I’m new to 1000heads, and have often been asked by family and friends what it is we do. Here’s just one example.
We recently supported the Nokia US launch of the Nokia Lumia 900. The brand and international rap superstar Nicki Minaj teamed up to host a launch of epic proportions, live from Times Square. Local New Yorkers and tourists from around the world witnessed an exclusive visual and musical takeover, using nine immense CGI screens, crowned by a show-stopping performance from Minaj.
She performed a medley of songs from her brand-new album and then introduced the exclusive Nokia remix of her latest single ‘Starships’, featuring London-based DJ Doorly. Lucky fans in the audience were also filmed to appear in the official video for the Nokia ‘Starships’ remix.
And what was our role in all of this?
Prior to the takeover we invited bloggers from the worlds of music and technology to join us for the event. The bloggers, as well as New Yorkers in and around Times Square, had no idea what was planned. Aside from a few hints, everything about the event was secret. The only real clue was a giant blue box that had been planted in the middle of Times Square the day before the launch. The box was unbranded but for a distinctive clock that was counting down.
To add even more intrigue and mystery, on launch day we gave each blogger a scaled-down version of the blue box; inside was a pair of Monster headphones and a miniature countdown timer, synced with the main box.
To support the activity online we created a Facebook tab on the Nokia US page called ‘Lumia 900 Live’. The tab mirrored all activity leading up to the event on the ground, still giving nothing away. Then, post-launch, we ran a Facebook competition giving fans the opportunity to win a Lumia 900 signed by Minaj herself. The tab was also the home for the official video for the Nokia ‘Starships’ remix.
The trip was a blast for lots of reasons, the main one being getting to meet our bloggers face to face, and giving them an experience they’d never forget.
Pinterest is the current darling of the social media world (even Obama is on it). With the records for fastest adoption (the time it took to hit 10 million monthly visitors), highest referral traffic (beating Twitter in February) and an average user time of 98 minutes per month, ‘pinning’ seems a hot contender for that most coveted and elusive grail: being ‘the next Facebook’.
A cross between Tumblr and delicious, Pinterest has nailed online scrapbooking to become the place where virtual mood boards come to life online.
So just why is it so powerful for brand Word of Mouth? Well, it’s basically a public display of show and tell, allowing us to build aspirational identities and lives from others’ raw materials. With boards such as ‘Products I Love’ and ‘My Style’ encouraging us to share the images and items from across the web that most resonate with our tastes and lifestyles – it’s an instant, visual way to announce who we are to friends and strangers alike.
Pinners are a bonafide online WOM army, showing off what they have, want, love and dream about, using any impactful content they can get their hands on. And savvy brands are filling those hands with their own imagery and ideas.
Publishing and lifestyle brands with numerous high-quality images already at their disposal like Martha Stewart Living and The Knot are having the easiest time, while companies that don’t translate well visually will most likely find that Pinterest isn’t for them.
From a retail perspective, Pinterest can be a dream come true. Users can pin items directly from a brand’s site, creating their own virtual shopping lists – perfect for birthdays or gift registries. These pins, embedded with links to the brand’s own page, are already driving more referral traffic than Twitter. And brands can see what people are pinning about them either through search or the source functionality (pinterest.com/source/yourURLhere), so tracking and analytics are easy.
Yet the best brand boards don’t purely focus on themselves. Instead, they curate boards that represent their point of view. A great example is fashion designer Tory Burch, who mixes boards of her collections with collections like ‘Orange’ featuring inspirations in her signature color. From artwork and colour swatches to Boo, her favorite celebrity dog, she seamlessly blends her collection with other items in a fun way, which also gives love back to other creative content and brands. On the ‘Tory Entertains’ board, she shares ideas for throwing parties and some of her favorite recipes. Those personal touches give users a look into the world beyond clothes through Tory’s lens.
At 1000heads, we’re using Pinterest with our client Veria, the health and wellness TV channel. In the past month we’ve curated over 41 boards and helped grow their combined following from 220 to over 3,117 in just under three weeks. The Veria boards are filled with a mix of the brand’s own recipes, workout videos and health tips as well as re-pins from health and wellness bloggers.
Each of the pins and boards are curated through Veria’s lens of pop-wellness. They are all about health and wellness with a playful approach that doesn’t take itself too seriously (hence the board for cute pets and cats doing yoga). This reflects the motivations for why Veria’s audience (and target audience) is using Pinterest in the first place – education, identification and fun.
Already the opportunities for those brands wanting to take an active role on Pinterest are as numerous as the subject matter of the new boards appearing every day. But there’s also something else to consider – how Pinterest generates organic Word of Mouth between peers. Pinning something brand-related onto my board of ‘things I love’ creates immediate advocacy, and for those brands I’m really passionate about, I can dedicate an entire space to pay homage, visually displaying that passion.
Top 5 Pinterest take outs for brands:
1. Make sure you have lots of sexy and creative visuals on your own brand website and social presences – but also focus on ways to spread those visuals across others’ social presences, where pinners are more likely to stumble across them – independent blogs, social networks, forums. Pinterest shareability is hugely boosted by social visibility elsewhere
2. Create your own boards to give people a feel for the wider world and influences of the brand. Understand why people want to be associated with you
3. Pin others’ images, not just your own, for authenticity, eclecticism and a bit of community love
4. Monitor, thank and reward people spreading your own brand imagery
5. Take time to observe how passions, brands and trends spread on Pinterest. Understanding the psychology and motivations behind those pinners is the best place to start when working to generate your own Word of Mouth
Influencers are the ultimate fans. They understand products often better than company representatives, and they accrue audiences based on the legitimacy and quality of the their advice, understanding and willingness to engage with like minds. And precisely because they are product users – rather than salesmen – they know the weaknesses, strengths and opportunities for product development.
In real terms, influencers are experts. They dedicate unpaid hours to research and sharing of news around a product or abrand, and they often have ideas about how to improve the experience of products – from manufacturing and delivery, to interaction design.
All these characteristics of influencers make them superb sources for learning about how to do business more effectively. More effective than traditional market research, influencer engagement represents the most cost effective means of accessing external research on products and brands.
Of course, thinking of influencers as mere research sources is also dangerous. Once a social strategy involving an influencer is established it’s essential to foster the relationship so that the influencer maintains his/her expertise, independence and authority. And they need to be valued for what they contribute to the firm.
So how do you go about facilitating learning from influencers?
The first stage in influencer engagement should be an exploration of how the influencer can share their expertise. While aninfluencer may be prolific in social media, they may not be as concise nor as comfortable communicating in alternative formats – say, for instance, on video or in live presentations. Or even if they claim to be comfortable, influencers may not have the natural skills in presenting either to the world or to business representatives in a credible manner. So it becomes the social facilitator’s role to establish the mechanisms that best suit influencers’ communication of expertise.
Once the range of communication styles has been established, social facilitators need to collate the knowledge of influencers, and distribute in a manner that suits the operational structure of a brand. A social facilitator needs to ensure that influencer expertiseabout vertical integration needs to go to manufacturing, logistics and/or distribution, while expertise about product experiences should go to product development and interaction design. They need to act as an arbiter, amediator who articulates and converts the value of influencer advice and understanding to the firm.
Sometimes this information and expertise needs structure, and sometimes it needs to break existing structures. Social facilitators should be prepared to break as much as they curate when it comes to influencer expertise. Only when processes and practices are challenged will any learning truly happen.
And finally, when learning from influencers is facilitated, it needs to be tested. It isn’t enough just to measure activity, either. Ideas that come from influencers should be able to be adapted beyond the scope of their advice. Testing such applied learning is best measured by changes in philosophy, and further influencer engagement. It’s a matter of making a business truly social, rather than separating business practice from audience interaction.
Influencers are not just another channel for selling ideas, campaigns and widgets. They are a catalyst for transforming business. And as the real impact of influencers begins to be freely acknowledged, it’s the social facilitators’ challenge to ensure that such transformation is for the better, and not merely decorative.
Choice is great, right? And in a long tail economy, consumers have more of it than ever. But do we sometimes forget that we have the right to create, and not just make choices, when it comes to what we buy?
My partner and I recently decided to go out for dinner at one of Manly’s most renowned seafood restaurants. As foodies we were both very excited at the prospect of an amazing meal, especially because it was ‘free’ – we went armed with a gift voucher worth $250, more than enough to cover the cost of a meal for two.
The evening got off to a fine start, with swift service, a breath-taking view and a well-picked bottle of crisp white, topped off when the manager himself appeared to take our order. After detailed descriptions and his personal recommendations, we made our culinary choices, and settled in to what promised to be an evening to remember.
Jump ahead a couple of hours and we both had full bellies and big grins; the food was exceptional, the service unrivalled, and the evening near on perfect. Our earlier choice – to go out to eat – had paid off.
The bill arrived and to our delight had come to only $150, meaning we’ve have a full $100 left from our voucher, to spend on a return date. Seemingly the night couldn’t get any better.
Which meant that it could only get worse. The manager explained that we would have to spend the entire voucher or forfeit the difference, as the restaurant’s policy meant no cash or additional vouchers could be issued as change.
He gave us three choices – to eat more, drink more, or take a bottle of wine home. But the thought of eating or drinking anything else wasn’t something we were comfortable with.
"A wafer thin mint, sir?"
Luckily I had my beautiful and intelligent partner with me, who immediately responded to the choices presented. “Nope, none of those options work for me”.
I had to hold myself back from laughing, as the manager was obviously taken aback with this response. But then an idea popped into my head, and I realised how both parties could actually win from this situation.
I explained to the manager that it was in fact him who would be making a choice, and presented him with two options.
Option 1
Make us spend the rest of the voucher now, leaving without our money but with a bad taste in our months, a taste that would certainly result in us talking negatively about our experience. We would almost certainly never return.
Option 2
Give us a new voucher for the difference. We would then walk away very happy, actively recommending the restaurant because of the amazing evening we’d had, and because of the manager’s willingness to be flexible and understanding of our predicament.
And to help him further with his choice, I reminded the manager that armed with a new voucher we would have to return to the restaurant, meaning there was a very real chance we would spend more money and more importantly create a new experience from which more positive recommendation and Word of Mouth would be generated.
Marketing is often about consumer choice. Brands provide us with options that ultimately encourage us to choose them. Yet increasingly brands are being face with choices when it comes to how they respond to people, within a social landscape where positive and negative experiences are instantly shared.
Needless to say Garfish is now reaping the benefits of great free Word of Mouth from myself, my partner and everyone else we’ve chosen to tell this story to. Including you.
Next time you’re given a choice by a brand, why not turn the tables? Could you give them a choice instead – determined by your agenda, not theirs?
Here at 1000heads we often extol the virtues of using human analysts to derive meaningful insights and recommendations from WOM listening. We also talk about how brands need to be more human when interacting with people in social media (and beyond). For a large organisation to achieve this, and to deal with any customer service issues that arise, there must clearly be some sort of process involved.
But what happens when that process actually makes the humans seem like robots?
Watching the recent Tesco employment story evolve, we saw a well-run and personalised customer service Twitter stream begin repeating the same message to multiple people for hours on end. But regardless of your views on the issue itself something went very wrong with the way Twitter was used to respond to people’s concerns. What’s more, I’ve no doubt that it was a human in charge of the Twitter feed. So what went wrong?
I imagine what we saw here was that Tesco has a prescriptive set of KPIs telling operators how many people they should reply to and a flowchart telling them how to respond in a crisis. These two processes perhaps worked together to make Tesco suddenly appear less human and more like a robotic call centre. Like other Twitter outbursts such as the GAP logo change, this may not have a lasting effect on Tesco’s reputation in the short term. But all brands should remember that human operators are more than capable of appearing machinelike in certain situations. A coordinated, sincere, human response to a situation like this is really hard to pull off, but a modern social business has to aspire to it.
How do you encourage the people running your social presence to come up with a better solution? For me it has to start with measuring the right things. For example, if you measure the % of tweets you are responding to as a success metric, your team is left with no incentive to demand a change to the script when it’s really needed. They’ll just keep on tweeting to hit their quota. It’s the same reason why direct marketing can become labelled as junk mail. The need to hit volumes outweighs the ambition to be targeted and relevant, and brands only entrench themselves deeper when social interactions go wrong.
This problem of blind process getting in the way of delivery has been solved elsewhere. In his excellent book “How to Measure Anything” Douglas Hubbard describes the early days of agile software development, where people measured the speed of work simply because it is an easy thing to quantify and optimise. But when these developers produced a large amount of features that no-one wanted to use, the realisation struck that a gauge closer to a consumer-facing outcome was needed.
So if our supposition is correct the first thing Tesco needs is a shift from speed-of-work based reporting to measurement based on outcomes. In doing so its Twitter team would be empowered with the flexibility to identify an issue and elevate it internally (with the benefit of a linear organisation structure to provide the speed and level of authority needed), which would ultimately allow the brand to respond in a human and empathetic way.
Scarcity, secrecy, exclusivity. Three words that don’t exactly reflect the transparency and freedom of information that brands are supposedly striving for in a social age. But that’s also the reason that they can be so powerful in triggering emotional impact and peer-to-peer conversation when they are used well.
Last week, a friend of mine invited me to volunteer for something called YMBBT. Armed with no more information than an address in the West End and a time for that evening, I was slightly nervous that I had signed myself up for some dubious Soho debauchery. When a quick Google search revealed nothing except for the fact that YMBBT stood for ‘You Me Bum Bum Train’, my anticipation – and anxiety – understandably increased.
For those of you who haven’t heard about YMBBT, well – the first rule of YMBBT is that you don’t talk about YMBBT. All I need to tell you is that it’s a highly sought-after interactive theatre experience run almost entirely by volunteers who, like me, don’t really know what they are volunteering for. And when I say highly sought-after, I mean sought-after. 80,000 applied for just 1,000 tickets during its last run, all without a clue what they were signing up for.
The absolute secrecy of the whole enterprise is key to its success. Counter-intuitively, explicitly asking people to restrict the nature of their word of mouth drives word of mouth like wildfire.
YMBBT is just one of several examples of brands that know the value of cloak and dagger. We’ve talked before about how pop-up shops harness people’s desire to uncover unconventional retail gems before anyone else.
Secret Cinema is another fantastic example. Paying over the odds to see a film you may or may not like in a location that may or may not be anywhere near you sounds bizarre in a world of hyper-personalisation, convenience and tribal passion groups. But it sells out every time precisely because it subverts those trends. Sometimes, not being pandered to makes you respect a brand or experience very much indeed.
Of course, exclusivity taps into very basic human drives. We’re herd animals – we enjoy inclusion and being privy to something special, and those emotions can quickly be converted into loyalty and advocacy. We want people around us to know we’re part of this magical experience, both to bond with our fellow participants and to badge our selves with a sort of ‘in the know’ cool.
Of course, not every brand lends itself to this kind of ‘popularity through secrecy’ approach, especially those that can’t rely on the impact of the live experience. Practical, non-experiential and non-luxury items such as say, household cleaner, rely on candidness, transparency and cold hard facts to make their product stand out in a sea of competitors.
But Apple is proof that you don’t need lots of stunts to make consumers feel special. Its carefully – some might say anally – controlled flow of information is absolutely key to the cult. The ultimate Generation Y brand, Apple doesn’t have a blog, Twitter account or Facebook page.
Yet by revealing so little Apple all but guarantees that every announcement it makes is met with fevered global excitement and advocacy.
So how might you be able to drive demand with a bit of social scarcity? What assets, information or experiences might you be able to withhold, tease or stagger to generate that sense of privileged camaraderie? Don’t forget: silence can be one of your most powerful tools in harnessing word of mouth.
A newly released white paper gives an interesting perspective on how brands are using Twitter – and how it could be done better.
Digital agency 360i’s ‘Twitter and the Consumer-Marketer Dynamic’ confirms that marketers’ use of Twitter is very different to how regular folk use the platform in their daily lives. The stand-out stats include the fact that only 12% of marketers’ tweets are @replies compared to 43% of consumer tweets – it’s still more about broadcast than conversation for brands. And only 12% of consumer tweets mention a brand, suggesting that there’s still much to do for companies wanting to inspire word of mouth with and about them in the microblogging sphere.
Some brands are of course going to the opposite extreme, such as the Wheat Thins campaign which responds to Twitter mentions about the product with real life deliveries.
This kind of dramatic reactivity can be extremely effective, as we’ve found in our ongoing reactive stream for Nokia, which continually identifies potential advocates and issues through daily WOM monitoring and engages with them with trials, solutions or even lovely surprises.
However, it’s also important to simply stay human and conversational on daily brand presences, sharing news and info but also getting involved with the community, picking up on interesting discussions and letting people know you’re listening and participating.
This doesn’t just mean addressing customer service issues via Twitter, which the likes of Dell and Twelpforce do so well – but engaging with consumers because you think they have something interesting to say.
Yes, it takes resource. But it’s more than worth it. It may not be as exciting as the dramatic stuff but it shows consumers you understand the social space and use it like a regular, conversational person they would be comfortable connecting with – not like a dreaded ‘marketer’.
It’s the big question in word of mouth: what is an advocate worth?
Well, according to research Syncapse and Hotspex have just released on eMarketer, on average $136.38. The study looked at the Facebook fans of the 20 biggest corporate brands on the site, and calculated the fans’ worth from a combination of how much they spent on the products, loyalty, recommendations and earned media.
In fact, for many food and beverage brands on Facebook, fans spent more than double on the brand than non-fans.
This reiterates the findings of a study earlier this year, which showed that consumers were more likely to buy from or recommend a brand after becoming a Facebook fan or follower.
It’s an interesting start to WOM ROI, although of course the real impact of advocacy goes far beyond Facebook, to cover not just the other social media platforms but real life conversations too.
Facebook fans are a notoriously passive group, and just clicking on a ‘become a fan’ button represents none of the participation and opinion-giving that true advocacy entails. Of course, there’s an exciting implication here. If these guys earn so much for a brand, how much more valuable must the fans be who actually bother to upload photos and videos, write detailed, passionate reviews on their pages and blogs and forums, and take that enthusiasm to the dinner table and the school gates?
Working out the ROI of an individual advocate beyond a single platform is a mighty complex task, but we’re getting there. For now, research like this indicates just how powerful that proactive, cross-platform advocacy is.
Every brand wants their very own new, shiny app, right?
Well, maybe they should consider exploiting existing apps – and the audiences and conversations already built around them – before they fork out.
In a recent interviewChris Cunningham, co-founder and CEO of Appsavvy, had a great piece of advice for companies looking to incorporate applications into their word of mouth strategy:
“Apps are not about building your own — leave that to the vast amount of really smart developers — but rather partnering with an existing, established app and audience, where you can join relevantly and add value. It is also important to view these channels as connected and not as silos.”
The two examples he gives of successful partnerships – the DVD release of Public Enemies joining with Mafia Wars, and H&M integrating into iPhone’s MyTown – show that if you are highly relevant to the app audience, you can seamlessly connect with the passionate WOM they are already stimulating.
It’s a great approach that emphasises how brands must connect rather than create, and amplify rather than broadcast.
Can you think of any app communities that would seem a natural fit for certain brands?
At 1000heads we pride ourselves on always keeping our eyes, ears and mouths open. So we’ve launched @wewantworkwith; a profile that will chart our thoughts on how brands and people can make themselves more conversational.
Some of our ideas will be reactive, such as recommending how GAP could have used the snow to their advantage, by building snowmen outside each major store and dressing them in the hottest GAP winter wear.
Or they could be proactive, such as suggesting that Laterooms might use geo-location services to connect people looking for space in the same place.
We know that not all ideas will be relevant or right for the brand (summing these ideas up in 140characters is difficult enough let alone nailing what each brand is after), but then creating perfect strategies isn’t the point of the initiative. Instead, we hope the ideas we come up with will drum up discussion and get more people thinking about the opportunities word of mouth can present.
This might seem a little anti-intuitive, as traditionally, agencies are notoriously close-lipped about brands they want to work with, or their creative ideas. But we’re not a traditional agency.
Please dive in, take our ideas and run with them, debate, disagree and retweet. Let’s have a conversation.
