Web 2.0 Tactics You Can’t Just Fake

So it’s my first session at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, CA and to get the spaces in my brain filled with something, I grab a Starbucks and head into the large meeting room. The session titled, “Blogs, Chat Rooms, Wikis, Oh My! The Yellow Brick Road to Online Market Intelligence,” was filled with people from all over the world, checking email on their laptops, BlackBerries, PDAs’, micro-computers and me, my T-Mobile Dash. If you’re not connected to the real world of the office, then you’re missing out on something right? So the session was headed up by Umbria Inc. They start off the session by going through some data they’ve been collecting:

• 71 million blogs currently and doubling every month
• 75% of people don’t believe marketing (Didn’t notice the source)
• 92% trust word of mouth for product decisions

After running through some basic overviews on the state of social media in marketing and how there was an incentive for search engines to keep Splogging going because of all the revenue it provides through Adsense, they then dove into how people were using these tactics to measure the effectiveness of their messages. Umbria’s focus was on the need to differentiate how we measure social media marketing as opposed to traditional marketing methods. They gave an example of how they were using Volume of Mentions to track how spammmers take advantage of E Coli and Spinach news. They differ between “Mentions” and “Actual Mentions” So what can you measure?

• Contextual accuracy - Coke in the following contexts: soft drink vs. drug
• Topics and subtopics - What are people conversing about and what are the deeper levels?
• Trending of sentiment - Pros/Cons over time
• Demographics - Age group and gender segmentation
• New and Unique voices - Track interest build and intensity
• Clean Data - Spam filtering is critical

Now that we have some idea of what we can measure, we’ll look at how some big brands have leveraged data they’ve discovered using some of these social media tactics.

1. Chevy Tahoe Mash-Ups Campaign - people created negative videos on Youtube. These effects have “staying power.” Sample Link

2. Greeting Card Company - Using free social media tactics for consumer research on why consumers didn’t buy more of their Valentine’s Day cards. Used blog but couldn’t keep up with posts. Used traditional market research - focus groups, panel data, in store surveys (these missed the anti-valentine sentiment)

3. Coq Roq Campaign - Slipknot sues Coq Roq for wearing masks. Bad PR equaled the agency doing their job. They ended up hitting the core demographic. (Crispin Porter Bogusky)

4. Big Orange Scissors from 5 Star - So 5 Star’s original demographic was baby boomer females, BUT they were way off! They find out that scrapbooking is the rage with Gen Y Females.

5. Big Pet Food Brand - They wanted to learn what was driving behavior for purchasing organic pet food? They reviewed all major providers and found out the reasons were different for each demographic. The older generation buying decisions were based on fair trade and altruistic means. Gen X were concerned with health related reasons and Gen Y just loved the food. They then went into how they did an analysis on pre-pet food recall to identify new product concepts and seed a community discussion about them. Leveraging blogs within these discussions, they create a new lone of pet food travel packs targeted to baby boomers.

Using the above case studies to determine if social media marketing is a useful tactic for you or not, these Word of Mouth Marketing Do’s and Don’ts are sure to help you in your decision.

1. Encourage Your Community or Social Network - Give them tools like tell-a-friend, forums, blog, feedback tools (It’s good to note that using these tools gives up control from your end.)
2. Give people something to talk about - Info to be shared/forwarded, advertising, stunts, publicity that encourages conversations.
3. Create communities and connect people - Create user groups and fan clubs, support groups that form around your product, hosting discussions and message boards about your product, local meetings, real world participation.
4. Work with influential communities - Find people who will respond, identify influencers, inform them about what you’re doing.
5. Create evangelists or advocate programs - provide recognition and tools, recruit advocates, teach them and encourage them.
6. Research and listen to feedback - Track online and offline conversations by supporters, detractors, neutrals, listen and respond.
7. Engage in transparent conversation - Encourage two way conversations, create blogs and other tools to share info, participate openly in blogs and conversations.
8. Co-creation and info sharing - Involving consumers in marketing and creative, letting customers behind the curtain to have first access

And the Dont’s…

1. Stealth Marketing - Don’t be sneaky!
2. Shilling - Paying people without disclosure. Remember that road trip campaign with two students?
3. Infiltration - Fake identities to promote product. Be upfront when setting up profiles in other social networking websites.
4. Comment Spam - Don’t user automated bots.
5. Defacement - Vandalizing property to promote product
6. Spam - It’s just wrong.
7. Falsification - Knowingly disseminating false or misleading information.

How does all of this information relate to B2B? They referred to using podcasts as sources of information like a white paper on your website. The golden nugget in all of this information if you are a B2B company is that each of the social media tactics mentioned above can be used for internal purposes as well and give you great insight into your organization and how your employees view the outlook of the company’s direction. With all of this information it’s best to consider them as additional ways to tap into your target demographic while finding ways to continually shift your company’s vision or your product’s message.