in Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games
- 17% upload to the internet from a mobile device

These results are not surprising, and it does suggest that it will be more difficult for brands to communicate as these trends grow.
Certainly the methods used will have to change, and recommendations from trusted communities will surely play an increased role in driving behaviour.

Listening to consumers is a key prerequisite before brands can be effective in “Joining the Conversations”.

Commuispace has released a study titled Meeting Business Needs by Meeting Social Needs, which examines the 6 social needs that people seek in social networks.

1. Expressing personal identity: online social networks provide people with the ultimate tool for defining and redefining themselves, as evidenced in profile pages on Facebook and MySpace.

2. Status and self-esteem: the need for autonomy, recognition and achievement are essential to our sense of self-worth and are fulfilled in online communities, blogs, and social networks that provide a way to develop and manage a virtual reputation.

3. Giving and getting help: people have a need to both seek and provide help to others. Mutual assistance between strangers is a phenomenon that has been uniquely enabled by the Internet.

4. Affiliation and belonging: online communities are becoming the way people find, create and connect with others “just like me” – people who share similar tastes, sensibilities, orientations or interests.

5. Sense of community: a sense of belonging or affiliation alone is not equivalent to a true sense of community. Achieving a real sense of community requires long-lasting reciprocal relationships and a mutual commitment to the needs of the community as a whole.
6. Reassurance of value and self worth. People want to be reassured of their worth and value, and seek confirmation that what they say and do matters to others and has an impact on the world around them.

These needs are very relevant for any company or brand that seeks to establish a community, and make an excellent benchmark to test the value of a social network. Meeting these needs helps to deliver trust and deeper insight into the community members, says the report.

Perspective: It’s very difficult for a brand to achieve these needs, as most offer limited expression for the community and fail to enlist the power of the social network to give and receive help. This reduces the feeling of affiliation and belonging, and the value of the community. That’s why most of the successful communities such as Shespeaks, Yelp, Minti are run by independant and passionate consumers rather than brands. Brands then try to engage interrupt the consumers with advertising clutter, treating the social network like any other content channel. Consumers want to be heard, and are ready to give help to be reassured of their worth and value. I wonder when brands will recognise this?

Your client makes biscuits, and their slogan is “Connect with Cookies”.  You know tv is dying and want to make a name for yourself trying something new and hip.  So you come up with the idea to create a social network around the connecting theme.

This is what Pepperidge Farm’s agency has just done with the creation of the Art of the Cookie website.   Whilst the NY times seems to love the idea, I think it is very poorly executed.

For a start the site budget was $2-3 million presumably to cover building, and advertising the site.
Whilst I do like the site design, it lakes the ability to interact and connect with others, which is afterall the basic essence of the brand.  The name of site is also confusing as I was expecting a site that discusses various ways to create art using or making cookies.  Why isn’t this site called ConnectingThroughCookies.com?

So what would I advise?  

Firstly, this isn’t a destination site and nor should it be.  The brand should be enabling connections by running or giving away Connection parties, sponsoring School Reunions, and enabling their consumers to connect (as opposed to giving them a check list of how to connect).

Provide people the tools to share connection stories, discuss them, and sharing them would be great, but why host them here?   Why not integrate the brand with existing social networks like Facebook, or Shespeaks and join the conversation rather than assuming people will want to spend their precious time coming here to read up on one persons journey across the country.    If you are going to share connections, would you be better working with a site like Meetup.com which is in the business of connecting people.

Tags: cookie, Social Network

Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV fame, talks with The Trend Junkie about building the Wine Community, transparency and the acqusition of Cork’d.

It’s an insightful video full of excellent advice for people wanting to start a community.

Tags: community, interview, Social Network, wine