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 When it hits the halls of Dilbert’s cube farm, you know it’s becoming pervasive! Just wait and watch a few weeks, and “gossipsize” will become one of those terms you’ll see in Wired’s Jargon Watch. Sounds much cooler than “online reputation management.” Thank you, Scott Adams, for yet another brilliant way to brighten our day.

BTW, if you haven’t checked out Dilbert.com lately, you should. It’s a phenomenal example of using social media to enable a community of advocates to spread your brand. Mix, mash and share to your friends’ delight.

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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.

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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

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Badvocacy can be deflated when companies are willing to face up to the damage badvocates can cause, recognize legitimate concerns of their badvocates and inoculate themselves from badvocacy by doing the right thing. At the same time, badvocates need to know when they can back off from their campaigns so that future criticisms and actions will be considered credible. Here’s to healthy badvocacy!

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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.

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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.

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Happy holiday.

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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.

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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.

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