Affinitive’s Social Media Playground

There's a certain catch-22 in social media: everyone wants to use the thing that everyone else is using. Critical mass is, well, critical. But getting to that critical mass from nothing is the tricky part. Such has been the fate of OpenID, the essence of which is the idea that people should share their login and information across multiple sites. But since nobody has really used it, nobody else has wanted to use it either.

This drowsy state of affairs in what has come to be called Data Portability has suddenly been woken up in a flurry of recent announcements. First MySpace announced an initiative called Data Availability along with Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter. It allows partners to use MySpace users' logins, profile info, photo, videos, and friends list on their own sites. The next day Facebook announced an almost identical service called Facebook Connect. Then Google announced a service called Friend Connect which includes Facebook, Hi5, Orkut, Plaxo, and other sites. It seems to be more of MyBlogLog-like widgets, while the MySpace and Facebook initiatives seem to be more robust APIs, but all are nothing but announcements at this point.

Taken together, they represent the next phase of social media APIs. The first phase was providing platforms for developers to integrate their applications within popular social networks. These new services turn this inside-out and allow other websites to incorporate user information from MySpace, Facebook, etc. There are only so many profiles the average person will maintain, so this has generally led to consolidation of a few large social networks. If people can easily use their logins, profiles, and friends lists across smaller niche sites, it will likely make it easier for these to grow.

While all the players in these announcements are part of an industry organization called The DataPortability Project, none of the platforms were actually developed within it. And while they use some open standards like oAuth, they will likely be incompatible and something of a platform war is inevitable. If social networks extend beyond individual sites, whoever maintains the crucial foundation of managing users' social identities will reap huge rewards. The stakes are high and the first moves have been made. Let's hope the result includes better, richer, and more varied social experiences for users.

In 2007, Gen X & Gen Y moms spent an estimated 1.7 trillion dollars on consumer and personal care products. With Mother's Day fast approaching, have you thought about the importance engaging and reaching moms as part of your WOM strategy?

Some highlights from a recent study released by Keller Fay Group:

• Today's pregnant women and new moms engage in one-third more word of mouth conversations per day than the total public or women.
• Almost two-thirds of these conversations include brand recommendations. This group has an average of 109 word of mouth conversations per week about products, services and brands, most of which are positive and considered highly credible by other moms.
• 60 percent of conversations among this group carry with them a recommendation to buy, try or consider the brands under discussion and positive brand sentiment outweighs negative by a 10:1 margin.
• The Internet is the #1 driver of word of mouth, beating out all other forms of media, including TV, magazines and outdoor.

Another study by The Intelligence Group found:

• The Internet ranked as the highest technology product moms would not want to live without. In large, moms are turning to the web for advice and education.
• Savvy moms rely on word-of-mouth (friends), well respected mommy blogs and websites for much of their decision making information.
• Moms are also looking for online communities to forge relationships and trade tips with other moms.

Related links:
New Word of Mouth Research Finds Moms Buzzing About Brands
How "Word of Moms" Affects Your Brand

The phenomenal growth of Facebook after launching its application platform in May 2007 sent shockwaves to all other social networks. Where sites like MySpace had previously been actively attempting to block external widgets, they all began scrambling to implement their own APIs and embrace third party developers.

Now, a year later, the primary competitor to Facebook is clearly the Google developed open source OpenSocial which is finally launching on a consortium of sites including MySpace, Hi5, and Orkut. In addition to its own site, Facebook has also licensed its proprietary platform to Bebo (recently purchased by AOL.) Is this the beginning of the platform wars?

While it's still early to see how it will all play out, a few observations can be made:

• Spam and other abuse of the system can be a huge problem. Facebook initially had very little restrictions in its messaging which allowed a few early apps to gain a huge advantage by massively spamming their way to the top. This also created a backlash among users who quickly grew tired of spammy tactics and all apps in general.
• Hi5, with fewer users than other networks, has proven to be amazingly viral. Perhaps this is due to the demographics of the users and the low number of apps in the directory (leaving a bigger slice of the pie for each one.) It also has unlimited messaging from applications, but so far, not too much spam.
• MySpace has demonstrated disappointing growth for applications. This may be partly due to the fact that after seeing how spam almost ruined Facebook, there are only a few APIs for sending messages which have only recently rolled out and have many restrictions such are requiring an active confirmation before sending. The application directory is not heavily promoted and has recently become flooded with hundreds of quiz apps and two or three apps for every single TV show or sports team, making it difficult for users to find other interesting apps.
• MySpace friends may have weaker connections than Facebook friends. This may be another reason for the much higher viral growth on Facebook, where applications provide an entertaining way for users to interact with their friends, with whom they already have a high level of involvement. MySpace users, in contrast, seem to be less involved with their friends, many of whom are probably just a collection of images for their profiles, and thus much less likely to participate in shared activities.
• OpenSocial provides limited functionality and is already fragmenting. The promise of OpenSocial is that is establishes a standard for the same code to run on multiple sites. While this mostly holds, the capabilities it offers when adhering strictly to the specification are rather limited. Each site has also implemented it in a slightly different manner and extended it through a variety of other APIs which allow more comprehensive and site-specific integration. In fact, it is entirely possible to create an application for MySpace that does not use anything related to OpenSocial.

Finally, from a developer's or brand's standpoint, these platforms are all still amazing opportunities to leverage the existing membership and services of popular networks to develop a large user base with relatively less effort and shorter time than other methods.

¹ Visitors in millions for March and annual growth from Nielsen Online as reported by Mashable.

² From April 22, by viewing sites' app directories.

It's been a long time since we've heard from Tremor, Proctor & Gamble's word of mouth marketing unit but based on what Steve Knox had to say last week it might have been worth the wait.

A summary of his points:

• Malcolm Gladwell's 'Mavens' are flaky, focus on the 'Connectors'
• Successful WOM programs must have both advocacy & amplification
• Don't get duped into measuring viral marketing exclusively on reach, factor in conversion to sale as well
• Focus on the right message and understand that the message that travels is the one that is created by the consumer, not the brand

His point about finding the right message is one that all WOM agencies can learn from. Over the last few years the industry has been consumed with addressing:

• WHO should participate?
• HOW do I engage and motivate
• HOW do I measure results

It's time to add a new question to the formation of a successful WOM program:

• WHAT are the messages people will spread?

For those of you who might have been following the Forrester Research Marketing Forum 2008 (either via "microblogging" or Twitter), a new set of metrics were put forth to better quantify how consumers engage with products and services.

The engagement model is based on Discovery, Evaluation, Use and Affinity for products and can be used offline and online to measure the interaction that consumers have with brands. It's based on a study Forrester released back in August:

Executive Summary: The marketing funnel is a broken metaphor that overlooks the complexity social media introduces into the buying process. As consumers' trust in traditional media diminishes, marketers need a new approach. We propose a new metric, engagement, that includes four components: involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence. Each of these is built from data collected from online and offline data sources. Using engagement, you get a more holistic appreciation of your customers' actions, recognizing that value comes not just from transactions but also from actions people take to influence others. Once engagement takes hold of marketing, marketing messages will become conversations, and dollars will shift from media buying to customer understanding.

Their framework outlines four "I" concepts:

• Involvement tracks site visitors, time spent, page views and more (old-school stuff)
• Interaction measures the contributions to blogs, photo and video creation and uploads, and purchases
• Intimacy tries to understand consumer attitudes, perception, and feelings about a brand through surveys or monitoring technology as well as applications providing an interactive environment between brand and consumers
• Influence measures the likelihood that consumers will recommend or advocate products or brands

What's interesting is that we have been using "engagement" as a primary metric used to measure the success our programs since back in 2003 - while our methodologies have evolved, the principles remain the same. Nice to see our friends at Forrester finally pick up on and validate it (just kidding, we love you Forrester folks! )

via MediaPost

Many marketers are interested in leveraging word-of-mouth, viral, and social media marketing because they view it simply as being "cheaper" than other marketing channels.

This is the wrong attitude. The expectation is small spend, huge results (often in a short amount of time). With traditional marketing channels, there is a linear relationship between spend and return (i.e., if I know that I get a x% response rate on a direct mail piece, I can simply set my budget accordingly to hit my total response goal; each $1M in additional advertising generates a x% lift in sales, etc.). With WOM or viral marketing, the relationship ideally resembles more of an S-curve (not a J-curve, as you might be led to believe) - fairly linear until a certain point, then takes on a more exponential shape until flattening out again (or falling off entirely). How you get to steep part of the curve is a factor of time (i.e., bigger spend gets you there faster). It's "organic" versus "amplified" WOM.

Most marketers want to first dip their toes in the WOM waters so they piece together a small budget to try something out, which is understandable. But if their budget is set too low, time frame is too short and expectations are too high, they are doomed to fail (they never hit the exponential part of the curve) and are left with a bad WOM taste in their mouths.

There's tons of research out there showing that Word-of-Mouth is the most impactful and trusted form of marketing around. But to really see its benefits, marketers need to spend more, not less.

WOM should be treated as being "effective" rather than "cheap"!