Healthcare debate analysis

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

How the h*ck do we do social media

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:

1. Teamwork, teamwork, teamwork: Scott didn’t set out doing, he set out meeting everyone he could across the organization and learning what they needed.
   
2. Inventory: All big companies are doing something in SM.  Find out what it is and leverage it.
   
3. Sr. Management Support: Without this you are doomed to failure.
   
4. Stakeholders: Marketing, PR, Product, Customer Service, Legal all have a stake in SM initiatives.  Figure out what it is and how to incorporate it.
   
5. Strategy: Before tools comes strategy.  What is the organization trying to accomplish.
   
6. Horses for Courses: Different SM channels for different Ford constituencies.  Mustang fans don’t care about the same thing as Fusion Hybrid fans.
   
7. 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?

Communities don’t care about brands

Does that seem like a provocative title? Well it kind-of is. Communities do care about brands, but perhaps not in the way you like to think. Communities are self organizing groups of like-minded people who gather to share information, opinions, and suggestions, make friends, get together, etc. Sometimes, a brand sits at the center of the community, but more often it doesn’t

(Here’s my deck on How Communities Work.)

We have done hundreds of projects over the last 6 years harvesting and analyzing community conversations to understand why people do what they do. Across all these projects, brand mentions are typically a fraction of all the community conversation. In food, brand mentions are in less than 5% of the conversations. In a highly brand involved community, like cars or cellphones brand mentions are rarely in more than 30% of the conversations.

If you are “brand monitoring” then you are missing between 70% and 95% of the relevant conversation.

If you (Mr. Brand) want to “connect” with communities what you need to do is study community issues, motivations and drivers first. Once you understand the community motivations, then you are ready to participate. Just remember this rule of thumb. Everything you (Mr. Brand) do in the community should go through the filter of community motivations.

Are you serving the community or are you using the community?

YMMV

TO’B

Google and P&G

I’m sure most of you saw the front page WSJ article last week about Google and P&G. This is of great interest to me because it gets to the heart of one of my underlying hypotheses about why digital advertising will continue to grow at the expense of other media.

Right now brand marketers are way under-invested in digital marketing. All you have to do is see the chart below.  TV has less than 20% of the time but 44% of the spending.     Marketers are over invested in traditional media as compared to time spent there.

Sources: TNS Media Intelligence & Forrester Research

This has to change. The challenge, as I have learned from several of our client CMO’s is that it is really hard to spend money on digital, while it is relatively easy to shovel it out the door on 30 sec. TV spots.

We (agencies, researchers, etc.) need to work a lot harder to bring ideas to our clients on how to spend money and leverage programs via digital channels. As John Bell famously asks, if I spend another $100k on social media, what do I get?

TO’B

5 Things about Social Media

I had a call with a client today. They are a huge, global company, and we have been doing brand tracking & analysis for them for several years.

They have a newly formed social media team, and I had a call with them today. I thought their questions (and my answers) might be relevant to others as well. Here is my follow-up email:

—————————————————————————-

It was great to talk to you and your team just now.  You have a big (and exciting) job ahead; here are my thoughts.

1. Social media is about human scale engagement – not technology
   
2. SM is about relationships, not campaigns.  Plan accordingly
   
3. SM cuts across silos.  It will involve marketing, product, customer service and legal (at least).  Doing it well will require C level approval AND support.
   
4. Success in SM requires putting the community’s motivations first.  This is very hard for most companies to grasp.  It is not about selling something, but about getting people to love you so they will do more business with you.  A subtle, but important distinction.  Put the community’s motivations first.
   
5. Successful SM will connect to something people are already passionate about.  Figure out what it is first.
   

I could go on, but you get the idea

Links & Info

Here are our decks on slideshare:

MotiveQuest SlideShare

You already read Groundswell – which I think is a really good book on this subject – here is my review of Groundswell.

Peter Kim @ Mashable: List of Social Media Marketing Examples

Another good one with lots of comments from Peter Kim: What is Social Media Marketing

Chris Brogan: A good Blog on social media marketing – pretty PR focused.

Jeremiah Owyang – analyst for Forrester has good coverage of SM but heavy on tools: Web Stratgy by Jeremiah

And finally, a really interesting and different social media execution: Layer Tennis – watch a match and you will get it – be sure to click thru the volleys.

http://layertennis.com/071026/

Take a look at the results the CS3 launch was a HUGE success for Adobe (and their agency – Goodby).

CS3 Launch

Call me if you have any questions or would like to discuss further –

TO’B

Sara Palin & SNL: Josh Bernoff has Questions . . . .

We sent out an email blast last week about our BrandAdvocacy ‘08 website and got some questions back from Josh Bernoff at Forrester (blogging here).

Here are his questions – and our answers. (By the way, Josh’s questions were pretty representative of the questions we are getting from everyone.)

1. Is there a bias in people who create or react to content online towards the democratic and liberal candidates?

• First, if you look at the trend data on Brandadvocay08 it is clear that sometimes Obama has led and sometimes McCain has led, so on a very simple level this does not seem to be true.
• Second, when we created the dataset we were careful to create a representative dataset of both ordinary people and political commentators.  For example on the site we have links to one of each for Democrats http://www.topix.com/forum/us/democrat and for Republicans http://www.topix.com/forum/us/republican. We found that there are plenty of Republicans who are online also.
• In addition we can look at the underlying constant of regression the CNN Poll of Polls and Obama’s Online Promoter™ Score to determine if there is an “online bias”.  The CNN Poll of Polls shows a constant of 50.8%, MQ’s OPS shows a constant of 49.6%.
• MQ’s data does not reflect a particularly liberal bias, other slices of data might, if we look more recently perhaps one could be emerging but over the 9/1 to 10/20 time frame there doesn’t appear to be one.
• This also depends on your belief in the bias of the poll of polls; I’m not a polling person and can’t say if there is a bias in the poll of polls.

2. Do people online just like to talk about the Wow activities (like Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live) vs the real Issues?

• Every day we highlight the words that are most highly correlated with each candidate.

• They show what issues the nation is associating with each candidate.  Sometimes it is true that they focus on the Wow stories but we see that they are just as likely to be seriously discussing the real issues (taxes, God, wealth, etc).  Don’t underestimate the power of forums as a place everyday people share their fears and thoughts with others like them.  For example take a look at this discussion on Parenting.com’s forums
  
  

3. How does Online advocacy relate to traditional polls?

• From one perspective, its apples and oranges, polls attempt to measure the outcome of the presidential election if it were held on a particular day, MQ is measuring the number of people who are advocating a particular candidate.
• On the flip side, if you believe as we do that people advocating to each other is an important piece of the future success of brands, products (and candidates) then we hope to show that the candidate with the most advocates will be the winner of the election.
• Important caveat, we don’t have an electoral college or battleground states so at best we can hope to use advocacy as an indicator of the popular vote.
• Using the data from the CNN Poll of Polls as a comparison metric, HYPOTHETICALLY, let’s assume that CNN Poll of Polls represents “truth”, we can apply straight forward regression to determine if the Advocacy metric for Obama is statistically related to the Poll of Polls data.
• Regression shows that Obama’s Online Promoter™ score is statistically significant in linkage to the CNN’s poll of Polls results at > 98%

• Furthermore, we can look to see if perhaps MQ’s results might lead the traditional polling methods; the relation appears strongest at 4-days leading.

The strongest statistical link from Obama’s Online Promoter™ Score to the CNN Poll of Poll’s results appears when we make Obama’s

OPS a 4-day leading indicator of the Poll of Polls

Obviously this detailed post may raise even more questions – feel free to post them in the comments section.

TO’B

Hertz #1 By a Mile – Thanks Walter!

On Friday afternoon I returned to the Hertz LAX location at 12:30 PM with 1 hour until my flight left. If I didn’t make the flight, I would be stuck at LAX for at least 6 hours. To make things worse, I was flying on United – which at LAX is the last of 9 stops that the Hertz bus makes.

So I got out of the car and started sprinting toward the bus. Someone called out “Sir, Sir”. I turned around, thinking someone wanted to give me a receipt when a Hertz employee named Walter told me to get back in the car so he could drive me around to United.

We had a nice chat and Walter told me that LAX has a policy of trying to help disabled people, families and those running really late (like me) get to the terminal quickly.

Well, I made my plane and got home to see my family that night thanks to the initiative and efforts of Walter at LAX. This is a great example of one person going above and beyond the call of duty to help someone – and I definitely appreciate it.

Please pass on my thanks to Walter and to his supervisor.

Tom O’Brien
Hertz Fan Forevermore

Social Media Experts

Alex Hillman sure stirred up a lot of emotion with his post over at Mashable about social media experts – How to Know if You Should Fire Your Social Media Consultant.

Go read the post for yourself, but all I needed to see to agree was Reason #1:

“If they recommend a Twitter campaign”

Like Alex, I am a twitter fan, (@tomob) and I agree with him, it is no place to start. Getting “social media” is a big deal. It is asking corporations to act like human beings and become an integral part of the community that exists around their products and brands.

Being an integral part of the community means:

1. It is a relationship, not a campaign
2. Community motivations get served first – not yours
3. You have to contribute
4. You have to be real – open, honest, direct, transparent

This is not something that can be outsourced. Outsourcing community involvement is like outsourcing friendship. It really can’t be done effectively.

With respect to “Social Media Consultants” the answer is the same as it always was. No, we’re not going to have licensing or standards. Those of us on the Vendor side (me @ MotiveQuest) have to be clear both about what we will and won’t do. Anyone who says they do it all is just lying. Those of you on the buyer side have to ramp up the due diligence. Ask for and call references. Do some research. Sort the wheat from the chaff.

Finally, this transformation is not going to be easy. Establishing relationships with your customers and communities (is that “Social Media?) is hard work. It cuts across the silos. It will require getting Marketing, PR, Customer Service, Engineering/Product, Legal and Exec all on board. It will require real people making real efforts to connect every day.

Good Luck!

TO’B

Chinese Milk Scandal

Most of you don’t know this, but early on in my career I was a milk man. Yes, I graduated from Purdue University with a BS degree in Food Science. My first job was working for Dean Foods Company as a supervisor in dairy plant – a milk man. (Here is my microbiology professor – Dr. Maribeth Cousin)

This may sound strange to you, but there is something special about a dairy plant. Milk is a fragile, important, ubiquitous and sensitive food. Taking special care of milk is what we did every day in that plant.

We took special care because we understood that everyone, but especially children depend on milk and if we didn’t do our jobs right, people could get sick. In fact there was a sad incident here in Chicago where there was a salmonella outbreak traced back to a Jewel dairy plant was wasn’t getting cleaned properly. Thousands were sickened and several died. The plant never re-opened.

So this milk scandal from China where they were putting poisonous industrial chemicals (melamine) in milk makes me sad and mad. What kind of person does this? How do they rationalize it to themselves? How do they sleep at night?

I have a pretty libertarian bent, but the USDA here in the USA and most if not all of the food manufacturers do a really good job of ensuring that we have the safest food supply in the world.

TO’B

Viral Marketing is Stupid

I have to give credit to Duncan Watts on this one, but his presentation at iCitizen a couple of weeks ago got me thinking about viral marketing. His forest fire analogy brought it home for me.

Forest fires start and stop all the time. There are thousands of forest fires every year. Only a few of them become the monster forest fires we see on TV consuming homes and acreage in vast quantities. How are these few mega-fires different from the thousands of small ones? Is it because they started from a really “special” tree? (An influential tree perhaps??)

No. The mega-fires started in a place and at a time where fuel, weather and other conditions were precisely right, and continued to be precisely right to grow into a TV-worthy blaze.

What does that have to do with viral marketing? Well, do you think the Coke-Mentos phenomenon was planned by an agency? Do you think the Blend-Tec videos were planned by an agency? NO, they just happened to appear in the right place at the right time with the right content. And they took off.

Viral marketing is like a baseball team trying to win all their games with home runs.

TO’B

Figure 1: Credit – Exp. Flickr