Miller Brewing has its own fulltime employee blogging about the beer industry and its arch rival Anheuser-Busch. This is an unusual advocacy platform. Being an advocate for your own company and badvocating or breaking news about your competitor breaks several traditional and social media conventions and can certainly be described as “out of the box” thinking.
Jim Arndorfer’s blog is called BrewBlog and I first read about it in the WSJ. The blog has practically developed into its own news feed and has a fair amount of influence in the beer sector. The Journal article described how Arndorfer scooped the trade publications on a new ale being produced by A-B called Budweiser American Ale. As described, “Brew Blog is the latest and perhaps most unlikely front in Miller’s drive to rattle Anheuser.”
To make it all fair in love and war, Arndorfer also posts negative tales about his own company although my sense is that they are less problematic than the ones about A-B.
Wisely, Arndorfer makes no attempt to hide who his employer is. The blog makes it evidently clear that he is a Miller employee. Transparency rules.
Advocates and badvocates come from everywhere but this one is unusual at best. I had to read the article twice to understand how this actually worked. Gathering information on your rival to be published on a company blog is not business as usual. Something to watch over time.
The blog is particulary interesting to read as talks between InBev and A-B heat up.
Just back from our healthcare conference in Madrid to find this very relevant and timely article on smoking cessation in the New York Times yesterday. Covered is a study to be published in the New England Journal of Medicine that finds there is a significant social factor at work in kicking the habit. It follows an earlier paper by the same authors that determined there was also a big social factor in weight loss.
The research points to the enormous opportunity in healthcare communications–discussed in my previous blog post and at our Madrid conference–to more and more create programs that defeat isolation, encourage participation, build community, and don’t just educate patients about treatment therapies but help improve health outcomes through facilitating advocacy.
It also shows how insightful social network mapping and analysis can be, a capability we’ve incorporated into our healthcare and other practices areas through our work with Myra Norton and her colleagues at Community Analytics. Myra — Posting the social network map from the study here in your honor! Let us know what you think.
B
eing an advocate for your university can help drive share price? How does that work? Harvard Business School and the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business found that university ties can make a difference among equity analysts. Essentially, information flows more tightly in security markets among those who attended the same schools. Interestingly, ivy league school advocates fare no better than non-ivy league school advocates. Essentially the research by professor Lauren Cohen found that
equity analysts outperform on stock recommendations when they went to the same university as the company’s management. The information flow is clearly more liquid and far-reaching among university networks than previously thought. Apparently the old school ties can help equity analysts make the right picks and recommendations. Public company managers might want to handpick those sell-side analysts who share common university ties and turn them into true blue advocates. A thought as the markets close for memorial day in the U.S.
Happy holiday.
Have been getting ready this week for Weber Shandwick’s global healthcare summit in Madrid, where advocacy will be a key topic. This gave me a good excuse to refresh my understanding of how far advocacy has come in healthcare, a category I don’t get to look at every day.
Here was the question: Like in other product and service categories, are individuals increasingly looking to each other for advice and information about health and disease? That would certainly track with how, in recent years, Americans have had to increasingly rely on themselves to manage their own health and even chronic conditions (a different but related question and debate). Or, on the other hand, does healthcare remain something of a sequestered category where a singular reliance on the “all-knowing” doctor, concerns about privacy, and a subject matter that often times, let’s be honest, makes us too squeamish to want to talk about it put up natural barriers for advocacy to be a go to source?
A few interesting facts (I’m sure there are plenty others):
* Word-of-mouth from friends and family is the main source of information today for US adult internet users when it comes to making decisions about physicians (65%) and hospitals (57%). (Lumin Collaborative 2007)
* 34% of adults in the US rank word-of-mouth as their first choice for information when it comes to making medical decisions. (USC Annenberg 2006)
* 42% of US adult Internet users say they get their information about healthcare companies and products from word-of-mouth sources, as compared to 30% who say the Internet, and 28% who say traditional media such as broadcast and cable TV, newspapers, magazines, radio, etc. (Lumin Collaborative 2007)
* 48% of health information seekers say their quest for information was undertaken on behalf of someone else, not themselves. (Pew Internet & American Life Project 2007)
* 75% of e-patients with chronic conditions say the information they found in their last online search affected a decision about how to treat an illness or condition; 69% say the information led them to ask a doctor new questions or to get a second opinion from another doctor; 57% say the information changed the way they cope with a chronic condition or manage pain; and 61% say they changed their overall approach to maintaining their health. (Pew Internet & American Life Project 2007)
* Also, worth noting: there’s a high degree of “badvocacy” among consumers when it comes to health and healthcare. The category gets one of the lowest Net Advocacy scores in the Keller Fay Group’s TalkTrak index, which measures weekly WOM in the US.
* On the other hand, TalkTrak also shows that there are a high degree of people who regularly give advice and make recommendations to others when it comes to health and healthcare (Ed Keller and Brad Fay have labeled these advocates “ConversationCatalysts”).
So when we look at the healthcare landscape and advocacy today, the trend, if not the answer, seems clear. Are we still reliant on doctors? Is healthcare still too private and too sensitive? Are we still too squeamish? As Amy Winehouse might sing: no, no, no. What we see here is that advocacy is playing a very important role in consumer decision-making about healthcare. That there is extensive engagement and openness. And a significant shift from the way things used to be not very long ago. Upshot: this has a major affect on the way we need to communicate in healthcare today. We have to pay attention to the vox populi, or ”dox” as it were, of the consumer who increasingly looks to others like themselves for doctoring and to the Web for medical advice and information — and acts on it.
Now, maybe that seems like an old hat no-brainer when it was so many years ago that Bob Dole first came into our living rooms to talk about ED (if you don’t know what that it is look it up; I’m not even comfortable writing it). But it’s new, according to experts like Weber Shandwick’s global head of healthcare Laura Schoen. The point she’s made to me is that the rise of advocacy in healthcare is really a revolution taking place, and at a time of high distrust and controversy for the industry (note the badvocacy bullet above).
Laura also helped me see how there’s a much bigger point to all this, one that goes beyond the hard facts and figures. Chronic disease and deadly disorders disempower people. They isolate and take away all hope. And complex treatments can often be as daunting as the diagnosis. Advocacy — the act of connecting with other individuals, being part of a community, socially interacting with others who understand “me,” helping others based on your own experience – is critically important to rebuilding patients’ self-esteem and restoring hope. It goes well beyond just talk in healthcare; it can be a critical equalizer and key ingredient in recovery.
With insights and a sense of purpose like this, the summit in Madrid promises to be a very interesting. I am looking forward to it.
At Weber Shandwick, we’ve been warning companies about badvocacy as long as we’ve been encouraging them to tap into the power of advocacy. Badvocacy is simply the act of criticizing companies, brands or products and it’s becoming rampant as social media accelerates (as my mother recently gleefully declared after dealing with a customer service injustice, “You don’t even need to picket the store anymore, you just go on the Internet!”). Highlighting this trend, the Society for New Communications Research recently released the results of a survey sponsored by Nuance Communications that shows that 59 percent of active Internet users use social media to vent about a customer care experience. That’s a lot of venting.
Lest companies make the mistake of shrugging off online critics or dismissing social media as a valid communications channel, the study also finds that the majority of online consumers are using the Internet to research companies’ customer care reputations before making the purchase (72 percent) and choose companies or brands based on others’ experiences they read about online (74 percent). Most consumers (81 percent) believe that blogs, discussion forums and online ratings systems give consumers a greater voice (our own research supports this newfound sense of empowerment: more than half of online respondents say they have more power to influence company success or failure today than ever before).
So even if customers aren’t writing about negative experiences, they’re reading about, and heeding, the experiences of others. Companies can’t hide from badvocacy – they need to recognize that the function of customer service has been forever changed. They need to respond to situations in new and inventive ways that minimize the risk of an unhappy customer escalating his or her problems to the world.
Looking forward to the full report from SNCR and Nuance due out later this year.
My colleague David Krejci has an internal social media newsletter that I really enjoy. It is called Your New Times and I always learn from it. This week’s edition focused on something called Astroturfing which is defined as fake buzz. The article in the newsletter written by “stingray” is about how people fake comments or create controversies on YouTube, Facebook and other sites to make them look like they have lots of friends or visitors or detractors. Using stingray’s definition — Astroturfing is when a public relations campaign seeks to create the impression of spontaneous, grassroots behavior (hence the reference to the artificial grass Astroturf). Astroturfing is a prime example of what we call badvocacy.
I wonder how it can be stopped or found out. If anyone knows, please let me know. I am always interested in how to combat badvocacy.
Miller Brewing has its own fulltime employee blogging about the beer industry and its arch rival Anheuser-Busch. This is an unusual advocacy platform. Being an advocate for your own company and badvocating or breaking news about your competitor breaks several traditional and social media conventions and can certainly be described as “out of the box” thinking.
