27 May, 2008 I’m officially sick of the term KOL. For the uninitiated, KOL is a TLA (Three Letter Acronym) that stands for Key Opinion Leader. As a digital marketing strategist, I hear this term (as well as thought leader, KOL’s less hip counterpart) incessantly—from clients and colleagues alike. The conventional (old) school of thought has taught the top down marketers that the secret sauce to any successful marketing initiative lies in influencing the influencer, or KOL.
Social media and communities have further democratized information which has had a direct impact on exactly how much influence (depending on the audience) a KOL has. In an age of skepticism, where consumers are leery of anyone occupying once trusted positions of power, the sway of the influencers is seeing a downward trend. Steve Rubel recently highlighted some specific findings from the 2008 Edelman Trust Barometer that indicates consumers prefer to hear from people like themselves rather than KOLs.
The question of targeting super nodes vs. smaller groups is all coming down to trust. While the marketplace – both marketers and publishers – continue to focus on reach, they are missing the big picture. Trust is by far a more important metric, one that clearly rules when it comes to influence.
Does this mean that the endorsement of influential personalities has lost its value? Absolutely not; the backing of influential thought leaders can certainly attract attention. Based on the aforementioned trust report, I would encourage marketers to place less emphasis on the so-called thought leaders. Treat each and every customer as if they are that coveted KOL.
As a consumer, whom are you more likely to trust—someone you’ve never met who is likely getting compensated for his or her product endorsement, or a peer who shares your tastes and interests, is genuinely excited about the product and isn’t getting paid to have an opinion.
4 May, 2008 Admit it—you’ve Googled yourself; we all have. It can be surprising (or alarming depending on your perspective) to see how many search results turn up when performing the ego search. What kind of content is returned when you enter your name into a search engine? Is the information personal? Is it favorable? What about your business or products; what are people saying across the web about your brand?
Every day, millions of people are going online and creating content. Remember when we were Time Magazine’s Person of the Year? The combination of search engines indexing billions of pages of content and the social web have given millions of people a megaphone to broadcast their messages to a global audience. Sometimes that message can be unflattering, embarrassing or downright false, and Google’s search results don’t discriminate between approved brand messaging and an irate customer.
Fortunately, there are tools available to help businesses detect valuable user feedback by monitoring online conversations.
As noted earlier, Search Engines are a reliable way to locate online content that is being published about your brand. Unfortunately, depending on the search term, sifting through several pages of results can be time consuming. Moving beyond the standard search engines, the following are useful applications which can enable marketers to monitor social media:
- Blogpulse – search and other tools targeted around content found on blogs
- Technorati – another search tool specializing in blog content
- Twing – this tool locates content specifically on message boards and forums
- Summize – what are people saying about you on the micro-blogging site: Twitter?
Rather than spending hours manually sorting through search results, Google Alerts will deliver the results straight to your email account. Users can set up alerts in no time, just enter the search term(s) that you want Google to monitor, define the type of search (Video, Blog, News, All, etc.) to be performed and how often you’d like to view results. This method is the most effective for searches that contain unique keywords: like “Kiekbusch” or “adjustafresh”.
Google and Yahoo! allow users to create custom RSS news feeds (similar to the Google Alert, but delivered via RSS) that will automatically aggregate content and push it through users’ RSS feed reader of choice.
In addition to the aforementioned tools, there are, of course, businesses like Andiamo Systems and PopularMedia that are developing algorithms specifically to monitor and track corporate reputations and buzz.
You’re Listening, Now What? Engagement
Now that it is clear how to monitor content on the web, the next step is developing a Social Media Engagement Strategy (SMES). Each corporate culture is unique and each should approach social media engagement differently with an understanding of possible privacy, public relations, marketing, legal and regulatory concerns. Does your business want to be proactive or reactive; have a distinct voice or let your customers do most of the talking; create content or collect content? Whatever engagement strategy is best for your business, there are some general best practices to consider when becoming involved with social media:
- Build trust
- Develop relationships with consumers
- Be transparent & respectful
- Facilitate a dialogue
Above all, it is imperative to remember that your customers control the message in social media—this is a bottom-up philosophy that many senior marketing and brand managers find uncomfortable. Rather than attempting to control the conversation, let your brand be the catalyst for conversation– the campfire around which people gather to connect and converse with one another. This mentality goes a long way to promote a positive corporate image online and off.
22 Mar, 2008 Yesterday, it happened… I succumbed to Twitter’s siren song. As you may know, I have toyed with Twitter membership. I know several people who use it, but I couldn’t bring myself to take the plunge—I found it to be a lot more noise than signal, and another distraction.
What pushed me over the edge was a post by John Mack on his Pharma Marketing Blog. While his post didn’t tell me anything new about Twitter, nor was it terribly persuasive, I found myself asking myself: Twitter… Why not?
In less than 24 hours of Twitter usage I’m following 18 people—mostly friends, colleagues and industry people that I respect—and 12 are following me—mostly reciprocal followers. I’ve posted a few tweets including links to interesting services and what I had for dinner last night. I’ve also discovered a couple interesting blog posts. I have to admit, it is somewhat addictive; I’ll hold off on using the service on my phone for now.
I’ll post updates about my experience with Twitter here—whether I’m finding it useful, or a waste of time. If you use Twitter, or are considering it, add me and I’ll do the same.
14 Mar, 2008 Today, Jeremiah Owyang, web strategist and Senior Analyst at Forrester Research posted his presentation on online community best practices on his blog, Web Strategy by Jeremiah (one of my daily reads). While looking at this without narration is not nearly as beneficial, the presentation does include some excellent data and advice for any business interested in participating in social media/networking websites.
I’ve embedded the presentation below for your viewing pleasure.
You may wonder why a company like Forrester whose product is essentially their intellectual capital, would allow this to be posted publicly. As Jeremiah effectively states in the post, “Information can’t be hidden, it simply hasn’t been published online.”
Thanks for sharing; this is good stuff.