Can P&G make money in places where people earn $2 a day? “Our innovation strategy is not just diluting the top-tier product for the lower-end consumer… You have to discretely innovate for every one of those consumers on that economic curve, and if you don’t do that, you’ll fail”

Robert McDonald, P&G’s CEO via  Jennifer Reingold

Disclosure: P&G is a client of mine at Porter Novelli

Threshold charges subject the logic of the print bundle — a bit of everything for everybody, slathered with ads — to two new questions: What do our most committed users want? And what will turn our most frequent readers into committed users? … This is new territory for mainstream papers, who have always had head count rather than engagement as their principal business metric

Clay Shirky

I can vouch for this as a customer. I tweeted in frustration a few months back when I found it impossible to record a programme I was watching in delay TV. It’s hard to really explain this problem until you’re experiencing it.. but it’s incredibly irritating at the time…

Anyway @virginmedia tweeted back at me with “it’s hard to record things that are in the past.” This somewhat facetious answer made me laugh, told me they wouldn’t be solving the complaint and ended the exchange with a lulzy acceptance on my part. (And a few minutes reverie around Doc brown and the clock tower).

The example given by Brian Solis is:

In one case, a woman tweeted that her Virgin Media connection wasn’t working and her two year-old daughter was upset at having to miss her favorite TV show, Peppa Pig. Not only did Virgin send an engineer immediately, he was carrying a Peppa Pig toy for the little girl.

By joining up social media listening with other parts of their business, and employing Twitter community managers with the right mix of humour, humility and ingenuity, Virgin media are well positioned to reap dividends from positive sentiment generated by reactive social media engagement. On the flip-side, their activity highlights a vast swathe of missed opportunities for brands that are deaf or timid online.

In times of crisis that require an immediate impact, Twitter’s suite of pay-for-play tools can help do just that. Twitter’s Sponsored Tweets can rapidly keep content at the top of search results, and can now place results at the top of user feeds.

A particularly effective feature allows advertisers to target not only key search terms, but key users as well… For example, if you have a major crisis impacting parents, you can identify this subgroup and ensure your message consistently remains at the top of their streams. Messages that link to rich media, use hashtags, and feature a call to action (“RT PLEASE”) will usually garner the most attention.

Dallas Lawrence

With the ultimate aim of reducing homeless dogs in the United States – this new ‘Best Friends’ mobile app enables users to upload pictures of themselves to be shown a doggy ‘match’ based on facial characteristics. (Similar to this earlier Doggelganger site)

 The App also provides:  adoptable dog search by zip code, simple giving to help homeless pets, and their  grassroots pledge to start seeing invisible dogs.  The dual purpose of the app is to raise awareness of the thousands of dogs waiting in shelters to be seen and adopted..

Beth Kanter

What the app does well then, is combine multiple information points, ways for people to take action around the core issue, and entirely personalised fun… as for the numbers:

[Beth Kanter] asked Best Friends Marketing Coordinator Claudia Perrone how they were measuring success.   The ultimate KPI, of course, is dog adoptions.  But they are looking at associated metrics such as:  downloads, user comments, sharing, and Google analytics to show dog searches… then data collection (emails and mobile opt-ins), microdonations, and buzz via earned media.

• Learn more about SOPA and PIPA on Wikipedia
• SOPA strike
• Fight for the future

It is definitely a balancing act but for us it’s all about helping people to have quality discussions, whether people want to use a pseudonym or not. It seems as though most people currently associate a commenter using their real name as one who produces a higher quality comment. We’re looking to let everyone know, by our data, that’s incorrect

Talton Figgins, Disqus

Social Local Mobile curation, where content and places are shared with a simple click, and value perception is added (often condensed in a line that is most probably shorter than 140 characters ), will drive a lot of the social web in 2012

Danny Devriendt

Disclosure: Danny is a colleague of mine at Porter Novelli

This weekend the nation (or at least those watching [UK] ITV1 at 7.55pm on Sunday 15 January) will see who online users have chosen as their favourite new TV advert for reed.co.uk.

People have been deciding over the past month between six shortlisted ads, all created by up-and-coming UK filmmakers.

The winning filmmaker will also receive a £10,000 cash prize and have the opportunity to work on future reed.co.uk projects with celebrated commercials and film director, Paul Weiland, whose team was behind the original ‘Love Mondays’ radio and outdoor campaign.

onrec

The campaign shows how voting on humorous crowd-sourced content, on a subject to which people can relate, can make for gratifying, low barrier-to-entry online participation. The bouncy design on the page bringing it all together works very well too.

Beyond the basic vote, online users can also connect and engage with the budding film directors through social media. Nick Bennett, creative director of Steel (the agency behind the campaign), said “It’s not just advertising. It’s social entertainment.”

Personally I’m rooting for Super Reed:

]]> http://mariamz.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/reeds-new-social-tv-ad/feed/ 0 mariamz reedSocialTvAd http://mariamz.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/cascading-contamination-and-product-reviews-judging-brands-by-the-company-they-keep/ http://mariamz.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/cascading-contamination-and-product-reviews-judging-brands-by-the-company-they-keep/#comments Fri, 13 Jan 2012 08:01:00 +0000 mariamz https://mariamz.wordpress.com/?p=3391 ]]>

“Reviews containing spelling and grammatical errors consistently result in suboptimal outcomes, like lower sales or lower response rates… the effect is very systematic.”

Panagiotis Ipeirotis

In a recent study of Amazon product reviews - Panagiotis Ipeirotis (Associate Professor of  New York University’s Stern School of Business) analysed how different language affects web users’ perceptions of products. He found that poor language and wording of reviews resulted in less sales of a product, but that the exact reason is not yet known.

This finding took me back to Levi and Kurzban’s theory of cascading benefits in social networks:

Essentially ’cascading benefits’ works like this:

• If I behave in a way beneficial to someone else, this will in turn benefit their connections
• I unconsciously know this, which means I am more inclined to make friends with people who are friends with my friends
• These ‘tertiary benefits’ I receive by benefiting my connections come to me more consistently if I am part of a dense network
• The two factors above lead to clustering in social networks

A potential connection between the Amazon review data and the theory of cascading benefits seems to me to be this – Amazon reviewers look to readers like socially connected ‘friends’ of products. If these social connections have poor writing skills, even in delivering positive reviews, we may believe that buying the product brings us into the same social circle, or product/consumer cluster. We avoid this, as we fear the cluster, and product at its centre, to be socially undesirable – and that undesirable social effects will cascade towards us as a result.

The anthropological backdrop to ‘cascading benefits’ theory is that our innate instinct as species living in close-knit communities leads us to believe a favour done to a friend will eventually benefit us. Let’s reverse Levi and Kurzban’s theory and see if it fits- substituting ‘benefits’ for ‘contamination’:

So ‘cascading contamination’ works like this:

• If I behave in a socially undesirable way which contaminates someone else by association, this will in turn contaminate their connections
• I unconsciously know this, which means I am less inclined make friends with those I can see are being contaminated by social undesirables
• The ‘tertiary damage’ I might receive by having a new, ‘contaminated’ social connection would come to me more consistently if I am part of a dense network
• The factors above lead to my avoiding what I perceive (consciously or unconsciously) to be socially contaminated people or products – even given other indicators of high quality for them

Thus the way in which a product is talked about affects peoples’ attitude towards it – however positive the sentiment expressed.

This is worth considering in multiple social media marketing scenarios – for example running a Facebook page promotion bringing in floods of new fans who have a different socio-cultural use of language to existing fans / your target customer. In this case, securing hundreds of thousands of active (but off-putting) ‘fans’ is the last thing the brand needs to actually engender trust and purchases.

Facebook image from Pacific54