Archive for the 'Badvocacy' Category
I just thought this was interesting. An app for complainers. complainapp.com aggregates complaints about business and uses the power of advocates to tell companies when they are not doing their job. On the website they also have trending topics and complaints by industry. Their tag line is Let’s Complain Together. That says it all. Maybe these are actually badvocates, not advocates. Whatever they are, interesting idea to get your complaints heard. I will have to tell my friends and family! Most of all, I like the graphic.
Female advocates complain less! Really. So says a study by Empathica about how men and women interact online with retail brands. According to the research, women are more likely to recommend a brand, product or service through social media than men — 35% vs. 28%. And they do this often…10+ times in the past three months. What surprised me most was the finding that men are the complainers or what we call “badvocates” with more men than women using social media to register a complaint or seek resolution — 4% vs. 2%. Everyone needs a life.
Tags: advocates, Badvocates, retail
I thought it would be worthwhile to post this quote from Admiral Thad Allen, the national incident commander for the Hoizon oil spill incident. He is quoted in an interview in Harvard Business Review (November 2010) as saying:
With social media and the 24 hour news cycle, there will never again be a major disaster that won’t involve public participation.
I believe that his statement applies to advocacy as well. Mmake sure you have your advocates lined up and your “badvocates” or detractors identified. Every event today involves public opinion. Get ready for a new kind of information warfare.
We always wonder at the end of the year who will be on the cover of Time magazine. Who will be the person of the year? I think that the person of the year should be the public. Maybe next year since I know that Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is the person of 2010. Public opinion and the advocates within will ultimately be the drivers of action and thought in the years ahead. You won’t dare leave home without them.
Tags: Admiral Thad Allen, Advocacy, Badvocates, public opinion
Just read about employee advocates in a report (Do Your Employees Advocate for Your Company?) from Forrester. I am a big believer in understanding how to get employees onboard as advocates. I think it is where future success truly lies. How to do it is another story.
The survey (which I believe is only available to subscribers) was among 5, 519 technology end users in Canada, France, Germany, the UK and the US. They used the well-known NPS (Net Promoter Score developed at Bain) to ask employees how likely they would be to recommend their employer’s products/services to a friend or relative and how likely they would be to recommend their company as an employer? Without a doubt, employee advocates are critical to spreading positive word of mouth, attracting the best talent and building reputation. The headline about the results say it all, “The Sorry State of Employee Advocacy.” Here are a few nuggets:
- Employees in North America and Europe scored-23% on the employee advocacy index developed for recommending their company’s products and services. Particularly interesting to me was that detractors or what we at Weber Shandwick call “badvocates” made up 49% of the respondents on this question, 24% were neutral and 27% were advocates or promoters. Essentially, the badvocates were nearly twice as prominent in their answers compared to advocates.
- For the second NPS question about recommending the company as a good place to work to a friend or family member, the employee advocacy score was -16%, with 43% detractors, 29% neutrals and 27% advocates. Badvocates still overwhelm the discussion about one’s company as an employer. That is alot of conversation to compensate for.
These findings do not speak well of employees’ endorsement of the companies they work for and the goods they produce. Of course, this is not a representative sample because they are information workers. However, I suspect that if the research was conducted among a broader population, the results could be as bad or even worse. The economy certainly is a factor but in truth, greater attention needs to be paid internally for advocacy to take root. This is a good starting point for understanding employee advocacy however.
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.
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and Andrea Weckerle, founder and president of CiviliNation, wrote this oped for the WSJ at the very end of December. I took some time off from blogging over the holidays (sanity check!) but saved this for my next blog post. It is the perfect coda to 2009 where incivility online and “badvocacy” seemed to explode exponentially, particulary as politics heated up. CiviliNation is a global non-profit education and research organization based on advancing how individuals communicate and engage online in a responsible and accountable way. This is an important advocacy group that deserves all of our attention and support. The oped is a call to action for many of us who advocate for fairness in conversations online and preserving reputations. Wanted to share with our followers.
Keep a Civil Cybertongue
Rude and abusive online behavior should not be met with silence.
by Jimmy Wales and Andrea Weckerle
In less than 20 years, the World Wide Web has irrevocably expanded the number of ways we connect and communicate with others. This radical transformation has been almost universally praised.
What hasn’t kept pace with the technical innovation is the recognition that people need to engage in civil dialogue. What we see regularly on social networking sites, blogs and other online forums is behavior that ranges from the carelessly rude to the intentionally abusive.
Flare-ups occur on social networking sites because of the ease by which thoughts can be shared through the simple press of a button. Ordinary people, celebrities, members of the media and even legal professionals have shown insufficient restraint before clicking send. There is no shortage of examples—from the recent Twitter heckling at a Web 2.0 Expo in New York, to a Facebook poll asking whether President Obama should be killed.
The comments sections of online gossip sites, as well as some national media outlets, often reflect semi-literate, vitriolic remarks that appear to serve no purpose besides disparaging their intended target. Some sites exist solely as a place for mean-spirited individuals to congregate and spew their venomous verbiage.
Online hostility targeting adults is vastly underreported. The reasons victims fail to come forward include the belief that online hostility is an unavoidable and even acceptable mode of behavior; the pervasive notion that hostile online speech is a tolerable form of free expression; the perceived social stigma of speaking out against attacks; and the absence of readily available support infrastructure to assist victims.
The problem of online hostility, in short, shows no sign of abating on its own. Establishing cybercivility will take a concerted effort. We can start by taking the following steps:
First, and most importantly, we need to create an online culture in which every person can participate in an open and rational exchange of ideas and information without fear of being the target of unwarranted abuse, harassment or lies. Everyone who is online should have a sense of accountability and responsibility.
Too frequently, we hear the argument that being online includes the right to be nasty—and that those who chose to participate on the Web should develop thicker skin. This gives transgressors an out for immoral behavior.
Just as we’ve learned what is deemed appropriate face-to-face communication, we need to learn what is appropriate behavior in an environment that frequently deals with purely written modes of communication and an inherent absence of nonverbal cues.
Second, individuals appalled at the degeneration of online civility need to speak out, to show that this type of behavior will no longer be tolerated. Targets of online hostility should also consider coming forward to show that attacks can have serious consequences. There are already several documented cases of teens taking their own lives because of cyberbullying.
A third step has to do with media literacy. People need to know how to differentiate between information that is published on legitimate sites that follow defined standards and also possibly a professional code of ethics, and information published in places like gossip sites whose only goal is to post the most outrageous headlines and stories in order to increase traffic. People can and will learn to shun and avoid such sites over time, particularly with education about why they are unethical.
Fourth, adult targets of online hostility deserve a national support network. This should be a safe place where they can congregate online to receive emotional support, practical advice on how to deal with transgressors, and information on whom to contact for legal advice when appropriate.
Finally, it’s time to re-examine the current legal system. Online hostility is cross-jurisdictional. We might need laws that directly address this challenge. There is currently no uniformity of definition among states in the definition of cyberbullying and cyberharassment. Perhaps federal input is needed.
The Internet is bringing about a revolution in human knowledge and communication, and we have an unprecedented opportunity to make the global conversation more reasonable and productive. But we can only do so if we prevent the worst among us from silencing the best among us with hostility and incivility.
Tags: Advocacy, Badvocates, online civility
I’ve been monitoring the coverage of our Good Book of Badvocacy since we released it last May. We didn’t do a press release for it – just put it on the Weber Shandwick Web site, shared it with clients and the Weber Shandwick network, and discussed it in events and social media forums (including, of course, this blog). Needless to say, we’re more than pleased that a book about the power of word-of-mouth has made its way around purely on the power of word-of-mouth. In fact, as Leslie Gaines-Ross blogged, the Book was presented in an IT meeting at a company that is not in anyway affiliated with Weber Shandwick. The review was glowing. One of the meeting attendees was my husband so you can imagine his surprise when the book appeared (in case you’re wondering, he had not discussed it at work nor does he carry it around with him but I think he should).
And who can forget when “badvocate” became Addictionary’s Word of the Day! Or when Forbes.com interviewed Jack Leslie, chairman of Weber Shandwick, about badvocacy. Certainly I don’t want to overlook the many bloggers and Tweeters who kept the discussion rolling along. Many thanks to these folks for being badvote advocates:
Wishing all our badvocate followers a new year filled with nothing but advocates on your side!
I returned to the Air Force Blogger Assessment tool today as I was writing something I hope to eventually publish. As I refreshed my memory about the blogging guidelines, I fell upon David Meerman Scott’s blog which had an interview with Captain David Faggard, Chief of Emerging Technology at the Air Force Public Affairs Agency at the Pentagon and developer of the blogger tool. The tool is also on his web site. I could hardly believe my eyes when I read that Faggard oversees 330,000 communicators! That is a big number! Scott spoke with Faggard (who I also emailed with months ago) and this is what Meerman wrote about their exchange.
“Their mission is to use current and developing Web 2.0 applications as a way to actively engage conversations between Airmen and the general public. Yes, that’s right, the goal of the program is that every single Airman is an on-line communicator.
In an environment where many corporations are scared witless about social media, here a huge global organization firmly committed to social media communications to spread messages, stories, knowledge and ideals. Capt. Faggard says that the focus is on: “Direct Action within Social Media (blogging, counter-blogging, posting products to YouTube, etc.); Monitoring and Analysis of the Social Media landscape (relating to Air Force and Airmen); and policy and education (educating all Public Affairs practitioners and the bigger Air Force on Social Media).”
While I was amazed that the Air Force is doing so much while many in the private sector are still doing so little, I asked about the unique challenges faced by the US armed forces when it comes to social media. In particular, I was intrigued by the term “counter-blogging” which Capt. Faggard says is when “Airmen counter the people out there in the blogosphere who have negative opinions about the US government and the air force.”
This interchange reminded me of Weber Shandwick’s discussions and research on badvocates. Counter-blogging is similar to countering and engaging badvocates before it is too late. Scott’s comment about the private sector’s reluctance to wholeheartedly use social media to manage critics struck home. In our research with global executives, Risky Business, nearly four in ten said that they worried alot about the damage that can be done to company reputation from dissatisfied customers and critics.
Thought that the parallels were worth mentioning here. Hope you do too.
Tags: Badvocates, US Air Force Blogger Assessment Tool, Weber Shandwick
Ad Age’s Jack Neff wrote that Forrester is coming out with a new report recommending that “brand managers” be newly named “brand advocates.” Forrester makes the claim that it is high time for marketers and agencies to capitalize on the Internet and focus on customer cohorts. The report being issued next week, Adaptive Brand Marketing: Rethinking Your Approach to Branding in the Digital Age, has many other recommendations about brand advocacy programs and what it means for marketers in 2010. Weber Shandwick agrees with this call to action for advocacy-focused marketing. In this complex and resource-restricted world, identifying your advocates and badvocates (what we call detractors) is the right solution. We are all advocates under the skin — maybe not all. Our research found that nearly one out of two (48%) of us are advocates, some more active than others. Non-advocates are also worth identifying and finding ways to communicate with and engage. Looking forward to the report.
Tags: Ad Age, brand advocates, Forrester, Jack Neff
Had a funny experience the other day when I was told that someone in IT showed up at a meeting with The Good Book of Badvocacy and was touting it as a must read! We at Weber Shandwick could not be more pleased and proud. Really love those Good Book advocates.
