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Advocating for Foundations

 I  came across a survey conducted among Americans who have a leadership role in their communities. You might call them engaged advocates. The survey was about philantrophic organizations which we all know something about but obviously not much as you will soon read. The survey by the Packard Foundation with Harris Interactive found that foundations are largely invisible, even among those who should know better. Only 43% of these engaged Americans were able to name a foundation on their first try.  Whereas 13% consider themselves to be very or extremely informed about foundations, 60% feel somewhat or not at all informed about them. The results are just plain scary — only 15% can cite an example of how a foundation has impacted their community.  The survey results add up to one plain fact which is that foundations need to communicate better to their best customers, community advocates, because they are the ones who are most likely to spread the word and keep their good work front and center in the public domain.  Greater communications are clearly in order here.

   Advocacy, Issue/Cause Advovacy    Add a comment

Advocacy in Quotes

  I never thought about it but when I searched, I found nearly 1.4 million quotes about advocacy.  And on the site I just linked to, there were several about social entrepreneurs which is a good way of talking about advocates. The one below is short and to the point about advocacy. However, sometimes just giving a fish can make all the difference in the world.

   Advocacy, Issue/Cause Advovacy, personal advocacy    2 Comments

Pets Are Advocates Too

Do you have a dog or cat in need of grooming? If so, here is an opportunity to advocate for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill clean-up efforts. Consider taking your pet to a groomer who will donate your pet’s fur to Matter of Trust, a San Francisco nonprofit organization that has established a process for collecting animal fur and human hair to create nylon “booms” that naturally absorb oil from the water. Last week retailer PETCO began shipping donations of pet fur from its grooming salons to aid in creating these booms to soak up and remove oil from Gulf of Mexico waters. Once fur shipments arrive in the Gulf Coast region, volunteers gather to assemble the booms and prepare for their deployment. The booms are made by stuffing donated nylon stockings with hair and fur. With nearly 1,000 grooming salons pitching in, PETCO expected to ship up to a ton of donated fur per day hoping to reach 5 tons through this past weekend.

As a pet owner, I say it’s about time my pets begin contributing to society! Joking aside, this is a truly unique and worthwhile program. Get your four-legged friends to advocate for the wildlife in the Gulf who so gravely face endangerment.

   Advocacy, CSR, Company/Organization Advocacy, Issue/Cause Advovacy, Non-profit, Weber Shandwick    Add a comment

Advocacy Measurement Month

Apparently April was Advocacy Measurement Month. I collected a number of fantastic and enormously valuable reports and articles published during April or so that are highly relevant to evaluating the impact of advocacy.  I’ve summarized interesting findings and stats from each piece below that I thought are worth noting but hope that you’ll find the bytes interesting enough to click-thru to read the full analyses.

1. The McKinsey Quarterly: A New Way to Measure Word-of-Mouth Marketing (April 2010)

• Word-of-mouth is the primary factor behind 20 to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions
• McKinsey has developed the “word-of-mouth equity” index which measures a brand’s power to generate messages that influence the consumer’s decision to purchase
• In the mobile-phone market, McKinsey has found that the pass-on rates for messages can increase a company’s market share by 10 percent (positive messages) and reduce it by 20 percent (negative messages) over a two-year period. [If you are familiar with Weber Shandwick’s advocacy research, you may recall that badvocacy, or brand criticism, reaches nearly twice as many people as brand advocacy.]
• Marketers tend to build campaigns around emotional positioning, but McKinsey found that consumers actually talk and generate buzz about product functions
• About 8 to 10 percent of consumers are influentials, whose common factor is trust and competence in a particular subject area. Influentials generate three times more word-of-mouth messages than noninfluentials do, and each message has four times more impact on a recipient’s purchasing decision. About 1 percent of these people are digital influentials—most notably, bloggers—with disproportionate power to influence
• Marketing-induced consumer-to-consumer word of mouth generates more than twice the sales of paid advertising in categories as diverse as skincare and mobile phones

2. AdvertisingAge: Spotting the Creators of Peer Influence, by Josh Bernoff (April 20, 2010)

Through online word-of-mouth, people make over 500 billion impressions on each other about products and services annually. Forrester Research estimates that U.S. social network users create 256 billion impressions on other social networkers per year and blog posts, blog comments, ratings and reviews, etc. generate another 250 billion impressions per year (hence the roughly 500 billion impressions)

Forrester concludes:

• People’s influence on each other rivals online advertising. For comparison, for a 12-month period ending September 30 last year, Nielsen Online estimates advertisers created 1.974 trillion online advertising impressions, compared to the 500 billion impressions people make on each other about products and services. And peer impressions are more credible than advertising, since they come from friends.
• A minority of people generate 80% of the impressions. About 6.2% of the online adults generate 80% of the influence impressions. Around 13.8% of the online adults generate 80% of the influence posts.

3. Nielsen/Facebook Report: The Value of Social Media Ad Impressions (April 20, 2010)

One common form of advocacy on Facebook is through social ads. That is, if a user’s friends are fans of a brand on Facebook, the ad unit itself will contain the names of those friends. But does this lightweight form of endorsement actually impact the effectiveness of the advertising? Nielsen and Facebook compared the responses of users who had seen ads with social context against users who saw ads with no social context from the same campaign. A user would be eligible to see social context if one of their friends had previously “Become a Fan” of the brand running the advertisement.

The result? Social advocacy impacts consumers three-fold: Ad recall is substantially higher with social advocacy with a lift of 16% (vs. 10% for non-social ads), the awareness lift is doubled, and the  purchase intent lift increases from 2% to nearly 8%.

4. Altimeter Group and Web Analytics Demystified: Social Marketing Analytics – A New Framework for Measuring Results in Social Media (April 22, 2010)

This report provides methods for quantifying your social media advocates, their reach/influence and their impact. It assumes that a company already has an agreed upon definition of advocates and a  process for identifying them, for example, the individuals generating positive or negative discussion about your brand.

Finally, having nothing at all to do with measuring advocacy, April saw the release of a movie called “The Joneses.” David Duchovny and Demi Moore star as a couple planted by a consumer marketing company in a gated community to spread word-of-mouth about its goods and services with the upscale community. The intent, of course, is to drive demand for the products. When I read the review for this movie (haven’t seen it), I thought of how the value advocacy has become so acknowledged by the mainstream.

   Advocacy, Badvocacy, Brand/Product Advocacy, Influentials, Research, Social media, Weber Shandwick    Add a comment