Research: March 2009 Archives
Less than a week ago Alltop launched its Personalized Feed Reader. Alltop is an online magazine rack that aggregates RSS feeds of every major topic from wine to personal finance and everything in between. It saves a reader from having to identify and add RSS feeds to a personalized Google page. All the best feeds on a given topic are easily scannable and can now be added to a customized page with a single click. Alltop is a simple, useful service for those who don't care to spend time creating RSS feeds and customizing them.
But Alltop has been bashed in the technology community. And in my opinion this bashing represents the worst of the technology community. This can be summed up in one phrase - technological determinism. I feel that many of the digerati and even folks in the social media space suffer from a technological determinism bias ( I do too at times). Technological determinism's doctrine is based on the premise that a society's technology determines its cultural values, social structure or history. It is the belief that technology is good for humanity and that it shapes humanity for the better. Got a problem - solve it with better technology. Technology is defined as the central causal element that promotes social change.
Continue reading Alltop fights technological determinism. The experts are wrong.
Last year a group of renowned scholars and business leaders got together to discuss the future of management. Organized by Gary Hamel of the Harvard Business School, the two day event was designed to think about the fundamental principles, processes and practices of management that will drive success in the future. The group identified shared beliefs and after much contentious deliberation also "moonshots of management."
The shared beliefs included the notion that management is one of humankind's most important social technologies, a recognition that current management models are seriously out of date and third that management must be reorganized to become more adaptable, innovative and inspiring places to work. Of the 25 moonshots of management, a few stood out for me which I'm discussing here because they jive with social influence and the role it plays inside and outside of organizations.
Continue reading Reinventing Management in the 21st Century.
A year ago, here at Razorfish, we developed a hypothesis that the way people were influencing each other -- online, in small groups, through peer pressure, reciprocity or flattery -- was giving rise to a whole new form of marketing that we called Social Influence Marketing™ (SIM). This post also appears as an article in the Razorfish Digital Outlook Report and was quoted by Guy Kawasaki at Open Forum.
We defined it as marketing to the network of peers that surround and influence the customer across social platforms and on brand Web sites. The rise of SIM reflected the emerging thinking in our agency that the social Web and the mainstream Web were converging and that digital marketers needed to deliver better value exchanges to consumers and allow for influence more directly.
Today SIM is not just a hypothesis. It is a driving force that affects everything we do as an agency, and, as we're impressing upon our clients, it matters more than ever in this economic downturn as consumers across the country are losing faith in large institutions and experts and instead are turning to each other for advice. In fact, we believe it is as important a marketing dimension as the traditional pillars of brand marketing and direct response. It is even bigger than we thought it was.
Now, as SIM becomes more mature, 2009 will be the year in which differentiating between good and bad SIM will get easy -- a year in which every campaign, every marketing effort and even every digital business transformation activity (where digital is used to transform core business processes) will need a social influence component. It will be a year in which companies realize that social influence must be harnessed strategically if they want to transform their brands, their relationships with their customers -- and their businesses too. It will also be a year in which marketers discover which agencies truly grasp SIM and which ones have only a tenuous hold on it.
With those broad themes as a guide, what exactly can you expect in 2009? Here are ten specific trends to look for. Tell me whether you agree with them at the end of the post.
1. Social media usage will result in more influence. As social media adoption climbs exponentially, so too will the influence conversations in a social context will have on brand affinity and purchasing decisions. Participating in a conversation online, sharing an opinion and influencing a purchasing decision explicitly or implicitly are becoming second nature for more and more consumers. The only thing that will prevent these messages from spreading is that a lot of this influence happens in small groups within the walled gardens of the social networks and therefore goes unnoticed. That will change in 2009 as social network analysis vendors help us peek into the walled gardens and as a result marketers will pay more attention. An event like the Motrin episode, in which a group of social media-fluent mothers managed to force Motrin to pull down an online video they found offensive, will not happen quite as this year because marketers will focus on SIM more.
2. The focus will shift to influencers. Who are these people that influence your customers and how does their influence actually work? This will come into sharper focus, as reaching the influencers gets easier via the social graph and the plethora of technology vendors that make targeting easier. Different influencers will matter at different stages of the marketing funnel, too. For example, at the point-of-purchase, friends and family may matter the most in determining what a consumer buys, while at the awareness stage, key influencers, like the bloggers at Edmunds.com ,carry more weight. We'll also find a way to put a valuation on each consumer's potential influence for specific product categories. Google and a few others are already taking a crack at defining your influence rank.
3. Top-down branding will experience growing impotence. Most brand managers are used to defining their brands in relative isolation of the marketplace -- or they do extensive customer research and see it as their jobs alone to define the brand or the manifestation of the brand in different forms. That's going to change as consumers define the brands by the sheer volume of their opinions. They'll be shaping the brands more than the brands will be shaping them. As a result, in order for them to be remembered, brands will be forced to deliver much stronger value propositions to their customers Cute advertising won't be enough as the focus shifts to value exchanges. If you're a brand manager, you can either fight this or treat it as an opportunity to take your career in a different direction.
Continue reading Trends in Social Influence Marketing.
We just published our 2009 Digital Outlook Report this morning. This is the fifth year that we're publishing the report and the findings are culled together by aggregating our media spending patterns across advertisers around the country. The report also includes insightful, thought provoking articles on the future of digital. Here are some highlights:We are in the second year of a major shift away from portals toward niche targeting over a wide array of media choices. This fragmentation reflects a trend in consumers' media consumption behavior toward "snacking" on a wide array of digital content. Although scale is still important, the media choices available that deliver breath and depth outside the portals continue to rise.
Advertisers continue to support search because it delivers a stronger ROI than many other tactics, especially in an economic downturn. We don't think search is recession-proof though, and do expect some budget tightening in 2009.
There was significant increase in paid search this past year; it grew from 31% of total ad spending in 2007 to 36% in 2008.
Television is undergoing a fundamental shift - it is going digital in all aspects and is becoming more niche in terms of both audiences and programming.
A long tail of television is emerging as audiences are increasingly dividing their time between computer screens, TV sets, mobile devices, gaming systems and set-top boxes. This will cause both content providers and marketers to reinvent the way they present content and experiences.
Social media and Social Influence Marketing™ exploded this year partly due to the economic downturn. Consumers began losing faith in large institutions and experts and turned to each other for advice. Marketers embraced SIM this year too because it's a very cost-effective means of reaching their customers.
We predict "your CEO will join Facebook" this year. The traditional C-Suite is finally responding to the pressure that social influencers have on their brands, and they're getting onboard. The ability to measure the value of social influencers is also expanding with the introduction of technology like our proprietary Generational Action Tags.
Social media advertising will finally hit its stride in 2009 as advertisers figure out better ways to embed social media into ad units. Display advertising on the web will begin to regularly incorporate widgets and user-generated content.
Retailers need to create a shopping experience in their brick-and-mortar stores that delivers the same level of personalization and service that customers receive online by deploying modern tools such as digital in-store signage, coupons delivered via mobile devices and interactive store floor plans and merchandise directories.
What do you think of these trends? Do they resonate with you and your business? You can download a PDF of the report and view the graphics on Flickr.
