Research

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Francois Gossieaux at NCF

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Francois Gossieaux from Emergence Marketing and Corante introduces results from an ongoing study of online communities in business. This is just a brief clip from the beginning of the presentation.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Share your thoughts with SNCR on press release ROI

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I’ve been part of a team working with the Society of New Communications Research (SNCR) conducting a study into the ROI companies derive from posting press releases online. The study is based on some interviews and a survey. The survey’s been online for a while but time is running short to contribute your thoughts. It only takes a couple minutes. SNCR and I would value your answers.

There’s a benefit to taking the survey, which is sponsored by Vocus, which owns PRWeb, the online press release distribution service: You’ll get a pretty nice discount to the New Communication Forum, which starts next Tuesday in Sonoma. If you’ve been on the fence about coming, the lower price might help tip you over. The survey results will be presented at a special Forum session.

Speaking of the New Communications Forum, not too many people are signed uip for the pre-conference sessions, which offer 3-1/2 hours of in-depth learning on topics ranging from measurement to new media education and training. The sessions are only $249, and discounts are available for corporations and non-profits. (Okay, I admit I have a selfish motivation for promoting the pre-conference sessions: Only a couple people have signed up for the session I’m doing on podcasting with Neville Hobson (who will be participating via Skype from the UK).

I hear that the economy is putting a squeeze on a lot of conference. The Conference Board, for example, is seeing a downturn in registrations (or so I’m told). But a discounted $249 rate for a half-day that goes deep on these topics is hard to beat.

In any case, though, taking the survey is free—plus, you’ll get a copy of the study’s xecutive summary—and will contribute to precisely the kind of knowledge base SNCR was formed to provide.

Friday, April 04, 2008

Survey says influencers have no influence. Doesn’t reach count for anything?

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There’s a fair amount of buzz over a study issued recently from the Canadian research firm Pollara that supports the notion that influential bloggers aren’t really so influential. Eighty percent of the 1,100 adults polled in December reported that they would be more inclined to make a purchase recommended by friends and family compared to only 23% who would consider recommendations from “well-known bloggers.”

Why this comes as a surprise to anybody escapes me. I would have bet real money on this. After all, would you buy a particular new car based on what a well-known auto critic wrote in a daily newspaper or what Uncle Marvin told you after he’d been driving one for six months?

The study reinforces Duncan Watts’ assertions in a recent FastCompany article. Steve Rubel points out that it also supports the findings of the Edelman Trust Barometer, in which most people put their trust in “a person like me” while only 14% trust boggers. Edelman’s results also mirror those from Ketchum’s Media, Myths & Realities study.

What’s more surprising to me is the conclusions people are drawing from the study. Rubel, for instance, suggests that outreach efforts that focus on reach miss the big picture. “Trust is by far a more important metric.”

Really? Whatever happened to the importance of building awareness? While the influential bloggers—the so-called “A-listers”—may not have influence, they do have eyeballs. They are A-listers, after all, because people read them. I may have greater trust in my friend in the next cube, but where did he hear about it? And if he heard about it from a trusted friend or family member, they read about it from a source that gets broad distrtibution. The information has to start somewhere.

My goal in reaching out to widely-read bloggers is not to trick them into using their influence to get other people to buy the product. It is, rather, to create awareness and get people talking. Once it trickles down to Uncle Marvin, that’s when the trust factor kicks in. Or are we supposed to just wait for Uncle Marvin to discover the product while poking around in Best Buy?

Has the application of PR in the social media space led us to forget the objectives we’re trying to achieve in the first place? Is it always influence? Or is is sometimes just getting the message out? If a sympathetic blogger agrees with the message and chooses to help distribute it, that’s great. Should I no longer take that approach because a poll states the obvious, that friends and family have a greater impact on a purchase decision? Nonsense.

Rubel notes that Louis Gray found that top bloggers extend their reach among people who subscribe to their feeds (beyond those who just read their blogs), but he opines, “Who cares?”

I do, Steve, and any good communicator should. Reach increases awareness, driving more people to take a look and, if they like what they see, make the recommendation to friends and family. That’s why so many tech companies try to get their products into the hands of The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and The New York Times’ David Pogue. Same idea: I may not buy a product based on their recommendation, but their reach and influence will lead me to see what my friends and family—and the bloggers I do trust have to say about it.

In her outstanding book, “Measuring Public Relationships,” Katie Paine repeatedly points to awareness as a key measure of the effectiveness of a public relations effort. “If your objective is exposure and communication of key messages, measuring media content is by far the cheapest, easiest, and fastest form of measurement,” Katie notes in one chapter.

Why does outreach have to be either/or? There is a strong case for targeting B-list and C-list bloggers. Robert Scoble and Mike Arrington get hundreds, maybe thousands, of pitches every day, good ones and bad ones. The odds of yours finding its way into their blogs isn’t great. B- and C-list bloggers, on the other hand, are a bit more hungry for good, relevant content in which their audiences will be interested. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, assuming your information is genuinely relevant and would be of real interest to Scoble or Arrington.

There are a number of dimensions to outreach, a lot of nuances, many shades of grey. Does the Pollara study mean there’s no value in reaching out to bloggers with high levels of readership along with smaller groups where there are higher levels of trust? Nope. Those blogs with high levels of readership are one way to kick-start the conversation among the groups of trusted individuals in the first place.

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Move over, ProfNet: LinkedIn is here

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Update: The Ragan.com article reference in this post is now online

Over on Facebook, Peter Shankman has started a group titled, “If I Can Help A Reporter, I Will.” The idea is pretty simple. A reporter in need of an expert for a quote or some background can reach out through the group, and members get notified via Facebook messaging (which also hits their email inbox).

I was subscribed for a while but left the group because of the flood of queries that had nothing to do with my area of expertise. Talk about overload!

But the idea is still a good one, an informal approach to what PR Newswire’s Profnet, a long-standing tool that lets journalists send out similar queries to companies that subscribe. ProfNet provides those companies with the opportunity to identify stories about their business and then get some earned media by responding and, with luck, getting an interview that makes it into the story.

Social media is making this even easier than ProfNet or even Shankman’s group. Mark Ragan, CEO of Ragan Communications, shared with me an example. (Disclosure: I do fee-based work for Ragan Communications.) Mark wanted to run a story on the company’s website about WalMart’s reversal of its decision to collect money an injured employee received from a lawsuit.

(You’ve probably read about this, but the employee was seriously hurt when her car was hit by a truck, losing short-term memory and confining her to a medical facility. WalMart’s benefits paid the employee, who also sued the trucking company. WalMart’s benefits policy is not unique by any stretch of the imagination: You can’t get paid twice—by WalMart and somebody else—for the same injury. So when the employee collected a judgment, WalMart took it, since they had already paid out on the employee’s claim. Yesterday, however, WalMart revised its medical benefit policies to allow the employee to keep the money she collected.)

In search of some commentary for his article, Mark—a former Washington, D.C.-based journalist—didn’t turn to ProfNet or even Shankman’s Facebook group. Both would have taken too much time. He put a question out, instead, through LinkedIn’s “Answers” feature.

The answers he got back were thoughtful and came from people, in some cases, any journalist would be happy to quote. There was, for example, the owner of a company, the general counsel for a hospital, and a human resources consultant. And the answers came back fast, all of them within an hour of Mark’s submission of the question.

When I told Mark I planned to blog about LinkedIn’s usefulness to journalists (or anybody else researching a story), he wrote back:

Linked In is a reporter’s dream. As a journalist, I can put a network of dream sources together. Then, when I’m facing a breaking story, I can post a question, ask for expert comment and then weave those comments into my story. And what makes Linked In a gold mine for reporters is that you can choose a category of expertise based on the story you are writing and post that question to those members as well as your connections. All of this can be done in a matter of minutes.

I got my first comment minutes after I posted the question. I also received comments from experts I never would have known--lawyers, HR professional and PR experts.

Finally, you can quickly scan the members’ profile to see what experience that person has, then mention it in your story. It gives your piece more credibility.”

Linked in is ProfNet on steroids. And it’s free.

And yet there are businesses that block LinkedIn and other tools that provide companies with the opportunity to get ink or find resources. I just read this morning, in a Globe and Mail article, about a company that blocked Facebook because “I just couldn’t find any business use” for it. The business uses are there. You just have to think (sorry) outside the box in order to find them.

Like Mark did.

Monday, January 07, 2008

New media study reinforces what we already know

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Deloitte isn’t exactly the kind of company you’d expect to find at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), taking place now in Las Vegas. But Deloitte is there and meeting with people looking for consultations on the results of a new study, ”State of the Media Democracy,” which the consulting firm unveiled today.

You won’t be bowled over by the results, which serve more to reinforce findings of other studies (and common sense) than offer mind-blowing revelations. But some of the numbers are still interesting enough to compile into a bullet list:

• 45% of respondents—representing U.S. media consumers—develop websites, photo albums, blogs and music online to share with everybody from family and friends to complete strangers. That is, the notion of consumer-generated content is alive and well.
• 32% of consumers consider themselves to be “broadcasters” of their own media
• 54% are increasingly making their own entertainment
• 69% are consumer content created by others
• 69% find their computers more entertaining than their TVs, and over one-third watch TV shows online
• 58% want to connect their TV to the Net so they can download content or view anything they like on their computers
• 36% use their cell phones as an entertainment device
• 50% of female Americans said videogames, PC games, and Internet games have become important entertainment sources
• 19% of GenXers said ads or product placement in virtual worlds like Second Life are the most influential form of online advertising
• 23% of Millenials said ads or product placements in video games are the most influential form of online advertising

In every case, these numbers were dramatically higher than in a survey Deloitte conducted earlier in 2007 (this one was conducted between October 25-31) by Harrison Group, an independent research company, with 2,081 consumers between the ages of 13-75.

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

The growing social media contradiction

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Rob Cottingham pointed me to a Canadian study that suggests business and marketing leaders believe the importance of social media is eclipsing that of traditional media. The study determined that 46% of respondents say that social media is more important than TV, radio, newspapers and magazines; 85% believe social media have become vital elements of the communication mix.

At the same time, though, 66% don’t think employees should be using it at work.

The study of 444 business and marketing leaders was conducted by Pollara Strategic Insights for Veritas Communications’ new com.motion unit.

Consider that, according to the study, 43% of business and marketing leaders have profiles on MySpace or Facebook. That would include a significant number who believe their own employees shouldn’t be able to access that profile or interact with the business leader—or other employees, customers, or others in their business network—during company time.

If social media are critical elements of the communication mix, shouldn’t employees be exposed to it? Participate in it? Shouldn’t the organization help employees figure out how to represent the organization in their online dealings, the way some companies are?

Rob also wondered (in his note to me), “So… Which group of employers is going to be more attractive to a young, entrepreneurial workforce in an era of skills shortages? And which group stands the better chance of being alive, vibrant and growing in ten years’ time?”

At least we’re starting to witness some chinks in the armor. A few days back, I heard the usual report from job placement company Challenger, Gray & Christmas warning companies that productivity would suffer on Black Monday, the first Monday after Thanksgiving when online retailers offered deep discounts. Their estimate: $488 million in lost productivity, based on 68.6 million American workers spending an average of 12 minutes on the Net. The company also pointed out that those 12 minutes result in $700 million in online sales, which is positive for the economy. But in the radio interview I heard, John Challenger also said that employees are increasingly expected to work when they’re away from the office, which balances things out.

Challenger also offered this, from a report in the Kansas City Star:

While employers shouldn’t be surprised to see distracted employees on Monday, Challenger, Gray said it is hard to measure productivity using a traditional “widgets per hour” formula.

The consulting firm said that while some productivity will be lost, employers should not fret because, realistically, workers are not paid by the minute and are not expected to be productive every minute of their work day.

Overall, “… unless online shopping causes deadlines to be missed or Internet performance to suffer, companies should not attempt to crack down on the practice. Doing so could negatively affect moral and loyalty, which ultimately will have a greater impact on the bottom line than a few minutes of cyber shopping,” said John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas has been releasing these productivity calculations for some time, around everything from Black Monday to the NCAA Final Four. This is the first time I’ve seen an admission that the numbers don’t mean very much.

I’m cross-posting this to the Stop Blocking blog.

Friday, November 16, 2007

SNCR Symposium looks like a great event

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I wish I could be there but I have another commitment. Still, I was surprised to hear that registrations are low for the Research Symposium and Awards Gala, the annual SNCR event set for December 5-6 in Boston. (I was particularly surprised given the combination of a great program and the vibrancy of the Boston-based social media community.)

Speakers include John Cass, Paul Gillin, Richard Nacht and Shel Israel, among others. A slew of case studies will be presented and the registration fee supports the Society, whose work benefits all of us. (Disclosure: I am a founding fellow of SNCR.)

Take a look at the program and give some serious thought to attending.