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

Story in yesterday’s WSJ

When Dogs and Robots Collide, Somebody Needs a Talking To

Fascinating story about the relationship between dogs and robots:

“The trouble started when Mr. Hearn first turned on his Roomba automatic cleaner. When the device started scooting around the floor, Mr. Hearn’s dog, Argos, attacked it.

Seeking help, Mr. Hearn found an online forum dedicated to the hundred-dollar Roomba buzzing with similar stories of pet assailants. Owners were offering advice. Among the most popular: Chastise the vacuum in front of the dog.

And so, with Argos looking on, Mr. Hearn shook his finger at his gadget and sternly called it “a bad Roomba.” Argos appeared to be mollified. “After that, he never tried nipping at it again,” says Mr. Hearn, a software engineer in San Carlos, Calif.”

I am listing this as a social media winner, because Roomba was smart enough to get out of the way and let it’s customers do what they wanted with the brand – and guess what – they ended up with a picture on the front page of the WSJ and were the most emailed story in the WSJ yesterday.

Wow – I would challenge any agency to plan that campaign!

TO’B

OK, this is just a bad idea.

Start-Ups Aim for Consumers on Hold

Like I’m not already p*ssed that I have to sit there on hold waiting in the queue to talk to someone (in the lowest cost location in the world) who is looking at the exact same thing I can see on your web page? Don’t even start playing ads at me.

Like companies need one more reason to increase hold times – let’s not start paying them to put us on hold – please.

I swear I will never support any company that markets to me while I am on hold.

TO’B

What is it with communities? Seems like every recent meeting I’ve had with both agencies and clients revolves around building communities. Specifically most of these large brand owners want to build and own their brand communities.

NEWSFLASH: Most brands that people care about already have their own self-organized communities. They are not waiting for you, the brand owner to build a community site where they can talk about your brand.

What are communities? My definition:

Communities are self organizing groups of like-minded people who gather to share information & opinions, argue, compete, make suggestions, make friends, get together, etc.

Do you see “to increase the value of a brand” anywhere in here?? NO! Communities are not about you. Communities are about the interests of the members. If you keep that in mind, you can join and participate. If you ignore that – well, you won’t be there long.

No doubt the vendors have been doing a great job selling communities to brand owners, but I don’t think that the effort will deliver on the underlying promise of higher levels of brand engagement and advocacy.

First, listen to understand what the community cares about. Next, learn how to feed that interest and become a valuable member of the community. Finally, if it still makes sense – build a community.

TO’B

Noah Brier created catnip for marketers with brand tags.

I won’t cover it here – because since he launched it on May 8^th it has received over 720,000 tags and 423,343 blog posts (OK, I made that last one up).

Last night on Twitter I stumbled across a similar idea for Flickr – hat tip to @whorleygirl. It’s called Tag Galaxy and it searches for all Flickr images with the specified tag and shows related tags – the cool thing is the visualization which presents the tag clouds as planets in a galaxy.

Visualization of unstructured data is a fascinating subject – and well done here.

TO’B

Hmmm, seems like Royal Ccarbbean could have embraced this couple and really turned things around - made someone who is already a HUGE customer into an even more rabid fan. Why not hire her and make her the Director of Onboard Customer Experience? Opportunity missed!

Banned from Royal Caribbean for complaining too much

Companies have to learn how to act like human beings when these kinds of things happen. How about a public sorry and here’s your free cruise next time and we’ll make a commercial about you.

Try it, you’ll like it - and profit from it.

TO’B

Well since I did it this way at WOMMA-U here’s my Top 5 List for the excellent iCitizen conference graciously hosted by one of our great partner agencies - Resource Interactive.

1. Kelly Mooney from RI gave a great talk about the Open Imperative – the thought and philosophy behind her (and Nita Rollins) recent book The Open Brand. Best quote from Kelly – “the internet is your Chief Opening Officer”.
2. Graphic facilitation from Jim Oswald – just plain cool – and a nice, really smart guy. He “graphed” the entire conference on 4 x 8 sheets of paper – the image above is one of hundreds he created during the two days of meetings. Nice to see something not on a screen for once.
3. Doc Searls – sure, he’s one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto – the book directly responsible for me having the idea for MotiveQuest – and a true visionary – but did you know he has at least 7 electronic devices running at all times? I was sitting behind him watching and that guy can multitask! Great presentation (we tipped sacred cows in Ohio) and I especially appreciated the part about project VRM – which will change how we consumer stuff – and move us from a marketing based economy to a relationship/intention based economy. Thanks to his simple visual – the Relbutton – I finally understand the concept behind Project VRM!
4. Joel Levinson: Joel has travelled the world and apparently supported himself solely with his internet endeavors and his talent for writing jingles. I am a sucker for stories about people with the energy, wit and guts to just go for it and make a living in a completely unconventional way. Joel is certainly living the life. His next gig? Taking a blind date on a week’s cruise to Alaska that he won in an online jingle writing contest for Nature’s Valley .
5. Duncan Watts: Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research and distinguished academic, author and thinker in the field network theory and social media. It was delightful to hear him skewer both the “influentials” and ” viral” approaches to marketing in one talk. Best quote “Do you think the really, really big forest fires are started by a particularly influential tree?”
   
6. Joe Jaffe
   (OK, you’re right, he did just get a Top 5 citation at WOMMA-U – but it was interesting to see the different reactions of the two audiences.) At WOMMA-U he was preaching to a room full of of social media firebrands – and it goes down well. At this conference, well there were a few more blue chip marketers from RI’s impressive roster of clients – and I sensed a different energy. What Jaffe has to say is definitely more challenging to someone holding a billion dollar advertising budget in their hands.

Thanks to Kelly Mooney, Nancy Kramer and the entire HARD WORKING Resource Interactive team for putting on a first class event. (I never snacked so well . . .)

TO’B

Nice article in AdAge about MotiveQuest work with MINI linking brand advocacy to sales.

Linking Web Buzz to Mini Sales

We spent months working with a team at Northwestern University to prove out this measure of brand advocacy – the Online Promoter Score^TM. OPS is a powerful measure of brand advocacy because when OPS goes up, sales go up 30 days later - and visa versa.

Nice thing about OPS - it is a natural (not surveyed) measure that we can simply observe in online conversations. While it is an online measure - it reflects all of a person’s brand interactions, feelings and experience - online and off. This is an online measure of real-world brand advocacy.

More coming soon.

TO’B

Get a Mac - Pep Rally

I’m starting to like this guy - and really dislike the Apple guy. Hat tip to Catherine P. Taylor

Hmmm - TO’B

Last week on my way down to WOMMA-University
I threw Joseph Jaffe’s latest tome - Join the Conversation in my bag. Once the doors to the plane closed and I could no longer frantically update Twitter, I opened it up and started reading. (We sat on the ground a LONG TIME so by the time I made Miami; I was through the whole thing.)

Now a couple of weeks ago in my review I said that Groundswell is the how-to book for marketers wishing to play in a post-cluetrain world - and I now see that Join the Conversation bridges the intellectual divide between The Cluetrain Manifesto and Groundswell. The first half of the book is a bit scholarly - and while I was a bit put off by this at first, I really appreciate it having finished the book.

When Jaffe reaches back to George Orwell’s on media and connects it to Web 2.0 a single word pops into my mind. Subversive. That’s what this whole social computing movement is. It’s subversive because it’s a revolution that takes power out of the hands of giant corporations and gives it back to people. With the Internet as plumbing we can find our tribe and talk to them - regardless of time and distance. Jaffe makes the point that Orwell would have loved the subversive nature of this revolution – the new age of conversation. Power to the people!

Jaffe makes a passionate argument that markets are conversations - so of course marketers must be involved. Before reading the book I considered myself a bit of a Purist (on the Purist => Corporatist Scale) and I still do. What comes clear is how this apparent gulf between people and corporations can be bridged. It is simple really; corporations need to act human if they want to participate in the conversation. And that means giving up control, not always being right, respecting people building relationships instead of running campaigns, listening and acting like caring human beings.

Along with lots of great examples of how companies are doing things right in conversational marketing, he has some great counter examples - and he’s not afraid to call them out! (TIP: If you find yourself asking the lawyers to contact one of your best customers who is doing something odd with your brand or product, you are about to nominate yourself for the “Join the Conversation Hall of Shame”. )

My favorite thing about this book? Jaffe is very passionate about this subject and he doesn’t pull punches. He is happy to get in an argument - and even offend if he thinks you don’t get it. I also like the scholarly approach of the first half, because with this Join the Conversation provides the intellectual grounding in how corporations can get on board the Cluetrain.

TO’B