Strategy

Channel Surfing for Influencers: Social Media

In my third of four posts about which channels work best to reach and engage influencers, I take a look at the new kid on the block: social media.

Marketers are sometimes torn between doing what has worked most effectively in the past and testing out new technologies and channels that have the potential to be real game-changers in the future.

The bright shiny object of the last few years is, of course, social media, a channel that’s still not completely understood but that has, in theory, the potential to radically change the way we market.

Why? Well, to start with, based on our research, influencers are spending 7 hours per week in the US and 9 in Canada on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and blogs. That’s already impressive but when you add to that the finding that influencers are connected, on average, to 108 (US) and 137 (Canada) people in their own social media network, that’s something that gets the attention of marketers – as it should.

While social media shares ease of use with the email channel, it’s this community or network that may hold the key to the channel’s true potential. These individuals have chosen to be connected based on an affinity for a particular community, and are actively engaged with others in it and outside that community too.

Bill McCloskey at ClickZ offers some fascinating examples about the potential power of social media, including this one:

“…look at Marvel Comics, which is one of the top performing ‘advertisers’ in the Twitter space. As of right now, Marvel has around 44,000 followers [63,000+ as I write this post]. But over the last few weeks, it sent out 151 Twitter offers. But more than that: 246 ‘influencers’ have directly rebroadcast that message to their followers. Add it all up and Marvel has exposed its offer to over 66 million eyeballs over the past few weeks!”

Those are some impressive numbers and just a hint of the potential opportunities social media offers marketers. However we do need to distinguish the difference between influencers: some will talk; others will pass along information (as per above) and of utmost value are those that truly influence others – by eliciting action. So whether on social media sites or via email or on the phone, you must understand what you are trying to achieve and ensure that you have designed appropriately.

One more thing bares repeating from my last two posts: even if some channels are better than others to reach particular consumers in particular ways, the fact is these channels work best for marketers when they work together.

For instance, email messages that offer a social-sharing option (like Twitter and Facebook) generate a 30% higher click-through rate than emails without it, according to a new study by email marketing company Get Response. And if the email includes three or more social-sharing options, that click-through rate jumps to 55%.

The bottom line? Social media offers a unique and advantageous opportunity to find, reach, engage and have a continuous dialogue with individuals – both within their social media communities and in their network at large. Just needs to be done right!

In the fourth and final part of this series, I’ll blog about the true answer to the question – which channel is most effective at finding, reaching, engaging and motivating influencers?

Gillian MacPherson

The Future of Planning

When Stanley Pollitt and Stephen King created the notion of "planning" back in the 1960's, they began the journey to what is now a very discombobulated discipline.

Let's have a look at the first description of account planning - "The account planner is that member of the agency's team who is the expert, through background, training, experience, and attitudes, at working with information and getting it used - not just marketing research but all the information available to help solve a client's advertising problems." - Stanley Pollitt

In the 1990's, Jay Chiat evolved the definition of planning to add a splash of creativity and flare, yet still remaining true to the discipline.

Fast forward to 2010. This is where I face a split opinion.

Many agencies are not familiar with the discipline of planning and try to create a role to fill an unfulfilled need. This role usually includes a planning title; created with little or no knowledge of what planning actually is. This direction dilutes the discipline of planning and builds confusion both internally and with the client. We now have client planning, creative planning, research planning, just plain planning, strategist, account planning strategist and most recently, digital planning or digital strategist. I'm sure I've left out a plethora of others.

On the other hand, It's my personal belief that a good account planner can be all of the above as long as the consumer is at the core root. It's all a matter of managing expectations with the employer/employee and client. Good planners have the ability to bridge together their understanding of the consumer and how they relate to the client's brand and visa versa. Because communication channels continuously multiply, it is crucial for planners to stay ahead of how consumers are engaging with brands.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic.

Jennifer Morozowich

Group Think is the Result of Groupthink

Group think is the nemesis of qualitative research. The more senior you go in any organization, the more dismissive of focus groups managers become because of "group think." And, indeed, watching focus groups, as I have done innumerable times, it could appear that group think is impacting the dynamic.

Of course, one manager's group think is another manager's consensus. I mention this as an aside, but it is true that when 6 people in a group like the concept, this is a sign of a great concept. When six people in a group dislike the concept, it's clearly group think. Of course, if you hate the concept, then this works the other way around. Which leads to:

Bernstein's First Law of Group Think: The intensity of group think in any focus group is indirectly proportionate to the degree that the group reflects the observers innate bias.

But, I digress.

Group think is the inevitable result of recruiting homogenous groups of people. Why are we surprised that people who are in the same targeted age group, same target education level and use the same products with the same frequency, share the same opinions about the brand, product, category, and so on. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if there is no group think, then the recruiters have done a lousy job. And, perhaps even more controversially, the reason why professional respondents (i.e. those who attend many focus groups and don't absolutely fit the criteria) are generally more interesting than actual respondents (those who do fit the criteria and have little or no experience withfocus groups) -- they are, in fact, not the same as everybody else in the room and are therefor are more likely to have different opinions!

Think of it like this:

In her brilliant (must read for all marketers) book, The Art of Choosing, Sheena Iyengar points out three aspects of personhood that help clarify this issue:
1. People are more alike than they think
2. What people believe about themselves (or what people would want other people to believe about them) does not vary much from person to person
3. Each person is convinced that he or she is unique

So, if this applies to all people, imagine how much these lack of differences are magnified in a homogenous group. Group think is not group think in the sense of people following a leader in spite of their own personal opinions. Group think is simply group agreement.

So what?

Couple of things.
1. The next time a client complains of group think, stick your finger in your ears and hum loudly
2. Don't recruit homogenous groups to focus groups. Try recruiting different people, try mixing the cohorts -- mix frequent users with terminal rejecters; mix 35 to 49 with 18 to 29; mix males with females; mix high income with low income. In any case you are better off doing two groups of mixed A and B than one group of A and one group of B
3. Read "The Art of Choosing" and get back to me .

And, for your added enjoyment, check out our new web site.

Laurence Bernstein

Branding to Gen Y – Part II

Referring back to our previous post, we received some interesting comments on what your experiences were like in marketing to Gen Y. With this blog posting, we delve further into the subject and offer some insight as to which events we think have helped to define this generation.

There is a tendency for Gen Y to actively seek out unique businesses, particularly those who produce hand-made items or market themselves as an ethical practice. Think of local boutiques or businesses like Lululemon and the Body Shop. This generation is willing to pay a premium for their products. Why? Perhaps it is that Gen Y is very aware of socially responsible activities and they want to hold companies responsible...by voting with their dollars.

We also stated in our previous post that Gen Y is socially connected all the time - simply because technology enables them to do so. With that social connectedness comes a greater interest in word of mouth peer reviews and viral trends. This generation is exposed to more ads and brands at an ever increasing rate. As a result, Gen Y is extremely media savvy and out of necessity, they have quickly learned to filter out to the content that THEY want to see. This in turn has led to websites focused on content which is customized to what Gen Y wants. Think of personal Facebook newsfeeds where you can control what kinds of stories show up, Twitter streams where you can choose to follow who you want, or blogs that you can decide to subscribe to. As we move to customizable content, the greater the expectations to cater to the individual.

What are your own ideas as to what has helped form the unique characteristics of this generation?

Patricia McQuillan

Is Brand Identity a Brain Science?

The Globe and Mail reported that according to a new research published during the week of June 21, there is compelling evidence that some people are predisposed to take on characteristics embodied by brands, while others are harder nuts to crack. In “Got to Get You Into My Life: Do Brand Personalities Rub Off on Consumers?”, two University of Minnesota researchers said that there’s a tradition in consumer research that identifies the fact that people use brands as signals of who they are. “In looking at the body of literature, one thing that fascinated us was no one had actually done strong experimental work to figure out whether or not, after people use some consumer brands such as Harley Davidson, are they really successful in feeling better about themselves,” said Deborah Roedder John, the chair of the marketing department at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management and a co-author of the paper.

It is the opinion of another academic, the University of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, that people think of themselves in one of two contrasting ways. One school of thought believes personal qualities are fixed and cannot be changed through direct effort to improve, learn or grow. As a result, they look for opportunities to signal their positive qualities to both themselves and others. “They sort of believe that they can’t do it on their own. They have to have something, such as brand names, to help them signal that they are a better person,” said Professor John. The second school of thought believes people can enhance themselves only through learning and hard work. Signalling their positive qualities to others or themselves by touting a brand has little or no effect on their sense of self.

According to Professor John, there’s already a belief among marketers and advertisers that brands have this type of feel-good power, and that consumers respond positively to that. “But there are other people – although they like these brands and they pick them and they use them – it doesn’t quite have that power over them.”

Professor John’s research also suggests that brands might actually play a therapeutic role in people’s lives. In one of the studies described in the Journal of Consumer Research paper to be published in early 2011, undergraduate students were given a math quiz. Regardless of their actual answers, each was told they had performed poorly. But students who were given an MIT-branded pen to use for 10 minutes fully recovered from the psychological slight, while others did not. “What we found interesting from that study was, brands really allowed people to feel more positive about themselves. It was sort of an empowering thing that they got from using that particular brand,” said Professor John.

For a change, maybe marketers should not always be portrayed as ‘evil’, figuring out ways to subconsciously make people do things that may be bad for them, or make people buy things they should not be buying?

The Quest for Community

There is a lot of discussion among marketers about the importance of community in today's networked world. The "quest for community", as Robert Nisbet, American sociologist and Vice-Chancellor at the University of California puts it, is "a nostalgia for a compassable and integral living unit". It has to do with changes in the way we interact and communicate.

The critical question is not whether community is important but how the definition of community has evolved and whether our lives have become more jangled and fragmented which has led to a desire for new connections with strangers. A lot has been written about the trend. But the trend isn’t just restricted to online communities.

The success of Starbucks has been built on the desire of consumers for a "third place”- away from work and home. Ray Oldenburg talked about it in “The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community”.

The success of Credit Unions is also built on this concept. In a recent interview, Ms. Christine Zalzal, AVP, Sales and Marketing, FirstOntario Credit Union, said that the grassroots strategy of a Credit Union is about being part of the community and staying for the long run in those communities.

What does this mean for marketers? They should look at the "quest for community" as an integral part of their marketing plans – at a strategic level. Different age groups and consumer segments have very different definitions of community. Often, “community” is quickly translated into a tactic- a presence on Facebook, Twitter and Myspace in a marketing plan. It is really more about understanding what defines a sense of community for your most profitable consumers and leveraging this insight for a deeper connection with them. The question to ask is what is the "third place" for your brand?

A tapestry segmentation system can help. It combines the “who” of lifestyle demography with the “where” of local neighborhood geography to create a model of various lifestyle classifications or segments of actual neighborhoods with addresses—distinct behavioral market segments. Adding the layer of a deeper understanding of the context of their "quest for community" can open up new opportunities to create a more meaningful dialogue with your brand with or without the constraint of geography.

Merril Mascarenhas

Marketing for Financial Institutions

From savings to loans, millions of Canadians turn to financial institutions for sound, sage advice. With significant competition in the Canadian marketplace, financial institutions need to stand out and grab the attention of risk-averse consumers’ during an economic recovery. When it comes to marketing, financial institutions stick with terms, subjects and formats that are most familiar to them. While safe can be good in our bank accounts, it won’t set you apart from your competition, nor will it keep you top of mind for your clientele. Marketing has become an integral part of business development and maintenance, but it is also an area that is sometimes forgotten.

Here are some smart and easy tips on marketing solutions to help your financial institutions succeed:

1. Know your brand. Before you can tell someone what you do, you need to know what you do. Consider the personality of your company and stick to it. Be consistent in your message, values, slogans, images and colours. These items should not only be consistent with each other but also with your product. Make sure everyone that represents your company knows the brand and portrays that message.

2. Know your audience. To know your brand is only half the challenge. The other half is to know your audience. Research your audience. Who do they trust? What do they like? Where do they go for information? When do they need your services? Why are you targeting them? How do they communicate?

3. Keep it simple. The financial industry can be overwhelming to your audience. Not everyone understands the difference between stocks and bonds and it can be easy to mix up RRSPs and RESPs, so make sure to keep your marketing clear and simple. It will help your customers feel at ease, which can be extremely important given the subject matter. It can be that simple.

4. Keep with the times. We live in a world of constant change, from interest rates to the latest in mobile technology. This week’s trends will be different than next week’s trends. It’s important to stay tuned to what your audience is watching, using and listening. This will help you predict upcoming trends and use them to communicate effectively.

5. Utilize social media. Social media has become the hottest thing since parity. With so many different sites and applications, it can be overwhelming – and tricky – to understand when and how to use each. Don’t try to join everything. Pick the tool that best suits your brand, audience and product and incorporate it into the rest of your marketing initiatives. Remember, social media is not a one-time thing. If you use it, make sure it is updated regularly with relevant information.

While the role of financial institutions has remained consistent, we must acknowledge that clients’ needs have changed. Companies must learn to stand out through effective marketing communications to demonstrate an understanding of clients’ needs. The time to act is now. By investing in effective marketing today, you’re ensuring a significant return on investment for both your organization and your clients.

Nicky Milner, Vice President, Program Management, Transcontinental

Building Your Reputation Bank Account

What happens when unexpected expenses happen. An accident, a repair, something breaks. You turn to your bank account to buy your way out of your trouble. If you have to use your credit card or borrow money it costs more so it pays to have money in your account.

The same is true of your reputation. When something unexpected happens - an accident, a mistake, a false accusation, an error. What happens when you get the call that one of your products has caused a fatal accident? Or that $1,000,000 in product that you have shipped over the last 6 months needs to be recalled? One reason to be in shape is so that you don’t suffer a heart attack when this happens. That would be your health bank account but that is not what this article is about.

When reputation disaster hits, you need to turn to your reputation bank account. So it pays to have one.

Reputations are hard to build but easy to destroy. The more solid your reputation, the tougher it is to destroy. So it pays to work on reputation before you need it.

Responding quickly and honestly can help you avoid damage and lessen it. So think speed in responding. And of course having systems in place to minimize errors/mistakes helps keep from getting the hit in the first place.

You might still need some reputation bank to help you.

Some ways to build your reputation bank include:

1) Network. The more people you know, the more likely people are to think favorably of you. It’s a natural human inclination to like people that we know (unless you’re a real jerk).

2) Be a nice, good and generous person. Some things, like smiles and kind words, are free. Plus those simple gestures tend to make people like you more.

3) Consider donating to charities. Although I prefer to be more altruistic and donate only for the purpose of helping a good cause, sometimes donating can also help to build your reputation within a community. You certainly don’t want to be branded as someone who isn’t charitable.

4) Build your online reputation by having a good web presence that is easily googleable. There is lots written about search engine optimization and how to get more on the first page of google. It is much better for you to be on the first page of goggle than someone who is complaining about you and trying to hurt your reputation.

5) Give back freely to the community and to your network. One of the ways I do this is to often do speaking engagements for free. I am also a natural connector. I will frequently make an introduction of one person to another, for something that they both can benefit in, even though I have no financial interest in either one of the people being introduced.

The time to think about building your reputation bank is before you need it. Before you actually have some sort of a crisis. It's like trying to buy insurance after your house is flooded. It doesn’t work well after the fact.

Ask daily " what can I do today to build my reputation bank?".

Jim Estill

Marketers Need to Reflect and Change

More on the CMA National Convention held last week in Toronto.

A few speakers highlighted the challenges that marketers are facing in the new decade:
-The 2009 consumer recession triggered significant job losses in marketing;
-Marketing is under siege; and
-Marketing budgets were cut but are starting to rebound in 2010.

Ken Wong from Queen’s University outlined two key challenges:

1. Marketing has a perception problem - Ken bluntly told the audience that research indicates that Senior Execs don’t value marketing. Marketers are perceived as “margin sucking maggotts’. They are seen as cost centers that don’t like to measure. But the key to “C-Suite” credibility is proving that marketing is a profit (or margin) driver.

2. Focusing on the tactics rather than strategy - marketers often change tactics randomly which Ken calls “schizophrenic” marketing. Changing tactics confuses customers and dilutes the impact on strategy. Companies need to build their marketing strategies around their overall business strategy and stay focused on key outcomes (not blindly chasing market share).

On a positive note, those marketers who can correlate their marketing efforts to generating profits will win big. Marketers just need to think more broadly in a business perspective and less narrowly about your business model and how you can manage customer segments and profitably change customer behavior. Profits will follow.

Geoff Linton

A Little Friction Ain’t So Bad

That's the message from Terry O'Reilly who addressed CMA's National Convention last week in Toronto. O’Reilly provided a fascinating and unique perspective on how to effectively market to a target audience.

“Sometimes people want and sometimes people need friction in the process before they buy a product or idea,” O’Reilly said.

This approach represents a paradigm shift away from the marketers’ traditional practice of helping their clients find the most efficient and speed bump free pathway to a sale.

O’Reilly used both historical and contemporary examples to show the dramatic impact friction can have on sales.

During the late 1950’s, a major food company developed an instant cake mix. The product was initially very popular, but was soon being ignored by its target consumer - housewives. After undertaking extensive research, the food manufacturer determined the cake mix was making women feel uninvolved in the cooking process. The food manufacturer decided to remove the egg from the mix so women could add it themselves. The result was a significant spike in sales. Women became instantly more attracted to the product with the added friction of having to mix in the egg themselves.

Another relevant example is pharmaceutical giant Johnson and Johnson’s development of an antiseptic cream to promote the healing of cuts and bruises. The companies’ scientists designed the ‘perfect’ product that was both effective and painless. Initially, sales were quite impressive but surprisingly, there were few repeat purchases of the cream. After the company engaged in a significant amount of product research using focus groups, they made an important determination about human nature – people tend to see pain as a positive indicator of a healing product’s effectiveness. Johnson and Johnson subsequently added a small amount of alcohol to the product to give it a sting – and sales increased dramatically. As O’Reilly explained, the friction of pain convinced consumers that the product actually worked – and left the company’s scientists in a state of utter confusion about where they went wrong.

A more recent illustration of the impact of friction involves a Google analytics professional. He was hired by an E-commerce site to replace its current five-step cart checkout process with a much simpler model. The business considered its current five-step process to be overly time consuming - so they requested the development of a single step process. To the company’s surprise, the new model failed miserably. The friction of the five-step process had given purchasers an added sense of security, which dissipated once the five-step process was reduced to one simple step.

There will always be a tendency for marketers to provide their clients with strategies that emphasize efficiency and convenience to sell a product.

O’Reilly summed up the idea of friction as a persuasion tool:
“If you ever need to make people believe, if you’re ever struggling to get people to a certain place, if you need to get noticed, if you’re ever looking for the leverage point to move a mountain - maybe what you need is a little friction.”

Jordan Sandler

Influencers: They Work For Social Media Too!

A bit of news and a blog post I recently read re-confirmed the power influencers have across all mediums -- and how successful some companies have become at harnessing them to create word of mouth.

According to a new report from Forrester, last year 145 million Internet users in the US generated 500 billion online impressions, with 6% generating 80% of these peer-to-peer influencing impressions. (That’s a lot of social media potential.) For those of you who read The Tipping Point, sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

And then there’s Seth Godin’s analysis of the iPad launch – 300,000 sold on the first day without a ton of advertising dollars spent – underscoring just how successful Apple has been at cultivating influencers and using its ‘tribe’ to get the word out whenever it needs to.

All this to say that a lot has changed since we began our work in word of mouth marketing. Marketers have caught on – some like Apple, long ago – that it’s not simply about harnessing influencers for the purpose of driving sales or building awareness – although that’s the ultimate aim of course. The bigger immediate interest is in how to enlist and leverage them and their networks via Facebook, Twitter, blogs and the like – then how to get them to talk about you and what you offer.

In my last post I discussed how influencers don’t necessarily participate in the social media realm any differently than the random population. What they do better is to stay more closely connected with friends and family through a variety of means, including social media.

Findings showed influencers spend approximately 8 hours/week on Social Media Sites with over 100 connections – that's pretty substantial!

But its important to remember – and I know I probably sound like a broken record – that despite all the hoopla, influencers actually still do the majority of their talking in person. That means it’s vital that any information marketers send to influencers – be it via email, mail or your social media presence – should be in a format that can be easily passed along to friends and family.

The bottom line? Just as we heard years ago about the importance of tailoring communications to off- or online channels and audiences, marketing to influencers today means first of all finding and understanding these individuals, then developing authentic and honest conversational communications that speak to them and what’s important to them – and then motivating them to act.

Hey do you have a good example of a company using influencer marketing well – I would love to hear about it!

MARK YOUR CALENDAR AND GET SOCIAL – Join me and the rest of the organizing committee on June 22nd in Toronto at the CMA Social Media Conference: ‘The Science and Art of Social Business.’. It’ll be an eye-opening afternoon with 9 different case studies on how companies are surviving and striving in the brave new world of social media.

P.S. Ran a successful webcast, The Influencer: A Consumer Voice With Legs, last week in which we shared a lot of the research I've mentioned in this blog - you can access the live recording by clicking here.

Gillian MacPhersen
Join the dialogue on Twitter - @icomwom - we would love to hear your thoughts, opinions and experiences with WOM!

Boom Time for Boomer Models

I read with interest in The New York Times that a customer service agent working at Lowe’s home improvement store in Garden City, New York, works two jobs – operating a forklift one day and then working as a model for the Ford agency another day. She appeared on the Today show five times. She also appeared as a savvy business investor on a TV commercial for Edward Jones; as a warm, nurturing mom of a seven-year-old for Hallmark; and as a middle-aged woman getting welcome relief from rheumatoid arthritis.

The 53-year-old boomer model would love to take on the modeling job full-time, but decided to hold on to her US$35,000-a-year Lowe’s job. Her new career is a reflection of changes both in the modeling world and in the demographics of consumers being targeted. According to Paulette Ellison, who oversees Ford’s classic division, which is primarily female models over 40, the greying baby-boomer population still has enormous buying power. That demographic needs to be portrayed in a different way. It was not until two years ago that the business demands justified the opening of a new classic division for Ford. The modeling agency had 12 classic models in New York; by the mid-1990s, 18. That had grown to 40 by 2008, and today there are 54. This is also a sign that in spite of the recession, boomers continue to have more buying power than most.

According to some of the more experienced and successful classic models at the agency, the correct description of this attitudinal change is pro-aging instead of anti-aging. The idea is women can look beautiful without looking younger. Many of the modeling moves used with younger models are no longer appropriate for the older models. When they were younger, the models were the product of the photographer. Now as they mature, the photographer is looking for a confident pose, and the way you stand knowing full well who you really are. When asked how classic models handle modelling in middle age, these models say they just have to figure this out on their own as they go since they are the first generation going through this. Their mothers didn’t have these opportunities when they were aging. This is exactly what baby boomers are all about – a new generation with no precedents!

Social Media: Don’t Mistake The Journey For The Destination

Over the past few years, you’ve probably heard stories about drivers so focused on their GPS directions, they end up in a river. Whether true or made-up, like the one about lemmings following each other en masse off a cliff, I wonder if – in response to social media’s red hot popularity -- marketers may be headed somewhere they don’t intend.

Don’t get me wrong. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other sites may be effective communication channels to help reach your marketing objectives. I just wonder whether marketers are treating social media as an objective – “quick let’s get a Facebook fan page up!” – rather than understanding its usefulness and role as a tool.

Put another way, it’s important not to think of social media as the destination itself, but rather a tool to get us to our destination – in this case achieving our objectives. And, as with any potentially powerful tool, we need to learn more about how social media works, who’s using it and why before we’ll really know if it can help us get where we want to go.

Take how social media relates to the work I’m doing on WOM. Some hypothesize that influencers – because they like to talk – may be more active in the social media space. In fact, the research doesn’t bare that out:

 Influencers don’t have more accounts than the regular Joe
 They don’t spend more time on Facebook, MySpace or Twitter
 They still prefer to share information – which they may gather from email or social media sites – the old fashioned way, face to face

Charlene Li, formally an analyst at Forrester, and the co-author of Groundswell offers some other learnings and insights into the minds of social media participants and how they actually differ, dividing them into the following segments:

 Creators: create or upload content
 Critics: respond to content from others
 Collectors: organize content for themselves, others
 Joiners: connect in social networks like Facebook
 Spectators: read, listen but do not participate
 Inactives: neither create nor consume

These two quick snapshots alone, I think, demonstrate that developing a successful social media presence first requires understanding who it works for and why. Then you can figure out how best to use the new medium to promote, engage and dialogue with consumers so you can meet your marketing objectives – without getting all wet.

Do you agree marketers are jumping a little too quickly on the social media bandwagon?

EXTRA! EXTRA! We’ll be holding an information-packed webcast on May 19th to present key findings from our recent white paper on influencers, plus other research and case studies. Click to learn more or to register. You won’t want to miss it! P.S You can also follow us on Twitter - we'll be tweeting before, during and after the event - @icomwom - hope you can join us!

Building Brand Trust Online and in the Mind

Last week the topic of trust was raised in a Harvard Business Review post titled, “What trust brings to Amazon, Zappos and USAA.” The author, Peter Merholz, described how being bold, and proactively trusting your customers, can contribute to a company’s online success.

The article was very well written, and the examples were thought provoking, but for me there was something missing. Beyond examples, what evidence exists that proactively trusting your customers can contribute to online success?

What Neuroscience has shown

At Claremont Graduate University, the neuroconomist Prof. Paul Zac has been studying the topic of trust for a number of years. Looking at the role of trust in macro and micro economics, his studies have begun to focus on the brain chemical oxytocin, and how it can influence trust.

In 2005, Zac published studies showing that when a person sends a trust signal to another person, it causes a release of oxytocin in their brain, which can induce a social obligation to reciprocate that trust. Put simply, his research showed that trust leads to trust, and it provides strong support for the idea of proactively trusting your customers.

What Morphological Research has shown

Morphological research has also been used to study the phenomenon of trust. In fact, in a recent study of 1000 North Americans, Concerto Marketing Group set out to uncover the benefits and drivers of trust in businesses and brands (link to the study here if you are interested).

Through our research we managed to uncover six equally correlated drivers of brand trust. Two of these drivers have particular relevance to this discussion; Relationship and Practical Value. In order for people to trust a brand, it needs to provide some sort of Relationship. Furthermore, in order for that Relationship to be strong, it must deliver some sort of Practical Value.

Based on these two drivers, our research would also support the idea of proactively trusting your customer. When Amazon gives a customer the power to provide product reviews, or when USAA lets a customer deposit checks by email, they are delivering Practical Value, strengthening their Relationship, and ultimately building brand trust.

Building Brand Trust Online

For many companies and consumers, the online environment can embody the best and worst of humanity. It can provide facts and friendship on the one hand; on the other hand it can harbor lies and fraud.

Extending proactive trust to your customers is a powerful way to cut through this mess and build a strong brand. In fact, it would seem that Peter Merholz was on to something in his recent post; being bold and proactively trusting your customers can contribute to a company’s online success.

Nick Black

Boomers and Seniors Continue to Bloom In Entertainment

Once again, a lot of ‘boomer’ and even ‘senior’ entertainers are establishing new milestones in their careers. Betty White appeared on Larry King Live last month and said, “I’m the luckiest old broad that ever drew a breath.” According to The Globe and Mail, pop culture has always been unpredictable, and no one knows this better than Betty White, who’s been a part of it since the 1940s. It’s amazing to see how a woman born in 1922 has become the hottest star of 2010.

White has become omnipresent since appearing with Sandra Bullock in a summer comedy The Proposal. Her sweet old appearance with a mean and saucy attitude landed her roles in Ugly Better and 30 Rock. She also took over water coolers this winter with an instantly iconic Snickers ad that appeared during the Superbowl telecast and a shower with Hugh Jackman to relaunch Jay Leno’s Tonight Show. These coincided with a January lifetime achievement award from the Screen Actors Guild and a successful half-million-strong Facebook campaign that got her invited as host of Saturday Night Live on May 8. News has it that she’ll launch a new sitcom Hot in Cleveland alongside three other women. This is all happening to a woman who won her first of six Emmys back in 1952!

Ted Danson, who’s a leading-edge baby boomer at 63, has also been enjoying a late-career revival on Curb Your Enthusiasm and Bored to Death, and starred in the critically acclaimed mini-series Damages with Glenn Close (of the same age).

Kim Cattrall, a younger boomer aged 53, is about to launch the sequel to the movie Sex and The City in May amidst a lot of glamour and publicity. She’s also enjoying a rave review of her performance in Noel Coward’s Private Lives currently playing in London’s West End. All this success and fame came to a woman who was previously only known as the Canadian actress who used to date Pierre Trudeau.

Maybe marketers and Hollywood have finally understood the role of mature actors instead of wanting young actors to attract young audiences?

Lina Ko