Frontiering Talk

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?

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

Widgets are all the rage, and it’s no surprise to me that many new businesses are creating business models on the creation of them.

Gydget is one such company, and it focused around creating Widgets to promote musical artists.

Not only is it a great way for people to show their support for their favourite artist, it’s also a tool for sporting clubs or brands to engage their passionate fans in the promotion of their products.
Here’s a test Gydget i have setup which includes the RSS feed from this blog, a video from youtube, as well as a test event.

Alvin and the Chipmunks is a new movie to be released on Dec 14th.  To promote the movie, the Oddcast software has been used to create quite a unique promotional microsite. The site is called Munkyourself and allows consumers to create a mashup of a chipmunk animated character generated combined with your own voice recording which is of course modified to sound like a chipmunk.

Perspective: The technology is very clever, and the site is simple to use, and allows you to send links or embed the result in your site as I have done below. I like this offering as it has strong ties to the movie.

Tags: , Frontiering Campaigns, movies

Cleanscores is a new site which links Google maps with the cleanliness of a restaurant rating.

It’s currently reviewing restaurants in LA and San Francisco and is indicative of a trend towards empowering consumers to rate products and services. I expect to see more and more consumable items being both reviewed and commented online, providing assistance to would-be purchasers.

Tags: Frontiering Products, Word of Mouth

Perhaps because alcohol products have had greater restrictions advertising on mainstream channels and therefore have had more time to experiment with other levers. But it is now more evident with the announcement that Jim Beam’s CMO Rory Finlay is committed to refocusing it’s advertising budget into activities aimed at generating Word of mouth.

Word of mouth marketing is not new. It started around the camp-fire when people debated over what were the best hunting tools, and conversations continued into market places where trade flourished. But since the invention of the TV, which radically changed the way brands spoke to consumers, many big brands have either forgotten or ignored the levers that drive word of mouth marketing.

Perspective: The science of how you measure word of mouth marketing is still in it’s infancy, and no doubt organisations like WOMMA will continue to promote various metrics to try to standardise the way word of mouth can be measured. But there are some quite simple initiatives that marketeers can do to maximise the word of mouth marketing effect of their campaigns.

Here’s a check-list that it worth considering as part of every campaign or activity, which should help you enhance the word of mouth marketing impact.
1. What conversations will this campaign drive?
e.g new product feature discussions, boasting about the experience, will they be category discussions or specific to your brand?
2. What mediums will these conversations use?
e.g. at an event, on an online discussion group, social networking commentary, dinner table discussions
3. How can we make it easier for these conversations to take place?
e.g. Can you provide photos of an event that consumers can download and post to their social networks?
4. What can I do to monitor some of these conversations? (one of the easiest success measures is an increase in online discussions that unlike tacit conversations are recorded. Hint, you need to know what the existing conversational levels are to measure a change, so if you don’t have an online monitoring service, consider starting one.
5. Testing
Can I test the campaign’s word of mouth impact before hand or with a smaller sample? For example, run the campaign in an area where you can more easily measure the impact, this will provide an opportunity to make any changes before a major launch.
6. Incentives
What incentives can I give people to share the conversations with others, and what ways are there to reward this? Are there opportunities to allow people to create Consumer generated content to express their opinions.
7. Involve your staff.
Can you utilise your existing employees to generate conversations related to the campaign?
8. Call to action
Does the campaign have calls to action which allow people to sign up to special offers?
9. Use your evangelists.
Do you have a record of brand advocates, or a loyalty program, and if so, have you involved them or made them aware of the campaign? if you don’t, then use this campaign to start a database.
10. Evaluate the results
Make sure you learn from the results, get into the habit of asking these questions before the campaign is designed, so you can change where necessary.

Tags: News, Social Network, WOM, Word of Mouth

Google in Australia have launched a doodle 4 google competition which encourages school aged kids to design their own Google icon based around an Australian theme.

Consumers will have a chance to vote for their favourite entries, and the overall winner will have their doodle featured on the Google Australia homepage on Australia Day 2008.

Perspective: This is a nice touch by Google to promote their business with schools and also to encourage participatory consumer generated media.

Update: here’s a youtube video of Australian kids talking about the contest

This is the presentation that I gave at Adtech Shanghai

[slideshare id=176617&doc=frontiering-for-ad-tech-1195795916588180-2&w=425]

Tags: adtech

101 2 litre bottles of Diet Coke + 523 Methos mints = One cool science experiment

These videos are hosted by Revver, which is a consumer generated video site that includes ads and shares the revenue 50/50 with the video creator. In this case there is a Menthos ad at the end which almost summarises the whole essence of the mint.

See the current Menthos Ad which interestingly enough has a guy who sneezes and mistakingly shaves off a little hair from the guy. He ponders the repurcussions until his friend helps him come out clean.

Perspective: Consumers are freely trading their time to watch these videos, and in this case Menthos gets to communicate it’s product while benefiting from the viral aspects.

Here’s a clever way to use your consumers to market your product to their friends.
You provide them with a simple widget that they can paste into their Myspace page which provides them with active content on a subject they are passionate about.

That’s exactly what Roller Warehouse have done with this Rolling News Widget. The news widget scrolls current Roller Skating News from the Aggressive Skate Blog.

As an additional incentive, consumers who post this Widget on their Myspace are entitled to a 5% discount.

Perspective: What information can you give your passionate consumers in a easy to use way like this?

via Technology Evangelist

Tags: WOM