Marketing to the Social Web E-Book

Larry Weber

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 380

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

An updated and expanded Second Edition of the popular guide to social media for the business community

Marketers must look to the Web for new ways of finding customers and communicating with them, rather than at them. From Facebook and YouTube to blogs and Twitter-ing, social media on the Internet is the most promising new way to reach customers. Marketing to the Social Web, Second Edition helps marketers and their companies understand how to engage customers, build customer communities, and maximize profits in a time of marketing confusion. Author and social media guru Larry Weber describes newly available tools and platforms, and shows you how to apply them to see immediate results and growth.

Rather than broadcast messages to audiences, savvy marketers should encourage participation in social networks to which people want to belong, where dialogue with customers, and between customers, can flourish. in Networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and even Flickr are the perfect forums for this dialog; this book shows you how to tap into this new media.

In addition to the tools and tactics that made Marketing to the Social Web a critical hit among marketers, this second edition includes three entirely new chapters that cover recent changes in the field. These new chapters describe how Facebook will monetize its business and one day surpass Google; how companies can measure the influence and effectiveness of their social media campaigns; and how marketing to mobile social media will grow into an effective practice in the near future.

Marketing must reach out into new forms, media, and models. Marketing to the Social Web, Second Edition presents an exceptional opportunity to use these new tools and models to reach new markets, even in today's fragmented media environment.

Larry Weber has spent the last three decades building global communications companies, including Weber Shandwick Worldwide and the W2 Group. He is also the founder and Chairman of the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange, the nation’s largest interactive advocate association.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Foreword

PREFACE

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

Acknowledgements

PART I - Pandemonium: The Landscape of the Social Web

CHAPTER 1 - The Web Is Not a Channel

Pandemonium in Media and Markets

From Broadcasters to Aggregators

The Web Is Not a Channel

Four Generations of the Web

CHAPTER 2 - Community and Content: The Marketer’s New Job

Who’s Really in Control Here?

Marketing’s Role Has Changed

Opportunities to Achieve Community

New Rules of Engagement

CHAPTER 3 - Making the Transition to the Social Web

The New Marketing Mindset

Segment by What People Do, Feel, Think

Communicate Interactively

Content Created by Customers

Viva Virality

Five Stars for Reviews

Advertiser and Publisher Roles: No Paper Needed

Strategy from the Bottom Up

Hierarchy: Let Users Decide

Test Driving the Social Web

Beyond Bold Moves for Ford

CHAPTER 4 - How to Let Customers Say What they Really Think

Learning to Let Go

Learning to Listen

Comments as Early Warning Signs

Complaints, Complaints

What about Legal Issues?

PART II - Seven Steps to Build Your Own Customer Community

CHAPTER 5 - Step One: Observe and Create a Customer Map

Steps to Marketing on the Social Web

Look Who’s Talking

You Need a Business Goal

Define the Target Audience and Speak Their Language

Look for Best Practice Examples

Select Key Words and Begin to Search

Create a Customer Map

CHAPTER 6 - Step Two: Recruit Community Members

Recruit as if Your Business Depends on It

Bring a New Toolkit to the Job

Send Out Your Invitations

Create That Community Feeling

Build on Existing Sites and Communities

Feel the Momentum

CHAPTER 7 - Step Three: Evaluate Online Conduit Strategies

This Way to the Conduit

Searching, Searching

More about Blogs

Welcome to the E-Community

Tap into Social Networks

CHAPTER 8 - Step Four: Engage Communities in Conversation

Bubbly Conversation

A Brand Is a Dialogue

Making Customers Part of the Brand

Too Much of a Good Thing

Ten Rules for Private Communities

How Do You Pay for It All?

CHAPTER 9 - Step Five: Measure Involvement with New Tools, Techniques

On the Path to Payoff

The One-Two Punch

It’s All about the Data

Listen, Engage, Measure

Evidence of and Quality of Community

It’s Not All Milk and Cookies

CHAPTER 10 - Step Six: Promote Your Community to the World

What If: Aéropostale

Now for a Real Example

The Little Web Site and How It Grew

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

Outside Expertise

Multimedia Outreach

CHAPTER 11 - Step Seven: Improve the Community’s Benefits

What about Friendster?

Job One: Quality

A Case in Point

Gather Ideas

The Improvement Imperative

Reality Check

PART III - Making Use of the Four Online Conduit Strategies

CHAPTER 12 - The Reputation Aggregator Strategy

Everybody Loves Search

What Am I Bid for “Laptop”?

Ready for Landing

Don’t Ask Jeeves, Just Ask

Beyond Plain Vanilla Search

More Flavors of Search

CHAPTER 13 - The Blog Strategy

Blogs Go Big-Time

So Why Get Blogging?

Get Your People Blogging

You Do Want to Hear the Bad News

Rules for Employees Who Blog

Blog or Tweet?

Now Listen up! Podcasting Is Here (Vodcasting Too)

CHAPTER 14 - The E-Community Strategy

Inside the Parenting E-Communities

Electrons Beat Paper and Ink

What’s in It for You?

Throw Your Own Party

E-Communities Expand the World

Add Your Voice

CHAPTER 15 - The Social Networks Strategy

Everything Old Is New Again

Click and Connect

Think Interests, Not Just Demographics

Focus on Focused Social Networks

A Slow Build, Not a Quick Transaction

Organizing for the Social Web

CHAPTER 16 - Does Facebook Matter?

Getting Started on Facebook

On Facebook: Victoria’s Secret and the New York Times

Let’s Talk Turkey and Tea

Doing Business on Facebook

Don’t Stifle the Dialogue

CHAPTER 17 - Living and Working in Web 4.0

Welcome to the Emotive Web

Where Is Television Going?

In-Home Goes Out-of-Home

Where Are Newspapers Going?

Where is the Social Web Going?

This Is Only the Beginning

NOTES

INDEX

Copyright © 2009 by Larry Weber. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada

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eISBN : 978-0-470-44031-5

For Hannah, Julia and Geoffrey . . . may your lives always be a ‘verb thing, not a noun thing’

FOREWORD

You may have heard Jimmy say his now famous phrase, “Imagine a world in which every person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.” Had it not been for an important change in direction eight years ago, that phrase would never have been uttered.

The predecessor to Wikipedia was actually the free encyclopedia Nupedia, which was built upon the traditional peer-review model of academic research. In other words, a traditional approval and gate-keeping process was very much in place. And while Nupedia saw some growth during its two-year existence, it wasn’t until the idea of opening up the contribution of content to everyone, and using a wiki platform to do so, that Wikipedia was born. What has made Wikipedia a global phenomenon is the idea that anyone interested in participating certainly can, which has given rise to a previously unprecedented collaboration based on a sense of ownership and community among thousands of volunteer contributors around the world.

Was it sheer luck that Wikipedia achieved its global success? Certainly historical timing was a benefit. But what really happened is that Jimmy and his employee Larry Sanger realized the old model of top-down uni-directional communication wasn’t working anymore and that people were really looking for a sense of community and a voice.

When it comes right down to it, humans haven’t fundamentally changed since their evolutionary ancestors first walked the earth—they’ve thrived on interaction and connection, namely community. It’s this concept—the need for community—that Larry Weber drives home in Marketing to the Social Web. Weber understands what the new marketing is all about, which is not selling, per se. The end goal might be a sale or something similar, but in reality it’s community and engagement that get people interested.

In this book, Weber helps marketers, whose job ultimately it is to introduce products and services to people who are sincerely interested in them, learn how to do it the right way. In chapter after chapter, he drives home the point that you can’t fake sincerity, you can’t fake authenticity, and you can’t fake caring because the consumers, users, or participants that marketers are hoping to attract will smell any poser-like behavior a mile away. He accurately points out that “a brand is actually a living, changing thing, [and] is based on the dialogue you have with your customers and prospects—the stronger the dialogue, the stronger the brand, the weaker the dialogue, the weaker the brand.”

So, while this is a marketing book with many practical tips, its underlying principle is respect for customers and consumers. For example, Weber encourages marketers that “when you start or join a social web conversation about your company or your competitors, you should be up-front about who you are.”

Without being preachy, he also emphasizes the rise of branding and moral purpose on the web: “[Moral purpose] means offering value and acting ethically and transparently. . . . The ethics around doing business include: environmental responsibility, diversity in employment, considering the larger effects of the company’s actions. . . . you need to have moral purpose embedded in your values, along with great products at a great price.”

For marketers still somewhat unfamiliar—and perhaps uncomfortable—with the new rules of effective online engagement, particularly when it comes to measuring success, he offers practical suggestions such as looking at a blend of quantifiable and qualitative measures like share of voice, level of engagement, tone of discourse, evidence/quality of community, cost of market share and such things as how frequently and in what manner an organization is being discussed online, among other things.

Ultimately, Marketing to the Social Web is an excellent blend of theory, practical tips and how-tos, and fun and interesting case studies that will serve both marketers new to the Web and those more seasoned, making it a timely read for everyone interested in growing and thriving online.

—Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Andrea Weckerle, Communications Consultant & Entrepreneur, New York City

PREFACE

In late 1993, I received a phone call from Michael Dertouzos, the founder and head of MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science. He said he wanted to see me for two reasons; first, to help promote the extraordinary innovations coming out of the lab, and second, to discuss the marketing of the recent work of a young British researcher who was moving to the lab from a stint at CERN (the Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire) in Switzerland.

A few days later, the larger-than-life Michael and a quiet Tim Berners-Lee were sitting in my Cambridge office. Michael spoke of the many things the lab had accomplished and the work in progress. He showed me a videotape of his 1980 appearance on the Today show to discuss the impact of the first personal computers on society. The interviewer pushed Michael to agree that the advent of the PC was just a fad, but Michael politely disagreed and went on to describe a world in which a large digital community would soon be formed by connecting all personal commuters so that people could easily communicate, shop, learn—even get advice from physicians on another continent. The interviewer just shook his head and broke for a commercial.

Then it was Tim’s turn. He discussed his recent work, the development of a language called html—hypertext markup language—that he planned to layer onto the Internet to create a World Wide Web. He asked if I thought the name was catchy, and I smiled, because I really had no idea what he was talking about.

Michael explained he was forming the World Wide Web Consortium and he wanted us to help promote and educate the world. Now, some 16 years later, we still have not seen the full impact of this most important innovation of our lifetimes. Michael left us too early, and Bill Gates, to whom Michael often consulted on a variety of topics about the future, called his passing a major loss in one major newsweekly. Tim, now Sir Tim, continues to work on his next phase, the semantic web, and I heeded Michael’s advice to study the marketing implications of the Web.

The Web has and will continue to change everything. A world of transparent content, mostly user-generated, broadband, rich media, and available on multiple devices, continues to evolve. Marketing at its best is the influencing of opinion through compelling content; doing so through the Web will get harder before it gets easier, but the change is gaining momentum. The Web has consumed almost all the traditional media: television, print, radio, and direct mail and will make marketing a set of dialogues. Companies will have to learn to contribute to these dialogues and share with their customers and potential customers. I’ve written this book to suggest how you can do just that.

—Larry Weber, Buenos Aires

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

In the 18 months since the first edition of this book was published, more and more companies have learned to stimulate and maintain dialogues with their customers and prospects on the social web. I would like to think that the first edition of this book has helped a good number of executives to think about ways to do so. But since the social web is evolving so rapidly with new tools, techniques, and opportunities, the book demanded a new edition to stay current.

This second edition has an additional chapter on the Facebook phenomenon and how marketers can use it. I’ve completely rewritten the chapters on blogs and measurements, and updated examples and illustrations in every chapter. To obtain the most current thinking about marketing to the social web, I’ve interviewed several more executives and quoted the most current research available.

Fortunately, the principles of marketing have not changed, so any marketing executive can read and apply the ideas in this edition. Those who do so will, I believe, have stronger brands, products, services, and customer relationships than those who dismiss the social web as just one more fad of the times.

—Larry Weber, Waltham, MA

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost I must thank my phenomenal co-writer Wally Wood, who truly understood my goals, thinking, and organization around this important book, as well as our earlier book, The Provocateur. These books would not have happened without his skillful hand. Thanks to Marijean Lauzier for always supporting my visionary discretions. Jackie Lustig, Jan Baxter, Brian Cavoli, Kevin Green and all at W2 Group who gave freely of their time and talents to bring this book to fruition while making my “second” career such a joy.

Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn.com), Diane Hessan (Communispace), John Palfrey, (Berkman Center for Internet & Society), Tom Gerace (Gather.com), Don McLagan, (Compete.com), Dan Morrison, (ITtoolbox.com), Josh Scribner (IBM Corporate Communications), Stuart Brotman (American Television Experience), Jerry Swerling (Annenberg School for Communication at USC at Los Angeles), Judy Strauss (U of N, Reno), David Berkowitz (360i.com), Jim Nail (TNS Cymfony.com), Marcel Lebrun (Radian6.com), Bob Walczak (Ringleader.com), Dan Bruns (Mzinga.com), Elisa Camahort Page (BlogHer.com), Jeremy Allaire (Brightcove.com), John Lawn (Food Management), and Ethan Beard (Facebook.com) all gave of their time but, more importantly, their deepest thinking on the social web. I am forever indebted to them, as I am to the many clients and former clients, and the large group of academics, authors, politicians, and executives who freely engaged in numerous conversations that helped shape my thinking.

I thank my agent Jill Kneerim and my editor, Richard Narramore, whose subtle, but swift and clear touch has made this book a very good read. Also to all the great people at John Wiley & Sons, Inc., including Tiffany Groglio and Lauren Freestone, who made the “process” of turning words into this book as painless as possible.

Finally, and as always, I want to thank my family, especially Dawn, for their support and love of a dreamer businessman who wants to help good businesses become great.

PART I

Pandemonium: The Landscape of the Social Web

CHAPTER 1

The Web Is Not a Channel

(And You’re an Aggregator, not a Broadcaster)

Learning to market to the social web requires learning a new way to communicate with an audience in a digital environment. It’s that simple.

It does not require executives to forget everything they know about marketing. It does mean that they have to open their minds to new possibilities, social change, and rethinking past practices. In the pages ahead, I look at what we can learn about these new possibilities and what the social web is all about.

Instead of continuing as broadcasters, marketers should—and will—become aggregators of customer communities. Rather than broadcasting marketing messages to an increasingly indifferent, even resentful, audience jaded by the 2,000-plus messages the average American is reportedly exposed to every day, marketers should participate in, organize, and encourage social networks to which people want to belong. Rather than talking at customers, marketers should talk with them. And the social web is the most effective way in the history of the world to do just that on a large scale.

The social web is the online place where people with a common interest can gather to share thoughts, comments, and opinions. It includes social networks such as MySpace, Gather, Facebook, BlackPlanet, Eons, LinkedIn, and hundreds (actually, as we’ll see, hundreds of thousands) more. It includes branded web destinations like Amazon, Netflix, and eBay. It includes enterprise sites such as IBM, Best Buy, Cisco, and Oracle. The social web is a new world of unpaid media created by individuals or enterprises on the web. These new strategies, which have the capacity to change public opinion every hour—if not every minute—include:

Reputation aggregators are search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Ask, and Live. They aggregate sites with the best product or service to offer and usually put things in order of reputation. Mobile search is increasingly popular as people on the go check for a nearby restaurant, directions to a store, or the best price for a product.

Blogs are online journals where people can post ideas, images, and links to other web pages or sites. Some appear on personal or corporate sites, while others are hosted on Blogger, BlogHer (for women), Weblog, Tumblr, and other blogging sites. The microblog site Twitter, where users post “tweets” of 140 characters at a time, is another twist. Lenovo’s web-marketing vice president says, “I use Twitter to monitor tweets about our brand—looking for people having a tough time with our products. I also see a lot of opportunity to sell through Twitter, and I expect we’ll open a ‘deal’ channel there soon.”1

Topic-specific e-communities are generally advertising supported although some are free. Business-oriented e-communities include dozens concerning IBM: for IBM interns, around different IBM products and services, etc.2 Hewlett Packard has communities on its web site: an HP blade community and IT resource center forums.3 There are interesting healthcare communities: Sermo for physicians and Patientslikeme, which has communities around specific diseases. There are communities involving sports such as KayakMind for people who enjoy kayaking.4 Password-protected e-communities are growing especially quickly.

Social networks are places where people with a common interest or concern come together to meet people with similar interests, express themselves, and vent. In addition to the examples I’ve already cited, other social networks include iVillage, Xanga, and Stumbleupon. Dopplr is an interesting site for business travelers who share their experiences with foreign hotels, restaurants, and attractions; it will also tell you when, say, three people you know will be in Paris at the same time you are. Some sites are devoted specifically to image-sharing, open to the wide world or restricted to a select few through password protection. YouTube (now owned by Google) serves up 10 billion videos a month to U.S. viewers alone; photos and videos posted on Flickr (now owned by Yahoo!) attract more than 40 million visitors monthly.

In traditional publisher- or corporate-controlled media such as newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, the communication is overwhelmingly one way. Professional journalists research and write stories that are edited and disseminated to the public.

Social media such as blogs, however, allow everyone to publish and to participate in multithreaded conversations online. Because bloggers, sometimes referred to as “citizen journalists” or even “citizen marketers,” have no editorial constraints and have access to the entire Web, their posts can make or break personal, product, or corporate reputations.

Online communities started in the early days of the Internet and software companies encouraged “user groups” to test and experiment with new programs. The Well in California, CompuServe, and America Online built on that idea and began to attract people to the Internet who didn’t have a community or who felt somewhat on the fringe of the new social order, where the groups were a way to meet and bond with new people. As Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn. com, says, “It was almost like the frontier. Who were the people who originally went West? They felt they didn’t really fit with this society; were somewhat alienated; and wanted to take a big risk. So they got in their wagons and headed West to make something happen. That’s the reason why there was this fascination with things like chat rooms and message boards. Wow, you are with these people you don’t know. Anonymity was a big part of this because it was like this Wild West kind of community.”

Today, there are online tools to manage and present your identity, to communicate with people, to bring yourself online and make yourself heard. Today, individuals and organizations are founding Web-based communities at a mind-boggling pace. People are using the Web to find others with similar interests, to shop more efficiently, to learn about products and services, to vent about shoddy products and poor service, and to stay in touch with distant relatives and friends on the other side of the world.

As Microsoft CEO Steven A. Ballmer told the New York Times, “I think one pervasive change is the increasing importance of community. That will come in different forms, with different age groups of people, and it will change as the technology evolves. But the notion of multiple people interacting on things—that will forever continue. That’s different today, and we’re going to see those differences build. You see it in a variety of ways now, in social networking sites, in the way people collaborate at work, and in ad hoc collaboration over the Internet. You see it in things like Xbox Live, the way we let people come together and have community entertainment experiences. And you’ll see that in TV and video. It’s not like the future of entertainment has been determined. But it’s a big deal.”5

Here’s an example of social media at work. When BMW relaunched the Mini Cooper in 2002, widespread publicity and unconventional promotions (online and off) generated lots of test drives and got car sales in gear. Not long ago, Mini’s marketers spoofed the car-happy 1970s TV series Starsky & Hutch with Hammer and Coop, a series of six webisodes featuring car chases without ever mentioning the brand. To support the webisodes, they aired quirky movie trailers, dangled Minis off billboards, and cast the Mini as the star of fashion spreads in men’s magazines.

Mini has been a web-savvy brand with attitude from the get-go. It’s always packed its site with an ever-changing array of features: a build-your-own car configuration page; virtual factory tour; various games and screensavers; and special owners-only e-newsletters and community pages. Still, when the buzz started dying down, Mini’s marketing manager knew she needed more than a sticky web site and intriguing ads to reignite it.

Mini hired MotiveQuest to analyze online conversations about the brand and its competitors by monitoring posts on blogs and social networks as well as on specialized sites like Yahoo Autos.

MotiveQuest’s CEO, David Rabjohns, found that “Mini owners were not only talking about things like performance and handling but community type things like picture sharing, getting together at events, and personal etiquette, the Mini way.” Not surprisingly, many posts involved non-Mini owners asking Mini owners about their experiences.

This analysis prompted Mini to ask its most enthusiastic supporters for help in rebuilding the buzz. Now the company invites bloggers to test drive new models and has a blogger who podcasts from special events like the cross-country “Mini Takes the States” festivals that bring thousands of brand fans (owners and non-owners alike) together for rallies, music, and more. The web site includes “Mini Mail” virtual postcards and other viral activities that let Mini fans get the conversation going in their own way.

Do more online conversations sell Minis? Trudy Hardy, Mini’s marketing manager, says “we definitely see some correlation between online activity and how that affects showroom traffic. We look at the spikes that are going on in conversations and see if it measures against an increased amount of traffic to our site, which ultimately leads to an increased amount of leads we send to our dealers.”6

I’d say the real value of social media here is in rebuilding the Mini’s buzz and reinforcing the hip, non-mainstream attitude that distinguishes the brand from its rivals. Getting people to think “Mini” and talk to friends about the brand or check out the web site is more likely to steer them toward a purchase down the road.

Now take a quick look at what Dell is doing. You may remember the company was soundly blasted in the blogosphere for customer service problems. Today Dell is turning social media to its advantage by inserting itself into online conversations in a positive way. Dell aims to make 100 million additional customer contacts every year through blog posts, Twitter tweets, and brand-related e-communities. These contacts aren’t directly sales-related—but they will help Dell start or keep conversations going with customers. Just as important, customers will have more opportunities to share information with each other and with Dell.

Of course, Mini and Dell are hardly the only companies learning to market to the social web. But they are harbingers of your future.

Pandemonium in Media and Markets

The marketing worlds are pandemonium these days. American consumers have more choices, more products, more services, more media, more messages, and more digital conversations than ever. Consider media:

• Television. Between cable and satellite, the average American household receives 70 or more television stations, a number that continues to grow, and the average time spent viewing continues to hold its own. Network TV and spot TV ad spending was down in 2007, however, even as prime-time broadcast TV product placements were up sharply.

• Magazines. Although publishers introduced more than 1,000 new magazines titles last year, the total number of titles, average magazine circulation, and single-copy sales continue to drift downward. National magazine advertising was up last year, but local magazine advertising went down.

• Newspapers. Newspaper circulation fell by 3 percent last year; in the past five years, it has dropped 8 percent, a plunge hastened by the Web. And advertising is following readers out the door, also dropping by 3 percent last year. Classified ads are shifting online to sites like Monster.com (jobs) and Craigslist.com (jobs and everything else). Small wonder that in a global survey of newspaper editors, 44 percent said most people will be getting their news online within 10 years (although judging by current trends, I’d say within five years, max).

• Radio. Satellite radio offers hundreds of channels of music, sports, news, and features, commentary, many of which are commercial-free. You don’t want to listen to commercials? Subscribe to satellite radio. Meanwhile, network and spot radio ad spending are both down, according to Nielsen.

• Internet. As more people and companies log on and join the conversation, Internet advertising expenditures are going up, up, up. According to eMarketer, ad spending on U.S. social-networking sites increased 70% last year to $1.56 billion and will exceed $2 billion this year.7

New product marketing is also pandemonium, for example:

• According to the Food Institute, marketers introduced over 16,000 new food products last year (over 2,500 new beverages alone). They introduced over 13,000 nonfood products—including 4,230 new cosmetics, 2,793 new skin care items, and 1,259 new hair care products.

• Exhibitors at the International Consumer Electronics Show introduced more than 10,000 new audio, digital imaging/video, gaming, home theater, home networking, mobile, and wireless products.

• Exhibitors at the International Home and Housewares Show introduced another 10,000-plus new small kitchen appliances, kitchenware, bath and shower accessories, decorative accessories, and personal care appliances.

• Exhibitors at the National Hardware Show introduced another 5,000-plus new hardware, home, and garden items.

The list goes on: Exhibitors at the New York Auto Show introduced . . . Exhibitors at the Ft. Lauderdale International Boat Show . . . Exhibitors at the International Camping and Outdoor Show . . . but you get the idea—and this does not include business-to-business products and services. Or new pharmaceuticals and medical devices. Or travel opportunities . . . or educational offerings.

What’s a marketer to do in this teeming mass of newnesses?

From Broadcasters to Aggregators

Before looking ahead, let’s take a quick look back. Not so very long ago, marketers got the word out about their products or services in any way they could—newspaper and magazine ads, billboards, radio and television commercials. Each new medium added something. Magazines added color and national distribution to newspaper advertising. Billboards were in your face as you drove along the highways. Radio added sound and music. Television added movement and, even more than billboards or radio, intrusiveness.

Remember the days when the marketer controlled the message? About all television viewers could do was watch or get up to change channels (or go to the toilet), and for a good long time television advertising was incredibly effective. It still is for many products in many situations, but its very success brought about consumer reaction.

Today, 90 percent of the people who can avoid TV ads through TiVo, DVD recording, or the skip button on the VCR remote do so. In fact, only 18 percent of television advertising campaigns actually generate a positive return on the investment. And although total TV viewership has remained steady, new channels have fragmented the audience to such an extent that the broadcast networks NBC, CBS, and ABC have all lost audiences both relatively and absolutely.

Despite their shrinking audiences, these networks and other TV channels have continue to raise their ad rates; the cost per thousand (CPM) people reached of the average television commercial increased 265 percent between 1996 and 2005. CPMs continue to go up, even as the size of network audiences go down, so it’s not surprising that TV advertisers are unhappy. Some big spenders—Procter & Gamble, American Express, McDonald’s—have begun experimenting with alternatives, but no major advertiser has decided to do something else.

It won’t be news to you that most advertising is incredibly inefficient. When you advertise in mass media, you generally reach far more people than the potential customers you intend to reach. But as long as the CPMs were small, who cared? A certain amount of advertising waste was a cost of doing business.

True, marketers have tried to improve their advertising’s efficiency. They’ve tried to match audience demographics—age, sex, education, income, household size—to their target market. For example, beer commercials appear in sports programs that young men tend to watch and disposable diaper commercials in daytime dramas that young mothers often watch. Still, demographics don’t really work very well in trying to identify a target market for most products. Middle-aged and older men drink beer; fathers buy disposable diapers.

For 150 years or more, marketers, through newspapers, magazines, and then radio and television, have been broadcasting their messages to a potential market that they defined as well as they could. Advertisers have tried to put their ads in front of those prospective customers most likely to buy the company’s product or service. But the goal has always been to reach as many people as possible with the hope that enough paying customers would respond to make the investment pay.

Today, sophisticated marketers realize that what worked in the past is not working (or not working well) now—and they need a new approach. As A.G. Lafley, the CEO of Procter & Gamble, told his executives, “We need to reinvent the way we market to consumers. We need a new model.”

The Web Is Not a Channel

Steve Ballmer’s observation hints at how thoroughly the social web will change our world. A century ago, although no one knew it at the time, the first automobile was not simply a self-propelled buggy. True, it got you from one place to another, but it also changed the face of the country, the design of cities. It changed courting behavior and where people could live and work. Similarly, television was not simply radio with pictures. By showing ordinary people in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union the lives of people in the West, television affected history. By showing Americans the Vietnam War in living color, television changed American society.

The Web will have as profound an effect on society as the automobile or television. In fact, we’re only beginning to glimpse the Web’s implications. For instance, the Web undoes some of the effects of 50 years of television. Remember how, in the early days of television, the ads and many programs showed the happy family—dad, mom, son, and sis—sitting together in front of the living room television? Today the reality is more like dad, mom, son, and sis all watching their own sets in separate rooms, if they are watching TV at all. Rather than bringing people together, television has, in many senses, brought about more isolation. People are home alone even if others are in the house; it is easier to click on the TV than go out to a bowling league, lodge night, or card game with the girls. In contrast, the social web, through the dialogue it encourages, is beginning to bring people together.

Since the dawn of the television age, the message of virtually all commercials has been: Buy! Buy! Buy! The unspoken contract was: Somebody’s got to pay for your news, entertainment, and diversion and that’s advertising, so Buy! Buy! Buy Now! Broadly speaking, for the past 60 years, most marketers have debated how to use television, radio, print, public relations, direct marketing, the Internet, and customer retention programs. What is the best medium to reach our market? What are our customers reading, watching, listening to? How can we attract their attention, stop them from turning the page or changing the channel? How can we best tell them about our product, our service, our benefits, our value?

For the past 10 years, corporations have been trained that they should use all the different media—newspapers, magazines, direct mail, television, public relations, and then the Internet. But the Internet is becoming the umbrella. Managers have to understand that the Web is rapidly becoming the most important marketing medium. If you are a corporate marketer, you don’t just drop some ads onto web sites the way you have dropped 30-second spots into television shows or a color spread into a magazine. A symptom of how things are changing: nearly every commercial during the Super Bowl is designed to send viewers to a digital destination.

People don’t want to be sold. They are doing their best to avoid commercials. They have pop-up blockers to screen out the ads on the Web that are a distraction. Early Web advertisers, who saw the medium as just another advertising channel, treated it like a magazine ad equipped with sound and motion. But banner ads and pop-ups are not the best way to market on the Web.

People do want news and information about the things they care about—and they want it right now. One recent midnight, a friend’s dog tangled with a skunk for the first time. She had no tomato juice, the traditional folk bath for a skunked dog. Five minutes on the Web, however, and she’d found a formula that included hydrogen peroxide and liquid dish detergent that she could mix up and de-stink the dog.

Community building—with communities focusing on a specific common interest—is one of the fastest growing applications on the Web. Examples include: ITtoolbox.com, where information technology professionals swap opinions on technology products and services; BootsnAll.com, where budget travelers share advice about, say, the best hotels in Katmandu; iVillage.com, where women trade ideas about diet and fitness, love and sex, home and food; HealthBoards.com, which has subgroups on 140 diseases that serve as forums for people to share experiences and discuss problems or new discoveries; and LinkedIn.com, where professionals go to network. All of this means that the Web is continuing to evolve.

Four Generations of the Web

During the first phase of the Web, 1990-1995, the focus was HTML and site building. I was present at the beginning. My experience with the Internet began in 1989-1990 when Michael Dertouzos, then the director of MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science, asked me to help promote the lab. It had developed a number of groundbreaking technologies—from RSA security to the spreadsheet to Ethernet—and Michael had successfully recruited Tim Berners-Lee to work on HTML at MIT. I helped lead the announcement of the World Wide Web Consortium based on the development of HTML.

We did early work for America Online (AOL), helping them establish and market early communities, then called chat rooms. The popular ones were for breast cancer survivors, Boston Red Sox fans, and personal finance. We helped Monster.com build its community, and in the mid-1990s, we launched E-GM for General Motors, one of the first automotive communities.

I’ve been deeply involved in many software and technology companies over the past 25 years such as Verizon Wireless, Hewlett Packard, Lotus Development, and Red Hat. I helped found the largest interactive trade group in the country, Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange, which is now 12 years old, with almost 10,000 members. And during this time, I’ve watched the Internet evolve.

With the advent of the browser, the second phase involved more interactivity and transactional things, search, click-throughs, and pop-ups. That phase lasted 10 years and has now given way to the third phase: the rise of the social web, all the things I have been describing and will be talking about in detail in the chapters ahead.

Web 4.0, which is right around the corner, will feature rich media (full of video, sound, even touch) and broadband, with high definition making the Web more emotive. How does this work? Consider the growing popularity of video conferencing. For instance, at a Halo center, where the next generation of video-conferencing technology is in place, participants see three-dimensional, full-size, video conferencing; it’s almost as if the people are in the same room and sharing the same experience. That is an example of rich media in action. The emotive element will include both personal and business sensations, the idea is that the experiences offer not only emotions—joy, curiosity, disgust, happiness—but also, on the business side, sensations of satisfaction and fulfillment.

In this new world, the customer is in control. There are still only 24 hours in a day, and if people become more involved with the Web, they’re not going to have as much time to watch television, they’re not going to listen to the radio, and they’re not going to read the newspaper or a magazine. Publishers know this and are doing their best to create web sites that can supplement (or replace) their paper publications.

The real job of the marketer in the social web is to aggregate customers. You aggregate customers two ways: (1) by providing compelling content on your web site and creating retail environments that customers want to visit, and (2) by going out and participating in the public arena. If you are in the energy business, you should be participating in the energy blogosphere. If you are a pharmaceutical manufacturer, you should be participating in discussions about disease and its treatment. If you are a small fly rod maker, you should be participating in discussions about fly fishing.

Note that you do not have to be a Fortune 500 corporation to participate in these conversations. Indeed, it may be easier and more effective for a relatively small or medium-size company to take maximum advantage of the principles I lay out in this book.

The social web will be the most critical marketing environment around. Much the way newspapers were critical in the 1800s, magazines and radio were critical in the first half of the twentieth century, and television was critical in the second half, the Internet began to become significant in the 1990s. It is rapidly growing more and more critical to marketing, but has shifted into a social digital space that I am calling the social web.

The social web will become the primary center of activity for whatever you do when you shop, plan, learn, or communicate. It may not take over your entire life (one hopes), but it will be the first place you turn for news, information, entertainment, diversion—all of the things that the older media supplied. In fact, according to a Forrester Research Report, young people (18-22) spend more time using a PC at home—10.7 hours a week—than they spend watching TV—10.2 hours a week—an important point for businesses looking to build early brand loyalty.8

Marketing, therefore, has to wrap around the social web, because what is truly changing in the social web is media, and marketing has always had to shape itself around media. Individuals and companies are becoming media. As you produce content, you become a medium. Now user-generated content—a key aspect of the social web—is bridging media. Just one of hundreds of examples: The retailer Cabela’s, which sells outdoor products, features customer-contributed reviews and ratings in its catalogs, e-mail campaigns, and stores.

How do you market in this new environment? Ultimately, marketing disappears if it does its job right, because marketers become purveyors of an environment. A manager of an environment helps people make decisions to buy. That is the commercial and modernization side of things. A good example is how the brilliant chairman of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, and his people keep thinking about how they can enrich the Starbucks environment without turning people away. They’ve brought in music . . . some social causes . . . and Wi-Fi. Now think about how you can create digital experiences that encourages your customers to come back for more. There is pandemonium around the social web, like anything in its first phases, but it will self-organize.

It is important to understand that although we are at the beginning of the social web, marketers should dive in now. If you wait much longer, your competitors will have figured out how to attract your customers to their environments. If that happens, you will have to work three times as hard to get them back. Customers have only so much time. And if they’re happy where they are, then they’re less likely to leave.

A business friend started and runs a large retail clothing chain. When I saw him not long ago and asked how thing were going, he told me, “Well, good. My core loyal customers of the past 20 years are still core loyal customers. But when I go into the stores, I notice they’re all starting to look older. Where are the younger people?” I suggested that they might be on SmartBargains.com or another clothing site. My friend had never heard of it.

Unless there’s a change, my friend’s chain will reach the proverbial tipping point; suddenly there are no customers in the stores at all. If that chain (or any retailer) does not get involved in social media and marketing, it will lose a whole generation of customers. They simply won’t come to stores. They want a dialogue with your business, want to know you are there and available 24/7. Branding in the social web is the dialogue you have with your customer. The stronger the dialogue, the stronger your brand; the weaker the dialogue, the weaker your brand. You can easily find examples of great brands that lost their dialogue at one time or another: SONY, Disney, Coke, McDonald’s.

Transparency is critical if you want customers and stakeholders to trust you and engage in dialogue with you. Doesn’t it make sense that a CEO should mention his title (or at least use his real name) when blogging about his company or a company he’s trying to acquire? John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, touched off quite a controversy when he used the alias Rahodeb to post notes on Yahoo! stock message boards. Rahodeb had lots of positive things to say about Whole Foods but not-so-nice comments about competitor (and acquisition target) Wild Oats Markets. “I think he looks cute!” Rahodeb wrote when someone made fun of Mackey’s photo in the Whole Foods annual report. On the other hand, Rahodeb bashed Wild Oats, writing that its management “clearly doesn’t know what it is doing.”9

When the posts came to light and regulators raised concerns about the possibility that Rahodeb’s comments might have affected the stock prices of Whole Foods and Wild Oats, Mackey apologized and stopped blogging. The SEC investigated and ultimately closed the case without taking any action. Later, the CEO explained the posts to the Boston Globe this way: “I participate in a number of online communities—pretty much anything I’m interested in. The thing I’m most interested in the world is Whole Foods. Plus, a large percentage of posters on a board like that are people that have an ax to grind. Whole Foods is my child. And here was my child being abused by all these vicious people. Almost all of my posts were responses that I made to lies and attacks that people had about Whole Foods. I defended Whole Foods. Somebody had to. That’s really how I saw it.”10

Here’s how I see it: The lack of transparency is very troubling. When you start or join a social web conversation about your company or your competitors, you should be up front about who you are. Your stakeholders deserve nothing less. (By the way, Mackey has resumed blogging but now uses his real name.)

Now look at McDonald’s, a great brand that’s using the social web to get customer dialogue back on track. Its web sites are becoming very social in nature, especially focused around nutrition, and WiFi access is making its outlets more social, as well. The company has a deal to sell coffee from Newman’s Own—a company with a social conscience that MacDonald’s hopes will rub off, not a small consideration.

The concept of moral purpose in branding is coming to life in the social web. By moral purpose, I mean offering value and acting ethically and transparently. No business will succeed without a clear definition of its transparency in doing business. The ethics around doing business include: environmental responsibility, diversity in employment, considering the larger effect of the company’s actions. In other words, you need to have moral purpose embedded in your values, along with great products at a great price. The real issue is to learn how to market on the social web responsibly. But first, let me talk a little more about what the social web means to marketers.

CHAPTER 2

Community and Content: The Marketer’s New Job

(Or How to Cut Your Marketing Budget and Reach More People)

Although the next generation of marketing is in its infancy, the social web is already having an effect. More to the point, you’re going to be caught up in it, no matter what kind of business you’re in. Marketing’s goals will remain the same as they’ve always been—to attract and retain customers. However, marketing’s role has changed, and the social web is promoting that change.

“Customers are demanding to be more engaged with the companies that affect their lives,” is how Diane Hessan describes the change. As president and CEO of Communispace, which builds and runs private online customer communities, Diane sees unmistakable signs that the social web is part of that change. “Booming trends like blogging, online communities, flash mobbing, buzz agents, and MySpace show that customers have a lot to say—they want to be asked and they want to be involved.” If you haven’t already heard about flash mobbing and buzz agents, you soon will. Flash mobbing is assembling a group of people via the Internet or other digital communications networks; they suddenly appear in a public place, do something unusual for a brief time, and then disperse. Buzz agents are recruited for the purpose of shilling; they talk up the product or service without identifying their connection to the company.

For a glimpse at the social web’s influence on the role of marketing, consider GlaxoSmithKline’s experience with Communispace. In preparation for the launch of its first weight reduction product, Glaxo sponsored an online weight loss community. This was a real win-win. The members benefited by meeting other women who supported their dieting struggles through instant messaging and chat discussions. Glaxo benefited as the members answered questions about product packaging, offered advice on where to place the product in stores, and, most significantly, discussed their battles with the scale.

These community discussions helped shape Glaxo’s advertising and packaging for the company’s diet pill. They also uncovered rampant confusion about dieting. As BusinessWeek reported, “In one exchange, a member stated that you could lose weight by drinking eight glasses of water a day, while another said no, it’s eight quarts. A third added that the water doesn’t count if it’s in coffee, but this person was quickly contradicted.”

Over time, community members come to trust one another even though they may be scattered all over the country, and their responses can be quite revealing. When Glaxo asked the group to use images that showed how they felt about themselves, the women posted photos of hippos and elephants. Says Andrea Harkins, senior research manager at GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare: “These are things they wouldn’t have said in words.”

In the end, the online community gave Glaxo far more information than it could have obtained from focus groups. As an additional benefit, the community has created an intensely enthusiastic corps of product evangelists. One member said about Glaxo, “They have done an incredible job of reaching out into the community and giving us all hope that someone out there cares about us and we are not alone in our struggle to lose weight.”1 The marketer’s new job is to build communities of interest and provide content. The reason to do so—as the rest of this book will demonstrate—is to cut the marketing budget and reach more people more effectively.

Who’s Really in Control Here?

The goal of marketing has always been and will continue to be building and leveraging relationships between your organization and various customers—current and prospective consumers of your products and services plus employees, partners, shareholders, government, the media, analysts, and all the rest. Obviously, strong relationships are crucial to establishing and extending brand value, strengthening and protecting corporate and product reputation, and boosting demand. But you have to do all this while under constant pressure to improve marketing’s return on investment in a highly competitive global economy.

As I suggested in Chapter 1, marketing’s traditional tools for getting the word out are growing rusty. Not only are fewer Americans watching broadcast television in both absolute and relative terms, they’re avoiding the commercials with the remote, TiVO, or their cable company’s DVR. They’re avoiding telemarketers through the National Do Not Call Registry, avoiding Internet pop-up, banner, and flash ads through software programs, avoiding radio commercials through the iPod and other digital music devices, and avoiding print ads the way they always did—by turning the page.

As a result, the job of national advertisers is more complicated than ever; it’s more work and expense to run ads in several places than it is to deal with one major magazine or three dominant television networks. For smaller advertisers, the changes have meant they can afford targeted vehicles in which to advertise. But for most advertisers, the growth of vehicles has meant that their advertising becomes more efficient—if they can define their target market well, they can probably find a vehicle that reaches that target market. It’s the difference between advertising Titleist clubs in Time and in Golf Digest.

The control of information, however, continues to shift from marketers to consumers. The explosion of media choice has undermined the mass marketing model because it is dramatically harder to put together a mass audience than it was when everyone you wanted to reach was watching just three television networks. Today, the computer and mobile phones allow consumers to find what they want when they want it. You’re not in control any more.

If you’re marketing a travel-related product or service, for instance, you need to get involved with the mobile space so people on the go can find you when and where they choose. “Mobile is considered to be an arm of quick-access information,” points out Bob Walczak, CEO of Ringleader, a mobile publisher and advertiser network. To connect with customers when they’re actively searching for information, Walczak says, “hotels, rental car companies, all those kinds of brands should be associated with the mobile environment.”

That’s why Burger King’s web site has a “BK Mobile” page inviting customers to enter “wap.bk.com” on any mobile phone web browser and find the nearest Burger King restaurant. Or if a customer wants to know how many calories are in that Whopper Junior before taking a bite, it’s easy to look it up using BK Mobile. The customer is in control.

Consumers love control so much that when they hear about devices like TiVo and DVRs they want them mainly for the control they offer. They can watch a program when they want, not when it conflicts with a child’s music lesson or a client meeting. Apple’s iPod and its competitors have profited from this attitude. Once people get used to the idea that they can have their news and weather when they want them and how they want them, and they can have their television when they want it and how they want it, they wonder, “Why can’t I have my music when I want it—without commercials?”

Forrester Research did a study a while ago that investigated consumer rejection of advertising. The researchers asked about consumers’ level of interest in things like digital video recorders and ad-blocking software. They also asked about interest in a device that would record and play radio content while automatically rejecting commercials—basically a TiVo for radio, although no such thing existed. Consumers were just as interested in the nonexistent radio recorder as they were in the television recorder. All they had to do was hear about it—a new way to take control!—and they wanted it.

Consumers now have access to devices to control their choice of entertainment, news, information, and diversions so there’s no going back to the days when a deep-pocketed advertiser could buy the same time on all three television networks and set up a roadblock to overcome channel switching. People who want to watch The Daily Show or House without commercials will have to wait for the DVD. Or, they can download the episode with commercials at hulu.com. PBS is finding that many people are watching Frontline online because they can watch whenever it is convenient for them.

Think your company (or any company) has any control over what consumers hear, see, watch, read, or do these days? In my experience, you actually have less control than ever. True, old habits die hard and company personalities change glacially. As consumers are doing their best to avoid commercial messages, some marketers are dreaming up ways to slip past their defenses. Thus, consumers are served up commercials before movie showings; blatant product placement in video games, movies, and television shows like American Idol; and commercials on in-store and airport television networks. Even the bathroom is no refuge: consider the “Wizmark,” which, sensitive to very slight motion, will light up, play music, and deliver an advertising pitch from within a men’s urinal to a briefly captive audience of one.

The techniques du jour are viral marketing, buzz marketing, word-of-mouth /word-of-mouse marketing, or stealth marketing—the idea that a company can hire people to pretend to be consumers to recommend a product or service. A liquor company might hire attractive young women to visit crowded bars, order the advertiser’s product, then turn to the next person and say, “This is really delicious; you ought to try one of these.”

If you live in Norwalk, Connecticut, you may have heard of Bobby Choice. His web site is filled with videos, photos, and e-mails complaining about a lack of alternatives to the local cable provider, Cablevision. In his quest for choice, Mr. Choice has also run newspaper ads, made the rounds of Norwalk bars, and handed out free T-shirts. If you think Mr. Choice is simply outspoken or possibly disgruntled, think again: he’s actually a stealth campaign for AT&T’s U-verse TV service.2

I think AT&T could have made a better call. These days, its brand and logo do appear on pop-ups and promotions that litter the Bobby Choice site, but the campaign still looks and feels like one man raging against the system. The harm stealth marketing does to a company’s reputation when the deception is revealed (which happens sooner than ever on the Web these days) cannot be offset by any short-term gain in sales or publicity. Marketing has to be both honest and transparent; consumers are cynical enough now—and they are hypersensitive to corporate misbehavior.

We’ve had 200-plus years of supply-side economy and now we are oversupplied. In an oversupplied world, you have to connect consumers to your products and services. To earn loyalty, you have to build and nurture your customer communities.

Marketers therefore have two daunting challenges. First, you have to justify your spending and your budgets through better performance measurement. The pressure is on from senior management to be much more transparent about marketing investments and the return on those investments. Second, you must connect with customers and prospects who are increasingly harder to reach. How do you deliver a message that resonates with customers and induces them to buy what you’re selling?

The objective is to have customers invite you to deliver the message to them. You just can’t force it on them any more.

Marketing’s Role Has Changed

As I’ve already suggested, the explosive growth of the social web has changed the marketer’s role from a broadcaster pushing out messages and materials to an aggregator who brings together content, enables collaboration, and builds and participates in communities. As an aggregator, you bring together content, collaborate with your customers, and engage your online communities. Content includes new ideas, research, and opinions. Collaboration creates an open environment in which people can, and do, share knowledge. The aggregator extends invitations to individuals as well as to groups to join communities of interest.

Most stories about the social web focus on the “cool” aspects, such as YouTube.com (everyone can be a movie actor/director/producer) or Facebook.com and MySpace.com