360DigitalInfluence

In case you haven’t heard, last night TechCrunch announced that Pinterest hit 11.7 million UMVs, becoming the fastest standalone site ever to surpass 10 million monthly uniques.

The #1 driver of consumer purchases is word of mouth recommendations from friends, and Pinterest holds the power to drive authentic “word of eye” recommendations in a way that is changing the landscape of social commerce.

How? The landing page for Pinterest is an endless visual stream of subtle product recommendations from the very people who influence your purchasing decisions - friends and strangers with good taste. This means that there is an endless opportunity for your brand and its products to be seen by Pinterest’s 11.7 million unique monthly users as endorsements from friends in the form of repins.

Currently availably stats show the average Pinterest user spends 98 minutes per month on the site, compared to 2.5 hours on Tumblr, and 7 hours on Facebook. Pinterest is most popular in North Eastern states, among females (estimates range from 58% to 70% female), and with people ages 25-44 (59% of visitors).

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(Part 2? Yeah, check out Part 1.)

In case you missed it, Ron Paul supporters, ASU students, and VFX artists were among those that joined the fray since my last post. The variations continue to proliferate further down the tail, satirizing - and entertaining - more niche audiences. What does this add up to? Segmentation.

While I easily enjoy Sh*t ASU Students Say even though I’m not a Sun Devil - and haven’t even been to the campus - the video resonates better with those who were. Beyond that, the video’s arc is more relatable to students who enrolled in the past 5-10 years and drink socially - perhaps even deeper for students who were in the Greek system and enjoy campus takeout.

The point is, there’s a clear difference in the type of viewer who’s going to watch the video halfway through for a chuckle and a viewer who’s going to share across social networks. Those pearls of info are demographic, psychographic, and behavioristic qualities - in some ways digital has obscured their importance.

As segmented as some brands' social media programs get these days.

On-platform segmentation

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It has taken the whole weekend to completely digest all the amazing learnings we gathered last week at the WOMMA summit. The WOMMA tagline is “Creating Talkable Brands Next and Best Practices” and they totally delivered. Great learnings from great brands like Mattel, Sprint, Intel, Unilever and Sephora just to name a few. But the most talked about sessions were definitely the keynote addresses that carried four themes that will help us navigate the social media industry over the next year.

The summit opened with Sally Hogshead teaching us all what it means to Fascinate – the theme of her recently released book of the same name. One key theme was how brands need to stand out in our cluttered and noisy world. It doesn’t matter if you’re the best, if no one knows about it. And with an average attention span of only nine seconds, consumers will remember the brands that persuade them in the most social ways. The brands with the best word of mouth reputations will stand out and others will fade into the background. Later in the conference, there was a panel discussion of legal counsel from Coca-Cola and American Express, and I was reminded that both of those brands have been able to stand out with plenty of reason to be risk averse.“

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The new era of consumerism is one in which each and every consumer has a powerful voice. It is one that touches brands across the spectrum, from the families of food, beverage and personal care brands within multinational CPGs all the way to modern B2B technology companies who are in turn focusing on the new voice of the consumer and how this affects their lead generation and sales cycles.

As marketers working with social platforms we focus a lot on influencers and building influencer relationships. However this new social consumerism means that we need to turn our attention to looking at the empowered customer as the new powerhouse that must be considered and included in any advocacy program. This does not need to be a huge expensive operation and can start with something as simple as a thank you.

Here follows five easy things any company or brand can do today in taking the first step to growing a new breed of influential and empowered customer advocates, both on and offline:

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Personal branding has taken kind of a bad rap over the past few years. As the overglorified “social media rockstar” label has been brought to life by people skilled in hype and little else, the idea of building a personal brand can seem inherently egotistical. Yet what if someone were to suggest that only egotistical companies need to worry about building a brand? Of course that would be silly, yet there is a double standard when it comes to individuals.

In many cases, there is good reason for this. Most companies are afraid to get employees who are not dedicated to doing their job, but rather focused on self promotion to their own ends. Yet the companies that manage to create an atmosphere where employees can build their personal brand and explore their interests are the ones who will win in the long term because they will have the employees that everyone wants to work with - and be better able to hold on to their best people and not drive them away to look for jobs elsewhere.

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What if, instead of targeting 5,000 people, you could achieve the same bottom line results by engaging 500 or even 5 people, at a lower total cost? That’s the potential of influence marketing. Is it living up to that promise and how can this type of marketing be scaled in 2012?

What we do know:

• Changes in consumer attention mean marketing is changing, and the change is dramatic
• It’s becoming clear that one of key players in this change is the individual consumer
• Individuals are playing a central role because they trust each other – often a lot more than they trust companies
• In today’s environment they’re able to better communicate and share with each other – on many things, including products, services and causes

So, do we then target all individuals engaged in social media? Our thinking is that individuals who are influential can create outsized value. There’s been a lively debate around this (see, for example, Paul Adams excellent discussion and his comprehensive collection of relevant research links). It seems to me that most of the debate seems to center around the definitions of who is an influencer. To us, an influencer is not defined solely by the number of people they connect to. Quite simply, an influencer is someone who is capable of – and wants to - bring about changes in awareness, perception or action in a group of people, around a specific topic. Below, we present 3 real world data points assessing the value of different types of influencers.

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Chart by Leon Haland

After launching Wave and Buzz to poor reviews and little pick-up in user base, Google had a low bar to clear with Google+. Now that Google+ has acquired 10 million users in 16 days and is receiving accolades for user interface as well as high responsiveness from the Google+ engineering team on the platform itself, the social media community is asking itself “what does the future hold for Google+?” Moreover, as social network users, we each need to ask ourselves on what platforms we’ll share our information and content - and with whom.

If you are looking for a comprehensive overview of all aspects of Google+, I encourage you to check out the complete guide to the platform compiled by Ben Parr at Mashable. In this post, I’ll give you the very brief overview of key elements of Google+ and how you can get the most out of using them.

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Fresh off the conference floor from this year’s School of WOM, it’s difficult not to feel conflicted as a digital communications professional. However, I’ve come to realize the true value of most conferences isn’t in the “Ah-ha!” moments, but rather the reflection. I don’t ever want to walk away from a gathering like WOMMA’s yearly event with notebook full of answers. If I did, I could have easily learned those lessons in a book or a blog post. A valuable conference in this industry is one that spurs discourse, rumination, and plenty of brow-furrowing.

What concepts stirred the pot during the 2.5-day event? Find out after the jump.

Crayola provided crayons so we could show off our artistic abilities (or lack thereof)

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The Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s School of WOM has been a wonderful combination of hands on skills development with leading practitioners,  inspiring keynotes, and a new element this year - questioning some of the “obvious” things about our profession that might not even be true, much less obvious.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Duncan Watts, author of extensive previous exploration on human social networks and the new book Everything Is Obvious Once You Know the Answer.  His new book provides compelling information for why we should question our human intuition and “common sense” as there are too many cases in which that “common sense” could reverse justify any number of outcomes.  Being people ourselves gives us a false sense of understanding how our fellow humans work.  As Duncan said yesterday, a physicist would never put himself in the shoes of an electron and imagine which way it would go, yet we in the (practical application of the) social sciences do this on a regular basis. continue reading

Egyptian Women Harassed on International Women's Day 2011

Oscar Wilde once famously proclaimed, “One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.”

It goes without saying that at least once, if not several times in our lives, we have all experienced the negative backlash a spiteful rumor or an embarrassing truth can have, but it is often how we handle these imbroglios that truly define our reputations.

In 1997, according to Measures That Matter, The Center for Business Innovation (CBI), and Cap Gemini/Ernst & Young, about 35% of investment decisions were based on factors such as reputation and image.  Today, this percentage is considerably higher with the activity and immediacy of Facebook and Twitter.

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