Los Angeles Advertising and Marketing: The Miller Group: Strategic Marketing and Advertising

Beware of Bright Shiny Things

By Bill Williams | Published: August 24, 2010

There’s an understandable urgency among most marketers today. In large companies, where the career span of a Chief Marketing Officer is 22 months, it’s not enough to just keep pace – you have to win. In smaller companies where the marketing hat may be just one of many worn by the owner/CEO, market share bought on the cheap is essential: grow or die.

Stop Looking for the Silver Bullet

It isn’t at all surprising to see marketers of all sizes and industries rushing about “going social,” “going mobile,” “going social again.” Not that innovation, and trying new things, isn’t a good idea. Innovation is crucial to finding what works best for your prospects and your brand. But, the problem arises when the motive isn’t about trying new media or new programs, but rather about a desperate search for the silver bullet. Or, in most cases, a bullet made of a cheaper ore like mimetite. The problem arises when we fall in love with bright shiny things.

When we drive our marketing into new media purely to be an early adopter, or because people [some of them who purport to be experts] keep pushing in that direction, we’re pursuing innovation for innovation’s sake. Do you suffer from “bright shiny thing syndrome?”

Contributing writer Adam Kleinberg [6 Ways to Kill Your Marketing Career, iMedia Connection, June 30, 2010] offers five symptoms that may suggest you have this syndrome and fall too quickly in love with innovation:

“How do you know if you have this disease?

Are you feverishly planning your new iPad app without knowing why?

Do you think Foursquare mayor specials are going to replace your TV budget?

Would you like to replace company HQ with a Facebook fan page?

Are you spending more time worrying about how Twitter is going to monetize its business than how you are going to monetize your own?

Twitter, Linked In, mobile, Facebook , etc., are not for everybody. At a minimum, managed properly, they are very labor intensive. As Ian Lurie writes in Conversation Marketing, “Social media is not some phenomenon that’s unique to the online world. It is not a revolution in marketing. It is not the way to instant millions in your Inbox. It takes time.” And, it’s possible that your particular product or service is best marketed in a different environment.
But, relax: there’s no such thing as “anti social” media, so you’ll do just fine if your own marketing needs don’t automatically embrace new media.

Test and Learn

There is no social media train leaving the station. There are no social media experts. There are some people who know a lot about social media, and you may find them an asset. But, if someone says they’re a social media expert, run – don’t walk – away. Social media isn’t something new: it’s about connecting with others to get the word out, and we’ve done that forever. True, there are new tools and protocols for connectivity, but the principle has been around forever.

So, with all due respect to the new media, and understanding that companies want immediate results, may we humbly substitute “Test and Learn” for “Wait and See”?

Wait and see is an open admission that you’re willing to let others do the learning for you. It is a defeatist, risk averse, surrender. Test and Learn is trial and error: an openness to try, a recognition that not everything will be successful.

Most importantly, Test and Learn is about metrics, and if there is one thing The Miller Group believes in, it is establishing performance metrics. It’s interesting to see a lot of smart marketers move into social media as if Tweets, Followers and Fans were the key metrics. What about sales, customer retention, margins, channel management, share price, etc? Aren’t those what the original marketing purpose was all about?

You Can’t Win ‘Em All, All the Time

Failures? You’re bound to have some. If it makes you feel any better WalMart failed dismally with it’s social network site called “The Hub.” It was aimed at kids, but it turned out that informing parents of their kids’ registration was great for the parents, very uncool for the kids. Plus, Wal Mart screened content – we join social networks to express ourselves not to have our messages audited or edited. As if that weren’t enough, kids couldn’t communicate – they couldn’t leave private messages or send e-mails to each other.

Wouldn’t you think they would have thought that through before launching the site?

Or, how about golf equipment brand Titleist? They created a website for a fictional golfer and promoted it offline with TV ads in major tournaments. And, while the site wasn’t all that bad, there was no call to action for people to share content; or any incentives for them to upload music and videos which was the original plan. Apparently, the content on the site was less than average. “Okay” content won’t go viral; great content can, and sometimes, does.

But, how many times do you find yourself discussing content vs the discussions of new media channels. It’s almost as if just being there – irrespective of content – is enough.

So, in the midst of all the pressure to do something, or when the boss comes in waving an article about Twitter or Facebook, take a deep breath and avoid the temptation to rush out do something. Anything. Instead, remind yourself about how the buying process for your product or service works today, and figure out how connectivity can best serve that process. Remind everyone around you that CONTENT still matters, so unless there is something to share don’t.

And, avoid falling in love with bright shiny things. Maybe it’s better to just take some tarnish remover to the old tried and true.

Spice up Your Next Production

By Gary Bettman | Published: August 23, 2010

In a time of shrinking budgets and reduced production schedules, comes a commercial that flies in the face of so-called logic. Every college student with a video camera already knows how to shoot cheap and fast, but not necessarily good. Look what Weiden + Kennedy accomplished when they coupled great work with a decent production budget:

Their “Man Your Man Could Smell Like” Old Spice commercial has been a hit of epic proportions for all involved. It’s funny, surprising, and perfectly-calibrated. The spot started with top-notch creative and continued with terrific direction and production. And like any successful creative endeavor with a leading man (or woman), it is hard to imagine anyone but Isaiah Mustafa in the part. For months, Isaiah – and the spot – have been all over the airwaves, discussed on everything from CNN to The Today Show to The Ellen DeGeneres Show (great PR for the brand and the actor).

The spot has had over 35 million hits on YouTube and has been endlessly parodied. The commercial has spawned dozens of blogs and additional Old Spice commercials with the actor. To use the old show biz axiom, this spot has “legs.” Old Spice – which until recently could have been perceived as your father’s (or even grandfather’s) body wash – has been reinvented and rejuvenated.

So for those who are planning commercial budgets and schedules, remember that there are times when spending money, and doing it properly, really can add even more to your bottom line. An important sales note, as of late July, 2010, Old Spice sales are up 107%. That is the tangible figure. The long lasting intangibles for Old Spice are almost immeasurable.

Over the generations, people remember commercials. We could make a very long list of really memorable spots, but in many cases the viewers have not recalled the product. Case in point, the famous American Tourister luggage commercial, “Gorilla” from the 70s: http://bit.ly/90j0QI. I have been to advertising seminars and heard people in the business swear that the spot was for Samsonite.

No one, and I mean absolutely no one, will think that the Old Spice commercial is for Brute.

After almost fifteen years of being loyal to my brand scent, I am pretty sure I will give Old Spice a try. But even if I do, no matter how hard my wife stares, I will not look or sound like Isaiah Mustafa.

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They Don’t Call Them Social Media for Nothing

By Jule Henning | Published: August 22, 2010

Emotions play a huge role in effective marketing communications.

None of us acts or reacts on a purely rational basis, no matter how cold and calculating we may be. And, social media – the wellspring of user-generated content – should be richly emotional. After all, if condensing moments of our lives into 140 characters or less and broadcasting them to legions of followers doesn’t call for a little emotion, what will?

Why should this matter to business? First, as most researchers will point out, there are a wide range of emotions that lie between “Good” and “Bad.” Companies need to know the intensity with which an opinion is held. Monitoring blogs, Facebook posts, and Twitter followers may provide a sense of overall opinions and attitudes, but it’s important to know how deeply customers, prospects, or former customers hold an opinion. A new product or service may create overall satisfaction, but that shouldn’t be confused with outright delight. Which means those positive comments you’re hearing may not be strong enough to support the sales gains you’re projecting.

Here are a few tools that might help you in monitoring emotions via social media:

TweetFeel

This free analysis tool for Twitter evaluates the general mood of a tweet. TweetFeel focuses primarily on distinct words like love, hate, better, etc. Search results flow down the screen, calculated as positive or negative words. The service also offers an overall percentage number to indicate whether the majority of results are one or the other. TweetFeel can be used to find out about the emotions users are feeling towards a brand, product, service, company, and so on.

This company also offers a service called TweetFeel Biz, which uses more complex rules and algorithms for analyzing and trending data over weeks and months. It allows businesses to track, trend, compare and create stories about their brands. If you’re interested, please visit: www.TweetFeel.com / www.TweetFeel.com/biz

ContextSense

Used to analyze a website or text based on its general polarity, ContextSense’s results are displayed as a percentage between 0 (negative) and 1 (positive). ContextSense can predict conversions on a website using visitor behavior. They begin with the basic premise that the base probability of contacting is around 4.2% and every minute spent by the visitor on the ContextSense page increases the probability of contacting by 1.8%. This, of course, assumes that the interest of a visitor increases linearly with time (when in fact it may be exponential).
The most important predictor for detecting if a visitor will visit the Contact Us page turns out to be number of pages viewed by him or her. So, to get visitors interested enough to visit the Contact Us page, it is vital to have an engaging website where visitors can fully explore what you have to offer. For actual conversions (people who fill the contact us form and get in touch for more information), the time spent on the landing page turns out to be most important predictor. This shows that the landing page must match with the intent of the visitor. To learn more, visit: www.wingify.com/contextsense/

RankSpeed

Looking to expand your basic search engine capability with additional emotionally charged adjectives? RankSpeed users, for example, can search for smart phones that are excellent, useful or popular. RankSpeed analyzes expressions on blogs and Twitter and enables conventional web searches as well as a specific product search. RankSpeed offers an inspirational taste of the possibilities of a progressive technology called Sentiment Analysis. You can find more information at: www.RankSpeed.com

Sentiment Analysis

Social networks can be searched for the sentiments and emotions of the users using Sentiment Analysis. This technology scans the web for keywords analyzing polarity, subjectivity, and the kinds of word choices people are using. Using these data and with the aid of algorithms, information about emotions that are expressed in text can be provided. Still in the infant stage, Sentiment Analysis is being used by some well-known social media players.

Sentiment Analysis will no doubt evolve and mature in the near term. Among the basic requirements for the area to be successful is the development of a very extensive database of words and languages, different abbreviations, vernacular, and – of course – the constantly changing slang. In addition, there is a need for semantic technologies to understand overall context.

As all these requirements are met, companies will be increasingly able to identify and cluster brand, product, and service attitudes based on the intensity of emotion. Strongly positive or negative comments point to severe issues that demand immediate intervention; whereas, tepid positive or negative attitudes might suggest a weakness in future re-purchase intentions or overall loyalty. Regardless, it appears we are moving from simply knowing what people are thinking to a more granular scale of how passionately they’re thinking it.

Posted in Connective Marketing, Market Research, News, Social Media Marketing, Tips | Tagged Social Media Monitoring | Leave a comment

If Consumers Now Control Communications, Who’s in Charge of Persuasion?

By Bill Williams | Published: July 12, 2010

Marketers are constantly reminded that with the advent of new media, consumers now control what communications they will receive, the channel they’ll receive it on, and when they’ll receive it. There seems to be a kind of “intellectual karaoke” going on in which the intention is to perform, to opine, to amuse, to share, to educate, or to connect. But, heaven forbid anybody should outright say the goal is to persuade!

But, isn’t that what commercial communications are all about? Have we become so delicate – such dilettantes – that we publicly proclaim we only want to participate, when on the inside we’re dying to create a killer, “in your face Flanders,” campaign?

In the Pleistocene era, persuasion was measured in a couple of ways: each of them clumsy, but both the only tools available. Pre and post campaign research was conducted to measure shifts in attitude and intention. While it was often argued that intentions don’t necessarily predict behavior, CMOs and agencies trotted out the research to quantify persuasion. The other tool was, of course, the cash register. If sales were poor the campaign sucked, if sales were good, it had nothing to do with the advertising. Such was life in those days when client and agency acted as proxy for the consumer.

Those days are gone. Who cares about intention when we can pretty precisely monitor behavior? Award-winning creative is great, but isn’t getting large groups of people to sing the praises of your brand – at no direct cost to you – just as fulfilling? And, while a qualitative or quantitative study about attitudes toward a brand or company is instructive, so is monitoring blog buzz.

But, persuasion is still the name of the game. Consumers still have to choose among a wide array of alternative products and services; sometimes our product design, warranty, or pricing isn’t as competitive as we’d like them to be. And, there are still new buyers entering a category who haven’t formed loyalties yet. So, persuasion still goes on around us.

And to answer the original question about who controls it? You, the marketer or the agency does. But, the new media have brought new disciplines with them, and successful persuasion rests on understanding what they are.

How Social Media Use Persuasion to Influence Behavior

BJ Fogg, of the Stanford University Persuasive Technology Lab, suggests that there are three dimensions to social media persuasion: triggers, motivation, and ability. There are “hot” and “cold” triggers – hot triggers give users an immediate call to action; cold triggers are calls to action that can’t be immediately acted on. Social media tend to use hot triggers [notifications to see people's feeds, see who has friended you, etc]. That’s part of the equation.

Motivations for behavior, according to Fogg, include:

Pleasure / Pain
Hope / Fear
Social Rejection / Acceptance

We might decide to get involved in Facebook to see what friends from high school look like 15 years later, or because we fear being seen as behind the times, or because we want to relive – and may level the playing field – from the dreadful high school years.

Lastly there is ability. You might have high motivation to perform an action, but if it’s really complicated, you may not follow through. The simpler it is to act, the more you will perform the behavior.

Put all three ingredients together and you get Fogg’s “Behavior Model:”

BJ Fogg's Behavior Model

When these three elements -triggers, motivation, ability – converge, it creates ritual. Fogg notes: “You check your Facebook when you get a notification. Then you start checking it daily, notification or no. Then you start checking it 2 or 3 times a day.”