Archive for the 'Research' Category
We just completed a survey on civility in America. The survey was conducted with Weber Shandwick and Powell Tate and KRC Research. We decided to dig deep into the tone and level of discourse in this country and surveyed 1,000 Americans online. I’d like to share with you some of the findings which point to an erosion in how people communicate with each other and with our public institutions. Since being informed is so fundamental to our democracy, our research might make people think twice before cancelling out other people’s opinions online and offline. You might also want to take a look at how Politico framed our research and underscored our point even further. As advocates for strong public discourse and hearing both sides of an issue, here are a few select findings: [For more information, please go to this link for the press release and here for the executive summary.]
- Two-out-of-three Americans consider a general lack of civility to be a major problem for the nation and 72 percent think that poor behavior has gotten worse in recent years.While the American people believe their friends, family and places of worship are bucking the trend toward incivility, a majority of the public sees uncivil behavior throughout society – especially in politics and high schools; on talk radio and our nation’s highways; in Hollywood and professional sports.
- Seventy-two percent of Americans view the political world and government as uncivil – the highest percentage recorded in the poll – and the absence of civility appears to be having an impact on participation and interest in the political process among broad swaths of the public.
- Nearly half the American people (49%) are tuning out government and politics, and almost two-thirds of those people (63%) cite the general tone and level of civility as a major factor in their decision. Forty-six percent of the people are tuning out opinion pieces and editorials in the media, and 45 percent cite incivility as a major factor. Thirty-eight percent are tuning out news coverage and reporting and half of them (50%) attribute their actions to the lack of civility.
- Each major political party gives the other low marks on civility. Seventy-one percent of Democrats view Republicans as uncivil, and 74 percent of Republicans view Democrats as uncivil. Political independents regard Congressional Republicans more uncivil than Congressional Democrats, although they rate both parties more uncivil than civil (58 and 50 percent, respectively).“Our research provides hard evidence that constituents and consumers alike are fed up with the polarization of our political system and the uncivil tone of our country as a whole,” said Jack Leslie, Chairman of Weber Shandwick. “As a result, Americans are tuning out and turning away from news, information and informed opinions that make up the very foundation of American democracy.”
Tags: advocates, civility, discourse, government, KRC Research, politics, Powell Tate, Weber Shandwick
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.
Are we making too many generalizations about digital natives, those people born between 1980 and 2000, who we consider digital advocates as well. An article in The Economist reasons that there is as much variation among digital natives as among generations. Of course, not every one, has access to technology as we sometimes fool ourselves into thinking. But what caught my eye in the article was a reference to a Pew Research Center study that found that the younger 18-24 year olds that we assume are online activists are the least likely age cohort to e-mail a public official or donate money to a political cause online. That surprised me after living through the Obama presidential campaign where young people were out in force online pitching for the democratic nominee. Instead, these digital natives in this age group are more likely to share political news and join political causes on social media sites. “Rather than genuinely being more politically engaged, they may simply wish to broadcast their activism to their peers.” High intensity advocates, as we at Weber Shandwick call them, walk the talk and take action in support of their causes. These findings would suggest that 18-24 year olds are more likley to be passive advocates or are more inclined to spread word of mouth than engage outside their networks more proactively. Very revealing finding.
Tags: Advocacy, digital natives, Economist, high intensity advocates, Pew Research Center, Weber Shandwick
There’s a “new” news consumer today, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center released this week. And the Internet and mobile technologies are at the center of it all, helping people’s relationship with the news become more “portable, personalized, and participatory.”
• Portable: 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.
• Personalized: 28% of Internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.
• Participatory: 37% of Internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.
According to the study, the rise of social media like social networking sites and blogs has helped the news become a social experience for consumers, where they use their social networks and social networking technology to filter, assess, and react to news.
This is good news indeed. Let’s face it, the mainstream news business, battered particularly hard by the recession, needs all the life-saving it can find to stay afloat and relevant to consumers today. And while that’s clearly not new news, it’s important not to lose sight of the broader story told by the broader trends.
And those trends tell us that the list of shows that thrive on broadcast television—particularly ones that discuss current events, politics, news and lifestyle— is short and getting shorter. The audience is declining for the Evening News. It’s declining for the morning news. No one is immune it seems. Not even the queen of daytime herself, Oprah. The trend for her show, and media empire, is down from where it was, unfathomable a few short years ago.
One of the few bright spots isn’t “real news” at all. It’s the hilariously “fake” news of Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” on cable and his even more radical brethren Steven Colbert of “The Colbert Report.” Ratings fueled by the loyal Colbert Nation are doing just fine. Even more surprising is that studies have found that viewers of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report—the news that’s fake mind you—have the highest knowledge of national and international affairs out of any show’s audience, news included! So obviously something more than just laughs is going on here.
But it’s the exception. Polls, circulation stats and Nielsen ratings show, beyond a doubt, that people under 40 are following current events less than their parents. Eighteen to 24-year-olds may be digital natives but research shows that just 11 percent use the Internet to learn about current events. Research also shows that people under 40 know less and care less about politics.
This generational divide is part of what’s wreaking havoc on the newsprint business. Average weekday circulation at 379 of the top U.S. newspapers fell 10.6% during the six months ending in September of last year—the steepest decline ever documented.
Similarly, the percentage of Americans who consider themselves regular magazine readers has shown a slow, steady decline over the past two decades. Pew has also found that 23% of adult Americans in 2008 said they read a magazine of some kind the day before — a drop of nearly a third from 33% in 1994. When asked specifically about news magazines, 12% reported reading one “regularly,” down 2 percentage points from 2006 and down 6 percentage points from a similar survey in 1994.
Together with the deep recession, these trends have led to a total of 15,000+ journalists getting laid off or taking buyouts in the U.S. alone last year. This means less journalists covering more beats, wearing more “hats.” A sobering reality for PR people everywhere, as there are far fewer journalists to write and pages to carry your story today in these old standby news vehicles. But there’s also good news. Niche publications have held up pretty well, with most though not all posting gains in a tough year last year. Same is true with some cable channels, the profit workhorses for many a media network today.
While the traditional news spigot runs drier, and Americans’ relationship with news changes, there’s a veritable fire hose of opportunity happening online. We’ve all heard the stats but they remain no less amazing. More video was uploaded to YouTube in the past 2 months than if ABC, NBC and CBS had been airing new content 24/7/365 since 1948 (which was when ABC started broadcasting). Twitter eclipsed The New York Times in unique monthly visitors in 2009. 250 Million unique visitors go to YouTube, Facebook and MySpace every month collectively (sites which did not exist 6 years ago), compared to the 10 Million unique visitors ABC, NBC, CBS get every month collectively. These kinds of stats could be cited all day long…
Of course, these are exactly the kind of trends that are disrupting the mainstream media model in the first place. But even so, any good news about how Americans are consuming news these days is welcome. Will news organizations truly adapt to and take advantage of them in time? Can they?
Image credit: Flickr
Tags: media, news, socialmedia, trends
Yesterday The New York Times teased an upcoming Strategic Management Journal paper about the positive influence of zealous employees. Their research found that strong sales growth is correlated with an organizational culture in which employees thought more highly of their company than did the public. In other words, when staff believes in its organization, pride and loyalty shows through and customers pick up on the positivity.
The theme of employee advocacy, and its importance to business success, was one of our key findings from research we released earlier this year (Risky Business: Reputations Online™ conducted with the Economist Intelligence Unit). Our study found that global executives believe that the best way to protect reputations online is to monitor employee satisfaction levels and respond to results from employee satisfaction surveys. Many executives echoed the importance of building “best places to work” cultures when asked in an open-ended question about the greatest reputation threats facing their companies over the next three years. As one Australian executive said in response to this question: “Failure to engage the passions of employees will cause the most damage to corporate reputation in the future.” Without a doubt, no company interested in protecting its reputation can afford to have a mob of grumbling employees online. Satisfied employees who are company advocates are the best antidote for–and defense against–reputation failure. A company’s culture is ultimately its best protection both online and offline.
Looking forward to the release of the Strategic Management Journal report. In the meantime, remember: your employees are your best advocates.
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
Wanted to direct you to a great article written by Weber Shandwick’s own Colin Byrne, CEO UK and Europe. It appeared last week and includes practical tips for minimizing reputation damage that comes from a company’s badvocates. Colin also cites real-world examples of the kinds of damage companies have experienced when they haven’t kept “the window to sabotage” shut tightly. Enjoy the article.
Thought I’d share another finding about advocacy from our study with the Economist Intelligence Unit - Risky Business: Reputations Online. This research snippet is about where Badvocacy meets Web 2.0.
Although global executives identify major media as the most threatening to company reputation (84%), plenty of executives (42%) recognize the damage new media can impose. Blogs and discussion forums are the most feared with online videos, comments on social networking sites, Wikipedia entries, and online pictures compounding potential destruction. Considering that fast-rising Web 2.0 new media and social networking tools can literally rally advocates and badvocates overnight, more executives should be concerned about new media as a reputation killer. Here’s how each of these rank in terms of global executive fear:
While the blog is considered the king of Web 2.0 badvocacy risk now, it will be interesting to see how the other technologies evolve as badvocacy threats.
If you’ve been following this blog you know that we at Weber Shandwick firmly believe in the “return on advocacy.” Simply, it’s the business benefits of finding and connecting with your advocates. Now maybe it’s time to kick off the “return on BADVOCACY.” Can there be such a thing? Afterall, our own study, Risky Business: Reputations Online™ clearly identified the fear instilled in global executives by customer and employee badvocates.
Employee badvocates are a big concern: executives ranked employee criticism (41%) in a tie for first place with leaked confidential information as the greatest online risk to their own company’s reputation. As employees wrestle with declining pensions and possible layoffs, reputation bandits will be even harder at work online.
The Internet provides innumerable platforms for employees to strike, usually anonymously, at a company’s reputation. However, rather than being immobilized with fear about the potential for such strikes, Nokia, as noted in an article in this week’s BusinessWeek, is embracing employee badvocacy. They are allowing their employees to rant anonymously on an intranet soapbox called BlogHub. “Workers can be savage as they flame thier employer…Nokia managers want them to fire away.” Nokia believes that innovation is accelerated by encouraging employees to say what is on their minds. I would surmise that the other benefit is that by allowing employees to release their frustrations in a “safe” environment, they won’t be tempted to go outside Nokia’s four walls and vent.
It will be interesting to see if Nokia sees a Return on Badvocacy as it struggles in a tough economy with strong competitors. In the meantime, we’ll keep on eye out for other examples of turning badvocacy into a positive return.
Tags: Badvocacy, Badvocate, BusinessWeek, Nokia, Weber Shandwick
