John Battelle's Conversational Marketing Summit, which debuted last fall with much acclaim in a more intimate setting in San Francisco, faced a challenging task with its second edition last week in New York.
For starters, the speaker lineup was impressive, but two of the most important players of the social media Web were noticeably absent: Facebook (which, to be fair, took part last year) and Twitter. Yes, where was Twitter, the epitome of online conversations? Or at least another micro-blogging service?
Additionally, and more crucially, the program had to deal with what business lingo calls a "good problem:" the summit last fall had done such an excellent job establishing and exhaustively addressing the topic that it was hard for the NY program to offer new insights. Sure, the trend toward and the need for conversational media have continued and amplified. So has the emergence of the distributed Internet, or in Battelle's words: "To keep building our brands, we have to go to where the audience has gone." And the audience has gone to conversational media, as traffic data suggests, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.
The most successful new online brands are indeed conversational: Blogging service Wordpress, for example, experienced a whopping 202 percent traffic growth since last year, YouTube is up by 80 percent, Wikipedia by 28 percent, Facebook by 72 percent, and Flickr by nearly 86 percent. Sites with tools, services, and platforms that enable conversations to thrive are thriving themselves while the traffic to traditional properties (aka portals) stagnates or shrinks.
"Too many advertisers buy impressions instead of making impressions," Matt Freeman of GoFish remarked. Despite all the momentum that conversational media enjoys, as far as marketers' best practices and tools are concerned, not so much has actually changed since the last CM Summit. And some of the panels seemed to artificially prolong a conversation that had already ended last fall.
B2B = B2C²
Yet it was still an excellent program that Battelle and team put together. Focusing on the role of conversational media in building brands, the summit set out to find the "online analogs to the executions we so love in magazines and television."
Beth Comstock, chief marketing officer of General Electric, was well-suited to provide answers, for she represents an old, venerable brand (the "Hillary Clinton of brands," as someone in the audience framed it) that is successfully adapting to the new branding paradigms on the web. Overseeing a $1 billion budget, she can afford to experiment. But it's not only the money, it's the latitude: "GE is a brand with the permission to do a lot of things," Battelle described it.
Comstock spoke about the importance of "visual storytelling" and GE's continued foray into social media and conversational marketing. She said that the company should--and will--be more aggressive in embracing online conversations, further enhancing the use of embedded video ads and engaging audiences through multimedia content in all of its online channels: "The media plan is becoming the distribution channel." Comstock also made an interesting point about GE's investment in consumer marketing: in her eyes, it elevates the overall brand because it provides a strong umbrella for all of GE's B2B marketing. She's on top of an emerging trend: at the end of the day, enterprise clients are consumers and have the same emotional needs (or as the saying goes, "B2B customers are consumers who have the luxury of having a company pay for what they desire"). On the engagement level, conversational media seem to increasingly force B2B marketers to think like consumer marketers and develop programs that connect directly with the customer--through narratives rather than benefit statements and feature lists.
Will standardized metrics stifle innovation?
The most interesting debates throughout the two-day program centered on the elephant in the room: measurement. Most people in the industry would probably agree that the "end of the click" is near. CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions) and CTR (click-through-rate) do not suffice anymore as go-to metrics for the effectiveness of brand-building display advertising campaigns.
A recent report from Starcom MediaVest suggests that the majority of clicks being purchased are being consumed by unemployed, twenty-something, gambling, shopaholic, Internet addicts: "Heavy clickers represent just 6 percent of the online population yet account for 50 percent of all display ad clicks. While many online media companies use click-through rate as an ad negotiation currency, (...) heavy clickers are not representative of the general public. In fact, heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites--a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers."
Therefore the cry for new types of brand engagement metrics is getting louder: "There is more and more emphasis by advertisers for greater return-on-objectives in campaigns, particularly in the digital space where the accountability data is so readily available," said Grant Prentice, Starcom USA's director of connections research and analytics. "'Natural Born Clickers' shows us that we can't count on click-through rate as our primary success metric for display ads; Starcom is more reliant on shifts in brand attitude metrics and analytics tying online exposure to sales as the true measures of online advertising efficacy." Added Battelle: "The success of online advertising can no longer be defined only by direct response metrics. Today's brand marketers are focusing on an entirely different set of parameters."
However, at present, there exists a plethora of metrics but no standardized set of measurements that lets conversational marketers prove the impact of their programs.
"One of the greatest barriers that we've seen for marketers in social media has been a general lack of standards and tools for campaign measurement and reporting," said Debra Aho Williamson, analyst at eMarketer. "There are, of course, vendors who supply disconnected data points, but it has so far been up to the marketer to wade through this sea of data themselves. What is needed is a single device or methodology that aggregates relevant data in an easily digestible form." Several companies and industry alliances have developed dashboard models seeking to fill that gap.
Federated Media, the summit organizer, introduced its own product: the Conversational Measurement Toolbox, an open suite of campaign measurement, planning, and reporting tools across the three dimensions--"engagement-amplification-equity"--offering marketers greater control and insight into their conversational marketing efforts.
Not everyone working on the creative side of the business is buying into the quest for a standardization of metrics. George Bennett, founder and CEO of branded entertainment firm Magic Bullet Media, contends that viral marketing campaigns are by nature unmeasurable, at least by standardized measures.
In his eyes, viral content, by definition, spreads through paths that are outside of the marketer's domain and are therefore difficult to track--and that's exactly how it should be. Well, probably not much longer. Video analytics firm Visible Measures announced Monday that it is launching a service that enables advertisers and agencies to measure the viral reach and audience engagement of video campaigns. Visible Measures' technology monitors user engagement in a given video stream, and its Viral Reach Database tracks video performance over 80 million unique videos across 150 of the Web's most popular video-sharing sites.
Let 100 flowers bloom
Amid the fixation on engagement metrics, Rich Silverstein, co-chairman and partner of advertising agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, brought back the idea of the good old big idea: "If it's good, it will work. Nice ideas that are big and deep will go a long way." And they even become a broader conversation, a cultural phenomenon, as proven by the recent Clinton vs. Obama Saturday Night Live spot (and a Time cover), both of which were inspired by a Silberstein NBA commercial.
Maybe a standardization of metrics would indeed stifle innovation and social media marketers' appetite for experiments. In the unregulated, fragmented social media space that we're in right now, anything goes, which may very well be a major factor for its vibrancy. Failure is always an option. Andy Markowitz from Kraft Foods quoted Guy Kawasaki: "Let 100 flowers boom."
However, Steve Rubel, senior vice president and director of insights for Edelman Digital, slammed the industry.
"We've gone backwards. There's no standard. The TV screen has a number. A dollar is a dollar. Having a standard makes transactions work. IAB has been moving slowly, fearing, justifiably, that if they come down from Mt. Sinai with two tablets offering a Ten Commandments of metrics, they worry that things could change in six months and render any standard useless," said Rubel, who also writes the Micro Persuasion blog. "Because there are no standards, all agencies are speaking different languages and no one has an answer."
Yet he reminded the audience that the "social Web is made of people" and demanded additional qualitative metrics that measure the impact of conversational marketing on the other side of the equation--the consumer. Social media, at its core, is about collaboration, he argued, and attempts to simply apply the old, quantitative templates of tracking marketing programs would fall short of capturing the essence of online conversations. They are no longer one-way streets: "Consumers are tired of being treated like cattle." They know they are marketed to and expect substantial value in return for their permission, said Rubel.
Consequently, metrics failing to measure the value of marketing programs for consumers would be one-sided and skewed. He also suggested rebranding "conversational marketing" as "collaborative marketing."
"Conversations are just a means to an end," he said, and he finds them valueless if they don't have a positive impact on consumers' lives. That's a somewhat radical proposition, seemingly far ahead of its time. What would truly consumer-focused, impact-driven conversational marketing metrics look like? A good question for the next CM Summit, this fall, in San Francisco.
Update 10:30 p.m. PT: I corrected the description of the old favicon.
Google updated its 'favicon' with a softer, bluer look.
Overnight, Google got a new face on the Web--one measuring 16x16 pixels.
The search giant updated its favicon, the eensy little 256-pixel logo that appears in browser locations such as bookmarks, URL location bar, and window tabs. The old icon, a capital G in a multicolored box, has been supplanted by a cuddlier-looking blue lower-case g.
It's a minor change, to be sure. But coming from a company obsessed not only with design choices but also the effect those choices have, I can't help but draw attention to it. And given how often most Web users see that icon sprinkled across their browsers, it's probably smart to pay some attention to that aspect of branding.
Note that the new favicon doesn't appear on all Google sites yet. And in some areas, there are other favicons: Google Docs, for example, shows different icons for online spreadsheets, word-processing files, and presentations. Conveniently, those favicons are color-coded with the same green, blue, and red colors used by Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.
It seems Google has solidified its dethroning of Microsoft in at least one regard: the global power of its brand.
For the third year in a row, the search giant whose very name has been transformed into a verb, grabbed the top spot in a list of the top 100 most powerful global brands (PDF). Its brand value grew 30 percent since last year's report to surpass $86 billion.
| Brand powerhouses | ||
| Rank | Brand | Value ($B) |
| 1 | 86.1 | |
| 2 | GE | 71.4 |
| 3 | Microsoft | 70.9 |
| 4 | Coca-Cola | 58.2 |
| 5 | China Mobile | 57.2 |
| 6 | IBM | 55.3 |
| 7 | Apple | 55.2 |
| 8 | McDonald's | 49.5 |
| 9 | Nokia | 44.0 |
| 10 | Marlboro | 37.3 |
| Source: Millward Brown Optimor | ||
Market research firm Millward Brown Optimor produced the rankings based on interviews with more than a million consumers worldwide, as well as on financial data. The results show that "strong brands continue to outperform weak ones in terms of market share and share price during recessions," Millward Brown Optimor CEO Joanna Seddon said in a statement.
Microsoft, for the record, once again came in third, with a $70.9 billion brand value. (General Electric once again took second place, at $71.4 billion.)
Apple and Nokia crept up in the rankings this year, breaking into the top 10 companies from 16th and 12th place, respectively, last year. (As a result, they bumped Wal-Mart and Toyota out of the top 10.) IBM and China Mobile also were among the top 10 again.
Of the top 100 most powerful brands, 28 of them were technology related, including Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Oracle, Intel, Dell, and BlackBerry (as opposed to its parent company, RIM).
Rick Clancy, Sony blogger and senior vice president of corporate communications for Sony Electronics
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)SAN FRANCISCO--Could your customer complaint department become a profit center?
That general idea is now possible with the era of corporate blogging and Web 2.0 upon us, according to a number of marketing gurus at a panel discussion Tuesday at the Ad:Tech conference here.
Earning loyalty by winning over critics is nothing new for marketing and customer support experts. What is new these days is that the increasingly interactive Internet provides a way to directly engage with them--once companies understand it's possible.
"There is a real gap in organizations between the group that handles the complaint department and those who view this as an exciting communication touch point," said Beth Thomas-Kim, Nestle's director of consumer services. To show how to do it right, she pointed specifically to the example of online retailer Zappos.com.
"The CEO views the contact center as an investment opportunity," Thomas-Kim said. "Often companies are squeezing the life out of it...but he's using it as a way to drive the connection with the consumer."
Beth Thomas-Kim, Nestle's director of consumer services
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)There was a time when gripers had little recourse besides cranky letters to consumer advocates. Now with the Internet capable of amplifying their voices and helping them band together, they and the problems they are finding with products and services can't be safely ignored.
Providing them a forum for discussion on the corporate Web site can help companies respond directly--and avoid the likelihood that their opinions about the company will help elevate some other Web site in search results.
"By being proactive on the Web, sites like Sony Sucks and IHateSony don't rank as high as they used to," said Rick Clancy, senior vice president of corporate communications and now and now a corporate blogger for Sony Electronics.
A good case in point: Sony's massive laptop recall triggered by lithium-ion battery problems. "It would have been good to have the blog then to have a way to communicate in an unfiltered manner," to explain what happened, what the company is doing about it, and to steer people toward the support they need, Clancy said.
A more concrete example: Sony eliminated a $50 fee that it had charged for PCs that weren't loaded up with trial software often called "crapware."
Tom Asher, head of customer relations for Levi-Strauss
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)In a March blog post, Clancy wrote, "The fee was designed to cover costs associated with removing the programs from the PCs, as well as the loss of subsidies received from the third-party providers. Regardless of the intentions, we listened and eliminated the fee earlier this week. It's gone."
Direct communications--both soliciting feedback and telling customers about new developments--have become a high-profile element of Dell's attempt to reverse its financial fortunes, too.
"Brands are less afraid to say they're sorry in public," said Jordan Warren, president of Agency.com. And at this point, there's nothing to lose from acknowledging problems: "If you don't, others will," he said.
It's tough to bring the lawyers around to this kind of openness. "To apologize to consumers was a big legal risk for us even a few years ago," said Tom Asher, head of customer relations for Levi-Strauss.
Jordan Warren, president of Agency.com
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)And there's a strong financial incentive to work with those who call the customer complaint lines. Levi-Strauss has found that most folks who buy Levi's and Docker's brands spend about $90 per year on them, but those who complain to the company's call center spend $285 a year, Asher said.
Legal department reluctance to customer communications has been diminishing once lawyers realized that addressing customer concerns on the Internet directly was the lesser of two evils, Clancy said.
"The lawyers are starting to come around. Three years ago they were very resistant. There were a lot of barriers, skepticism, and concerns," Clancy said. "It's happening regardless of whether we participate, and without us participating it's happening in a way that's doing more harm than good. That was becoming more and more apparent."
As of September, Philips will no longer make televisions for the U.S. and Canada.
Instead, it is transferring that job to Japanese electronics maker Funai. The two companies agreed to a brand-licensing agreement in which Funai will source, distribute, market and sell all consumer TVs under the Philips and Magnavox brand names in the U.S. and Canada.
The deal begins September 1 and is good for five years. Funai will pay a royalty to Philips.
Beginning in September, Funai will distribute all Philips TV in the U.S. and Canada.
(Credit: Philips)"This agreement secures continued presence of Philips and Magnavox branded TVs in North America in a model that safeguards Philips profitability in this highly competitive market," Philips said in a statement Tuesday.
And so begins the thinning of the herd. The television market is becoming an especially tough business, as prices continue to fall and more inexpensive brands like Vizio and Olevia attempt to edge out the traditional market leaders. Pioneer, a leader in plasma TV tech, also recently announced it would sell TVs but no longer make its own plasma panels.
This means that though the Philips brand name will live on in the U.S., the materials inside those televisions aren't necessarily the same. But the biggest blow is to brand perception.
Philips is a top-tier television maker--it won the Best of CES 2008 Best in Show Award from my CNET Reviews colleague David Katzmaier for its Eco TV--and Funai is, well, not as a highly regarded. This is a boon to Funai, and Chief Executive Tetsuro Funai's comment is pretty much the understatement of the year: "As a premium brand, Philips will add lustre to our existing portfolio."
To be fair, Philips has definitely struggled to compete in the flat-panel TV market. Though the company has attempted to differentiate its brand with Ambilight technology aimed at home theater enthusiasts, it still trailed the big guys, like Sony, Panasonic, and Sharp, in both production and panache.
With everyone becoming a producer in the YouTube age, self-branding ("The Brand Called You") has evolved from a fancy to a necessity.
Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame have shrunk to 5 seconds of microfame, and in the contained public arena of social networks, amateur paparazzi--thanks to the viral nature of social media--have the power to grant celebrity status. That, in a nutshell, is the thesis of Clive Thompson's poignant piece for Wired on the rise of "microcelebrities."
As Facebook walls make personal communications open to the rest of your trusted network, even your most private moments become public relations. What used to be said in e-mail is now "the writing on the wall." This radical transparency lets more and more Internet users nurture their image, manage their privacy, stage their public appearances, and distribute carefully chosen content to their circle of online friends.
PR professionals will have mixed emotions about this trend, as the borders between profession and confession are increasingly blurry. Thompson quotes Theresa Senft, a media studies professor and one of the first to identify the rise of microcelebrities: "People are using the same techniques employed on Madison Avenue to manage their personal lives. Corporations are getting humanized, and humans are getting corporatized." And he writes: "In essence, I'm sending out press releases. Adapting to microcelebrity means learning to manage our own identity and 'message' almost like a self-contained public-relations department."
The growing sophistication for managing one's online reputation is supported by the findings of a recently released study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, stating that Internet users have become more aware of their digital footprint: In 2007, 47 percent searched for information about themselves online, compared to just 22 percent in 2002, and 60 percent of U.S. Internet users surveyed were not concerned about how much information is available about them online.
This stands in stark contrast to the 84 percent, who, in a similar study in 2000, had expressed concern about third parties getting personal information about them from the Internet. Teenagers, the Pew study shows, understand the implications of their digital footprint best, protecting their privacy by using pseudonyms or private accounts, and locking personal details into "walled gardens."
The top global technology brand for 2007 is (drum roll, please) ... um, I'm not sure. One market research firm says Google, the other says Microsoft. This is embarrassing.
How about this: you're the tie-breaker. You're all buyers of technology products and services; which do you think is the better brand? Which one commands your loyalty and recurring business? I hear so much admiration for Google and so much vitriol toward Microsoft, it's hard to believe there's even a question here. But still, the question remains. Which one is it going to be? ... Read more
Last week, I explained why high tech isn't known for its stellar marketing. Well, if you'll permit me to continue to throw stones from the comfort of my glass house, I'd say its branding isn't worth a damn, either.
Mothers should love their children, right? Then why do high-tech mother companies give their spin-offs such stupid names? Do they hate their offspring? It's not that far-fetched. They already saddle them with tons of debt and other baggage. Maybe a stupid name is just their way of saying, "Don't let the door hit you in the butt on your way out"?
Or maybe they're just trying to toughen the company up for the real world, as in Johnny Cash's A Boy Named Sue? I seriously doubt it.
... Read moreLet's face it, high-tech is not known for its stellar marketing.
Sure, there's Dennis Carter's Intel Inside branding campaign, Steve Jobs' iMac, iPod, iPhone, iWhatever, and Michael Dell's direct-marketing concept. Aside from the obvious characters, even folks in the business--like me--have a hard time naming great high-tech marketers.
That's because much of high-tech marketing happens behind the scenes. Like Broadcom somehow managing to nail almost every market it enters, Google turning a great search engine into virtually limitless ad revenue, or Intel defining a next-generation microprocessor four years in advance of its launch.
That's a whole lot different from coming up with an ad campaign to sell beer or batteries.
You see, high-tech marketing is so interwoven with the technology that it's often unclear where the technology ends and the marketing begins. As we discussed in a prior post, marketing's job is to turn technology into successful products. But that statement doesn't imply or require that the transition from technology to product is either distinct or simple. Therein lies the rub. ... Read more
Coca-Cola and Microsoft are the two top global brands, according to an annual ranking by BusinessWeek and branding company Interbrand. Coca-Cola has kept the No. 1 spot and Microsoft has stayed No. 2 for the last seven years.
IBM, GE and Nokia made it into the top 5. Google is climbing and has reached the 20th position; the search giant has raised its brand value 44 percent compared with last year and 45 percent since 2005, breaking into the top 20 in just two years.
The ranking, called Best Global Brands 2007, compiles a list of 100 companies worldwide, a fair amount of them from the U.S.
But how's the value of the brand calculated? The ranking is based on the assumption of how much money the brand will generate in the future. Key issues are branding and marketing strategies as well as financial forecasting.
The big losers this year are Ford, which dropped 19 percent compared with 2006; Gap with 15 percent; and Kodak with 12 percent.
These are the top 10 companies from the list and their brand value in 2007:
1. Coca-Cola, $65 million
2. Microsoft, $59 million
3. IBM, $57 million
4. General Electric, $52 million
5. Nokia, $34 million
6. Toyota, $32 million
7. Intel, $31 million
8. McDonald's, $29 million
9. Disney, $29 million
10. Mercedes-Benz, $24 million
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