Archive for the 'Research' Category
Avid readers of this blog probably know that Weber Shandwick is not only obsessed with advocacy but also with corporate reputation. As part of the Reputation Research team, I was thrilled to see the results of the Harris Interactive Reputation Quotient (RQ) survey proclaiming that a “strong statistical correlation exists between a company’s overall reputation and the likelihood that consumers will purchase, recommend or invest in a company or its products and services.” In other words, companies that attend to their reputations are rewarded with advocacy. Of course, we’ve known this for a long time (check out our Return on Advocacy white paper) but it’s really gratifying to see esteemed third party substantiation! Don’t miss Leslie Gaines-Ross’ blog, reputationXchange, and Weber Shandwick’s web site, reputationRx, to learn all about reputation.
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
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.
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.
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?
Nielsen Online recently released a study that finds that blogger buzz around sustainabilility grew by 50 percent in 2007. Early 2007 buzz was dominated by global warming, but issues such as renewable energy and resource conservation increased.
The study also reports that corporations that greenwash their advertising and PR will quickly turn bloggers into the dreaded Badvocates. Sustainability bloggers’ number one greenwashing discussion topic is “contradictory actions.” As most companies know these days, there is no hiding from Badvocacy, so they need to be sure their messages are consistent with their products and services.
Here is some interesting evidence that badvocacy exceeds advocacy. If you go to Fortune’s Most Admired Companies section on the Fortune web site, you will find that people post their thoughts on whether the top most admired companies deserve the kudos or not. Fortune asks readers: What do you think of the corporations on Fortune’s top 20 Most Admired Companies list? Should they be in the top 20? Tell us what you think. The best replies will be published here, and possibly in a future story on CNNMoney.com.
As of this writing, there were 156 postings. We did the analysis one week ago when there were 129 comments. Over one-half (54%) of the comments in our analysis about the top 20 most admired companies were negative vs. over one-third (38%) which were positive. The remaining 8% were neutral. The comments are pretty interesting and are certainly a peek into what people think about companies. As our research on advocates and badvocates shows, badvocacy gets spread more frequently.
As an example, here is a positive one about Costco:
“I was a 20 year kid when I started working for Costco. Almost instantly I was looked at as a celebrity in the town I worked. People would stop me on the street and ask me about Costco and tell me about their love of the store. In the eight years I worked there I was wa paid well and given full time employment. I worked in the regional office and learned more about the company then I ever thought I would. I know that they are not perfect and have some improvements to make but they do a good job taking care of their employees despite pressure from Wall Street to limit their compensation. I personally met the CEO. I bought in the company philosophy that the member comes first and I felt good about making sacrifices for company (like time away from my family and not getting everything to make my work life better). Costco is truely an innovative business model that could treat their employees a lot worse but they don’t because they chose not to. Needless to say I drank the Kool-Aid and 4 years away from the company I still shop there every week just to remember how it tastes. If Costco doesn’t deserve to be there no company does.”
Here is a negative one that is referring to recent problems that Southwest Airlines has had with the Federal Aviation Agency about flying planes with safety concerns:
“Southwest + FAA = Not a trusted top 20.”
Badvocacy often rules.
Very interesting data and insights from a new PR Week and PR Newswire survey of 1,231 journalists/bloggers released Monday. I can’t yet figure out what’s more amazing — the number of journalists who see the clear web road ahead, or the number that don’t see the speeding web semi-trailer in the rear-view mirror chasing down their Prius.
Now, I’m a big fan of print media. Wrote for a major daily. Edited my college paper. Even launched a magazine in my younger carefree days. And based on a recent Churchill Club event, I have renewed faith that some print media will continue to thrive — especially the ones that truly engage their audience and represent a community of interest.
At the same time, I’m a big advocate for social media. Which is why a few of the stats surprised me:
* Only 22% are blogging for their publication, and only 19% on their own;
* 38% say they’re asked to do more on the web, but only 13% cite increased competition as the top change driver;
* 70% to 89% rely on web sites, Google searches and direct PR engagement for information — but only 14% are using RSS feeds and only 14-15% tap executive blogs or podcasts as important sources.
Of course, this may reflect that blogging and podcast content is still fairly uneven. Or that some respondents didn’t make hard distinctions between “blog” and “web” content. Or that a generational gap will create big divides in the media world. Whatever the case, it’s evident that PR Week nailed the headline on this one: “State of transition.”
Imagine my surprise when I typed “badvocates” into Google and found a blog titled badvocates by Craig Ritchie. The reason I am surprised is that we coined the term badvocates last year in May. Weber Shandwick conducted research on what drives advocacy and badvocacy worldwide…who are these people who champion or detract from companies, causes and organizations. The badvocates are the advocates with their thumbs down. His blog has a tag line that says “You wouldn’t like them when they’re angry. And own a blog. Or a webcam. ” He also has a cute UN-smiley face….>:( for badvocates. Our research found that badvocates spread negative word-of-mouth faster and to more people. Don’t get on their bad side! That’s okay if Craig wants to borrow the term. We believe in open sourcing.
Avid readers of this blog probably know that Weber Shandwick is not only obsessed with advocacy but also with corporate reputation. As part of the Reputation Research team, I was thrilled to see the results of the Harris Interactive Reputation Quotient (RQ) survey proclaiming that a “strong statistical correlation exists between a company’s overall reputation and the likelihood that consumers will purchase, recommend or invest in a company or its products and services.” In other words, companies that attend to their reputations are rewarded with advocacy. Of course, we’ve known this for a long time (check out our Return on Advocacy white paper) but it’s really gratifying to see esteemed third party substantiation! Don’t miss Leslie Gaines-Ross’ blog, reputationXchange, and Weber Shandwick’s web site, reputationRx, to learn all about reputation.
