November 3, 2009
Yesterday BL Ochman published a blog post titled: 10 Things Social Media Can’t Do. This post went viral among a certain community on Twitter – you know who you are. BL was surprised that this post got something like 4,000 ReTweets which is remarkable.
Why the huge response? I think it is because one of the primary themes around SM is the (negative) myth of the SM Guru/Expert. This post lays bare that myth, and exposes all the hard work it takes to make SM into something meaningful that drives ROI and contributes to an organization’s success.
Most of us working in this business aren’t walking around pretending to be experts, but we are working hard on behalf of our clients and companies to do a better job connecting with customers to drive sales and profitability. BL’s post is an acknowledgement of the hard work hundreds of people (consultants, agencies, companies) are doing all over the country to drive organizational success using SM as one of many tools.
Let’s re-imagine BL’s list as requirements for SM success, because that is what they are:
1. Coordination with marketing strategy.
2. Top management buy-in.
3. Long-term commitment.
4. ROI model reflecting long-term commitment.
5. Requires a professional team of agencies & experts.
6. Must be coordinated with PR and products efforts. SM can’t substitute for either.
7. SM Requires multi-year budget commitment.
8. Don’t expect to guarantee sales or influence.
9. Must be led and staffed by senior internal people who understand the over-arching strategy.
10. SM should always be coordinated with PR, Marketing and Product.
My $0.02
TO’B
4 Comments |
social media | Tagged: BL Ochman, MotiveQuest, social media, tomob, whatsnext |
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Posted by tomob
October 13, 2009
We (MotiveQuest LLC) have just completed the third report in our series on the Health Care Reform debate. Because we think brand advocacy is the most important metric for brand health, (we used this to predict the outcome of the 2008 Presidential Election) we decided to take a look at Obama’s advocacy over the course of this very rancorous HC reform debate.
What we see is that the overall level of conversation is down, and some topics have faded (rationing) while others have continued to increase (insuring the uninsured).
Regarding advocacy, we thought that perhaps Obama’s HC Reform related advocacy would be lower than his overall advocacy – but when we compared the two, we found that they are both dropping at similar rates. Since

we have proven the link between changes in advocacy and changes in
sales in a number of categories (Cars, Cellphones) we decided to compare Obama’s advocacy to his approval ratings – the lines are a pretty close match, with advocacy seeming to lead approval ratings by a few weeks. If so, watch out below.
What do you think? Will Obama’s approval ratings plummet further in the next few weeks?
TO’B
2 Comments |
MotiveQuest, advocacy, health 2.0, healthcare, metrics | Tagged: advocacy, healthcare, MotiveQuest, obama, reform, tomob |
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Posted by tomob
September 9, 2009
We (MotiveQuest LLC) have decided to start tracking & analyzing the healthcare debate using our online anthropology tools and techniques. The first report in this series can be found here: The Raging Debate
For this series we will be monitoring & analyzing the online conversation around healthcare and providing weekly updates as to what is driving the conversation, advocacy for different options and the emotional tenor of the chatter.
Here is one chart from the report showing the key topics and drivers of concern – you can see the landscape has changed significantly from June through August.
You can see that rationing shows the biggest increase from June through August.
We will be posting a follow-up report next week which will reflect today’s speech by President Obama.
If you are interested in more information you can contact me at tobrien at motivequest dot com.
Thanks – TO’B
1 Comment |
MotiveQuest, advocacy, consumer generated media, health 2.0, healthcare, measurement, sentiment | Tagged: advocacy, Brand Advocacy, data mining, healthcare, MotiveQuest, sentiment, social media, tomob |
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Posted by tomob
September 3, 2009
Hey There -
I’m on vacation until September 8. Won’t be checking voicemail or
email, so …
If you need …
Cheers,
Andy
_____________________________________________
Andy Sernovitz
www.twitter.com/sernovitz
Blog: Damn, I Wish I’d Thought of That!
www.damniwish.com
Book: Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking
www.wordofmouthbook.com
Work:
GasPedal – www.gaspedal.com
Social Media Business Council – www.socialmedia.org
Northwestern’s Medill School – Faculty, teaching WOM
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word of mouth | Tagged: ooto, sernovitz, tomob, WOM, word of mouth |
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Posted by tomob
August 18, 2009
For some time I have been arguing that what brands need is advocates not influencers. Somehow this meme has recently gathered steam in the marketing discussion (see great post here from Jeremy Epstein – influencers vs. fans)
I don’t think fans is quite the right word for what brands or movements need, what they need is advocates. Advocates are different than fans because they will do something. They will recommend you to a friend, they will tell someone else to buy your car. They are taking positive action. Moreover, they don’t do this because they are “influential” or because they are being paid by the post or enticed to write nice things b/c they are getting free stuff. They are telling their friends (online and off) to do something, because they believe.
We (MotiveQuest) have studied Brand Advocacy in some detail and I am confident in saying that increasing levels of advocacy (online and off) are correlated to increasing sales or share. We have studied this in automotive, food, cellular, spirits and other markets with some variability (how much of the change in share or sales are explained by the change in advocacy; time lag) but always with a strong positive correlation.
When we work with brands, key questions are how many advocates do you have (compared to your competition) is the number increasing or decreasing and why? Also, we examine what your advocates love about you most, and figure out how to leverage these things to grow advocacy.
Contrast this approach with Influencer marketing. With adovocacy research and marketing we are trying to discover why your authentic brand fans love y0u most and how to make more advocates. With influencer marketing you are trying to find those few people who will influence lots of other to do something. Now like most things this works great if you get the right influencer, on the right topic. Clearly Oprah Winfrey recommending a book to her audience is a guarantee of a NYT best seller. Every other influencer works less well than that.
The other day I had a tweet with Guy Kawasaki about this very subject. Guy has somehow
wrangled a Corvette from GM to drive and tweet about as an “influencer”. I respect Guy for lots of things, but is opinion is irrelevant to me as a car guy. (Though Guy did confirm that it is fun for him!) This is but one of many, many influencer strategies being deployed by big companies, and some of them will work. But to me it feels more like Viral Marketing than anything else. Rather than engaging your REAL brand users on the level of their personal brand experience, you are looking for a few influencers who will tell the rest of us sheep what to do.
What if instead of giving Guy (and I’m assuming a bunch of other “influencers”) a Corvette GM spent the resources engaging with the people over at the non-GM owned Corvette Forums which has 30 million posts from some 223,000 members? Those are the Corvette advocates, and the care and feeding of the Corvette advocates (even if they aren’t famous) should be the #1 job of the Corvette PR and Marketing teams.
<RANT OFF>
TO’B
3 Comments |
MotiveQuest, advocacy, community, influence | Tagged: advocates, Brand Advocacy, influencers, MotiveQuest, tomob |
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Posted by tomob
August 10, 2009
We are getting lots of questions from our clients about how to scale social media. At first, the discussions are “tools and tactics” focused. Then it quickly becomes apparent that “doing social media” is a major commitment that will take real people and real funding over time. No freebie here.
The other day Scott Monty the SM guy for Ford blogged “A Year @ Ford – Part 1″ and I knew this was one to share. (A year ago Scott quit his agency gig and moved his family to Detroit and joined Ford to head up digital communications – and what a year it was. Can you think of a more turbulent year for the automotive Industry?)
Here are my takeaways – but if you (or your clients) are trying to figure out how to do SM – then read the whole thing:
- Teamwork, teamwork, teamwork: Scott didn’t set out doing, he set out meeting everyone he could across the organization and learning what they needed.
- Inventory: All big companies are doing something in SM. Find out what it is and leverage it.
- Sr. Management Support: Without this you are doomed to failure.
- Stakeholders: Marketing, PR, Product, Customer Service, Legal all have a stake in SM initiatives. Figure out what it is and how to incorporate it.
- Strategy: Before tools comes strategy. What is the organization trying to accomplish.
- Horses for Courses: Different SM channels for different Ford constituencies. Mustang fans don’t care about the same thing as Fusion Hybrid fans.
- Help: Once the strategy was in place, Scott brought in some really expert agencies (advertising, PR and SM) and people to help execute. That means budget.
While this is a long term initiative, the early returns are quite good with very positive press coverage for Ford, and significantly improved perceptions of the brand.
As an outsider, I’d say that Ford has stopped relying solely on mass media & big advertising and they are taking the Ford Story direct to the people.
What will your clients do?
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CMO, Groundswell, digital agencies, social media | Tagged: ford, MotiveQuest, scott monty, social media, tomob |
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Posted by tomob
February 17, 2009
These three charts represent a case study in how data can be manipulated to tell a story. I’ll bet the one you saw the last week is the one on the bottom.



Tom O’Brien
1 Comment |
data visualization | Tagged: MotiveQuest, statistics, tomob, visualization |
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Posted by tomob