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We always wondered what might happen. If someday the undeniable power of advocacy were combined with the irresistible taste of cheese. Well, that day has finally come, according to this on-the-lighter-side story in Advertising Age this week. At least as far as this one local Chelsea neighborhood market in NYC is concerned.
Rogue word-of-mouth for rock band Van Halen (whose song lyrics adorn the label) or an altogether better marketing cheddar? We honestly may never know.
The year was 1995. The then first-term mayor of New York city Rudy Giuliani was making his third nationally televised appearance on the CBS program “Late Show With David Letterman.” They were doing this bit where Mr. Letterman offered the mayor a chance to select a new slogan to increase tourism in New York City. Speaking to camera with great gusto, Mr. Giuliani picked from among the slogans and famously uttered these words, which were simultaneously flashed live on the Jumbotron in Times Square: “We can kick your city’s ass.” This, as David Firestone wrote in the New York Times at the time, was one of those moments that helped to “burnish [Rudy Giuliani's] reputation for creative political pugilism.”
Of course, as is the stock and trade of late night television, this was all just “schtick.” A joking motto. Yet it captured, in Mayor Giuliani’s own words, “the spirit of the city.”
What’s up with the throwback trivia? This recent post from Heather Dougherty, director of research at Hitwise, about the geographic divide of social networks caught my eye. And, as you will soon see, gives the mayor’s famous quote brand new meaning for today’s MySpace and Facebook crowd.
While it’s never taken much to fan the flames of local city pride, not least between New York City on the East Coast and Los Angeles on the West, it now appears top social network sites MySpace and Facebook are not as borderless or as untethered to the offline world as we might have thunk. Especially when it comes to the big US cities.
To review, MySpace continues to be the largest social network in the US, according to Hitwise. It’s market share of visits was 3.5x that of Facebook for the week ending July 19, 2008. But Facebook is gaining. It’s traffic grew 23% when compared to the same week last year while MySpace was down 29%. But size is one thing. Where the users are located, blogs Heather, is another:
We have recently launched a tool at Hitwise where our clients can access DMA® level data for both websites and categories to understand the share of traffic from local regions. As an example… for the 4 weeks ending July 19, 2008… the top DMA for MySpace is LA while the top DMA for Facebook is NYC- which is not surprising considering that these two cities are the 2 largest DMAs in overall size and tend to be significant for most national websites.
When comparing the DMAs of the 2 websites to one another, an interesting trend pops out – MySpace visitors are more likely to be located on the west coast while Facebook has heavier representation on the East Coast (the coasts where each company was started). The 20 DMAs with the highest representation index for MySpace when compared to Facebook, meaning the likelihood of the visitor to go to MySpace vs. Facebook… are all located on the west coast. The trend is also illustrated… when looking at the top 10 DMAs for MySpace, where the West Coast DMAs dominate. When the situation is reversed to compare Facebook to MySpace, the East Coast and Midwest becomes more prevalent.
Does this mean MySpace is a social network that is like, omg, totally hot and Facebook is a place where it’s better to fuggetaboutit? Could Facebook make good on the former mayor’s motto and kick, in a digital minute, some MySpace gluteus maximus? Me, I’m a New Yorker and a Facebook member. So how you doin’?
Wherever your networking takes you, the Hitwise’s DMA research helps to underscore a point that often gets missed in the social media discussion today: how there’s actually a strong link between offline social networks and their online counterparts. Between citizens and netizens. Grassroots and netroots. Between those we friend and those who simply are our friends.
And while I couldn’t agree more that the world is increasingly flat, it’s clear our burgeoning digital shoots still have some very real world roots–and possibly some geographic limitations. Even for the top social networking sites going in the US today.
For more background on the inter-relationship between offline and online social networks, see Now that you’re blogging, don’t forget face-to-face. And let us know your thoughts about MySpace and Facebook. I’ll be doing some friends-and-family research of my own in the meantime starting with our New York and LA offices. Now how do you think that will go? Fuggetaboutit!
Image credit: www.thephoenix.com
The name of the game today is community.
Whether your mission is to grow a brand or strengthen a corporate reputation, an increasingly important goal is not just communicating or marketing to an audience. But developing the relationships and conversations that create a true community. Stronger community means stronger advocacy, research continues to demonstrate. Which leads, ultimately, to stronger future growth.
Well, like Yogi Berra said, the future ain’t what it used to be…
The nature of community–where, how and why we connect and relate to one another in society or don’t for that matter–is changing. Dramatically. And not necessarily for the better, according to the authors of the recent book The Big Sort. Who see in three decade’s worth of data signs that America is no longer the national melting pot it once was. But a group of increasingly like-minded, self-selecting individual communities. Homogeneous as much in the lifestyles we choose to pursue as in the political beliefs we hold. The result, they argue, makes cultural understanding harder and politics more bitter. Familiar taste?
Says Big Sort author Bill Bishop, as quoted recently in the The Economist:
“We now live in a giant feedback loop… hearing our own thoughts about what’s right and wrong bounced back to us by the television shows we watch, the newspapers and books we read, the blogs we visit online, the sermons we hear and the neighbourhoods we live in.”
Now, our interest in the ideas raised in the Big Sort is not about politics, though the implications are concerning enough. But in how communities of customers and consumers can be forged around brands and businesses–where advocacy can be fostered and flourish–despite our increasingly fragmented society here in the U.S and potentially abroad.
This difference in focus, however, doesn’t change the bigger picture all that much we find. The world of consumers, like that of politics, is becoming dramatically different and fragmented, too. If not altogether older and more risk-averse, according to Advertising Age’s The Changing Face of the U.S. Consumer. The article by Peter Francese, who founded American Demographics, provides an in-depth look into the key demographic trends, many of which point to a “big sort” not just between neighbors and geographies, confirming what Bishop found. But between generations and what we could call mindsets:
The online youthful and mostly wireless consumer inhabits a world far apart from the older consumer who subscribes to a newspaper and uses a telephone directory. The college-educated consumer with a white-collar job in a wired office has much less in common and much less interaction with the high-school-educated, blue-collar worker than in the past. Their product and brand preferences can diverge just as widely as their views on issues such as free trade, gay marriage and global warming… It’s hard to overstate the attitudinal gulf between a Prius-owning, environmentally aware consumer and the driver of an [SUV] who thinks global warming is just a bogus scheme to take away his or her 3-ton tank.
A key tenet of advocacy often discussed on these pages and with our clients is how people are increasingly looking to each other for news, information and recommendations today (see: Dox populi for a discussion on this trend in healthcare). This fundamentally changes how we must communicate and engage. Works like the Big Sort and by Peter Francese show that demography does appear to be destiny. We’re melding less in America and splintering more. Making national politics, on the one hand, look a lot like Humpty Dumpty with a bad case of cement poisoning.
But is that the case when it comes to building communities that build everything from simple connections to deeper knowledge and stronger brands? Books like Forrester’s Groundswell make a powerful case for how social media is not about technology (follow someone like Jeremiah Owyang for a few laps around Twitter and you’ll soon see why). But about people — like-minded people who are reaching across traditional barriers to create powerful communities and networks in growing numbers. Putting the shattered shell of society back together again. Or creating an altogether new kind of Phoenix as some might argue.
The challenge, of course, is that it’s not all one thing or the other. There’s both gridlock and groundswell out there in abundant quantities. Since the most powerful communities–and by extension advocacy–involve both the offline and the online world (see: Now that you’re blogging, don’t forget face-to-face), our challenge is to chart the smartest course between.
Image credit: www.adage.com
A perfect way to sum up what we’ve been calling Badvocacy.
Thanks to Pete Blackshaw, Nielsen BuzzMetric’s CMO, for this upcomig book due out in July. We’re looking forward to reading it.
As we’ve been discussing here, more and more companies are getting their online efforts on track these days with smart blogging and social media strategies. That’s good, since individuals are not only increasingly looking to online sources for news and information about companies, products and brands and everything under the “sunflowers,” they are also contributing mightily to that content as well. Chief among these contributors are the top bloggers, those with high “authority,” as defined by Technorati, or numbers of other blogs linking to them.
That makes these top bloggers influential, right? The answer is yes and no. They are certainly influencing other bloggers. And any media relations professional worth their salt knows that a juicy story that starts on the blogosphere can become front page news soon after. Just ask Bill Clinton and Barack Obama about the stories the Huffington Post broke during the recent Democratic primary campaign.
There’s sometimes so much focus on bloggers today that the larger truth, and opportunity, can get missed: bloggers as an emerging source of authority are not highly trusted overall–not yet anyway. In fact, research shows that people–consumers, customers, people like you and me–have headed in the opposite direction to date. We are reserving our trust for the people we know in what we call our day-to-day hub, the inner circle of friends, family members, colleagues and others we know well and regularly communicate with.
Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester recently did something of a research summary on this issue on his blog post, “Who do people trust? (It ain’t bloggers).” It’s certainly not the only reference point out there (my colleague at Jack Morton, Liz Bigham, did a nice summary last fall on the Jack Morton 360 blog). But it’s an updated discussion (with 94 comments) that drew my attention to a study published in April by Canadian research firm Pollara which had the following finding: social media is still more a channel for sharing opinions and learning about products, services, organizations, and brands than it is a channel for influencing people’s ultimate decision-making.
One possible explanation is that the “mode” of how people seek advice and recommendations is still largely face-to-face and offline. But the interesting thing is that Pollara’s findings apply to social media users themselves, as summarized by this write up:
“According to a new study from Canadian research firm Pollara, self-described social media users put far more trust in friends and family online than in popular bloggers, or strangers with 10,000 MySpace ‘friends.’
Of more than 1,100 adults polled in December, nearly 80% said they were very or somewhat more likely to consider buying products recommended by real-world friends and family, while only 23% reported being very or somewhat likely to consider a product pushed by ‘well-known bloggers.’
‘This shows that popularity doesn’t always equate to credibility,’ said Robert Hutton, executive vice president and general manager at Pollara. ‘Marketers might have to reconsider who the real influencers are out there.’
…Overall, social media remains chiefly a mode of communication and personal expression, rather than a source of credible information.”
Some active social media users will strongly disagree (I know from reading the comments on Jeremiah Owyang’s post). But I think it’s a good reminder for agencies and marketers alike to not miss the forest for the trees when developing campaigns or simply communicating and building relationships. Yes, by all means, engage in the blogosphere and other social media. Case in point: I found Jeremiah’s blog post by following him on Twitter and then to friendfeed. By all means, harness social media to listen to your audiences, build a dialogue, and spark word-of-mouth conversations in the offline world, one of the key roles online plays in the marketing mix in diverse categories from banking to technology according to research.
But don’t overlook the larger opportunity to engage influencers and identify advocates in the real world where the lion’s share of word-of-mouth discussions are taking place, and where traditional sources of expertise and influence still matter and need to be in the mix. The biggest impact we can make will undoubtedly be when we bring the best of the online and offline worlds together in compelling and authentic ways, including those who are influential among bloggers and have large social media followings but also the people who truly influence customer and consumer decision-making when push comes to shove: the people in their day-to-day hubs.
Image source: Digital vision, Getty images
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.
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.
I was in a meeting on the West coast this week. The topic was advocacy (why are you not surprised?). When the question was posed.
OK, not exactly in the way this blog post’s title suggests. And, no, there was no rousing Cole Porter-styled big-band score you’d expect to go with it. Or any fancy footwork a la Fred Astaire. Just the bland illumination of ubiquitious PowerPoint. And a spilled cup of H20.
The question was pretty straightforward in fact, and you don’t have to be a fan of the American Songbook to appreciate it: When does advocacy really start?
Here’s what was at issue. Is advocacy, as the classic purchase funnel has it, the desired end state a marketer strives to achieve with a customer after she’s been acquired and has experienced the brand? Is it about, then, creating programs that enlist customers to help sell to other ones? So brand loyalty, ambassador and “friends and family” type programs. This was essentially the POV of the questioner, and perhaps represents the view of other veteran marketers as, in effect, this is in large part the way advocacy programs have been created heretofore.
The on-the-other-hand was this. Why not also see advocacy as not solely an end but a means? For spreading postive word-of-mouth and recommendations on the path to purchase. When consumers turn to colleagues, friends and family for information and advice as they form opinions and make decisions about what to buy or not to as the case may be.
This school of thought is rooted in some of the big shifts we’ve seen taking place in communications. How individuals are increasingly looking to each other for advice and recommendations about products, services and brands, and less to traditional institutions and authorities as a result. How they tend to make decisions faster. And how some, who are highly connected to others, are highly influential. In some cases more so than traditional opinion leaders or influentials. Full disclosure: yes, this is our POV at Weber Shandwick, and what we’ve seen in our research and work. But we’re hardly a choir of one here.
So back to the question: When does and should the beguine–that spirited dance (which is what a beguine apparently is according to wikipedia) between brand and consumer–really begin when it comes to advocacy?
You should decide for yourself (naturally). But there’s room enough for both views these days, if not the POV that there’s now a continuum of advocacy activities that are happening from the outset of the purchase cycle, and that we should be seeking to understand and harness. Social networking research makes clear that you don’t have to be a customer to be an effective advocate, just someone whose advice your audience seeks out and trusts. In fact, the most valuable customers are no longer necessarily the ones who buy the most, according to Kumar, Petersen, and Leone. Writing last year in their HBR piece entitled “How Valuable is Word of Mouth?” they showed how consumers who don’t buy much at all can be some of the strongest marketers for your brand.
Others, like Forrester, have observed that the purchase funnel itself is fundamantally broken, and a new marketing model based on engagement is needed. Our views on advocacy and the role it plays–and how harnessing it should start earlier today–are more in line with this kind of thinking.
But perhaps there’s only so much the data can tell us about a topic we know really comes down to passion. And who better than the crafty composer himself to shed some light on the subject.
So in the words of Cole Porter (click here for the full lyrics)…
When they begin
the beguine
it brings back the sound
of music so tender
it brings back a night
of tropical splendor
it brings back a memory of green
And as for the steps that go along with this tricky ryhme, nobody could make it look easier than Fred Astaire. Forget making marketing moves so smoothly. How about just dressing that cool?
As a follow up to my last post about what it takes to be the world’s top mom blogger, here’s a recent piece from Brandweek about the flip side that caught our attention: what major companies are doing to court social media moms. Featured are Johnson & Johnson’s campbaby.com and P&G’s vocalpoint (pictured above) and the strategies each is pursuing to reach this ultra connected and influential community of advocates.
Be sure to read what Brandweek reports about the 3-day conference J&J recently hosted for 56 influential mothers / bloggers. And check out some of the stats quoted about vocalpoint: that up to a 30% increase in sales is witnessed after the site’s 350,000 members chatter about products on the site or off it. That certainly meets our definition of advocacy!
Want to know what it takes to be a professional advocate online? Check out today’s article (and discussion) about 32-year old Heather Armstrong (pictured above), the hip often outrageous but always influential mom and author of the 59th most popular blog going on the Web: Dooce.com. As the reigning top blogger on all matters parenting and mom, she is one of the new faces of influence today.
Always on the lookout for clues to what makes an advocate truly an advocate, this look into Heather’s life, and the toll it can take, caught our attention. Knowledge, passion, committment, openness, a unique POV and voice, and willingness to flout convention. These qualities and more of a parent advocate, some suprising (like her penchant for vulgarity) some not, are on full display on dooce.com, along with quirky items like a daily photo of her “SuperMutt,” Chuck. See what is outshining the 200,000 plus other parenting bloggers in the world today and generating a whopping 4 million page views a month. Plus advertising from the likes of BMW and Verizon.
Peter Weir, director of “The Truman Show,” commenting on how the 1998 movie starring Jim Carrey predicted the rise of reality television once said: “This was a dangerous film to make because it couldn’t happen. How ironic.” Heather’s story, and bouts with mental illness, need for therapy, lack of privacy, show that it is indeed no cake walk.
Truman, in a quest for freedom, walks off the make-believe set at the end of the movie and into a life (a happier one we hope) out of the 24/7 public eye. How will Heather’s own life-as-movie end online? After seven years of blogging, it’s not clear it will or even has to.
