PyroMarketing

Two New Twitter Tools for your PyroMarketing Plan

What influence does Twitter have on your brand?  Who is talking about you on Twitter?  What are they saying?  Is it positive? Negative? How far is that message traveling?  Who are my brand's biggest customer evangelists and how can I find them in order to encourage them?  Thanks to a couple of web applications it's now easy to find out.

TweetReach
Use TweetReach to see how often people have tweeted your brand in the last 30 days or 50  tweets (whichever comes first) then explore how many people those tweets reached, how many impressions resulted, and how often those tweets were forwarded or replied to. 

Best of all, from a PyroMarketing perspective, you can see who is commenting on your brand.  These folks, in many cases, are your driest tinder.  If your brand has a Twitter account, consider joining the conversation.  But, be careful to connect to them using Twitter and not some other method. 

After a friend recently tweeted about a brand, that brand contacted him via email rather than joining the existing Twitter stream.  It felt creepy to him--like the brand was stalking him.  He said it would have felt much more natural had the brand simply joined the Twitter conversation.

Twitalyzer
Twitalyzer analyzes your brand's Twitter presence to provide five metrics.

Strength: Is the likelihood your brand is being discussed on Twitter.  It's brand citations divided by total citations.

Signal: Twitalyzer publishes a "signal to noise" ratio. Signals are any tweets containing a link or a hashtag that allows the reader to easily explore further.  Noice are brand specific tweets without further connections.

Favor: The ratio of citations that are generall positive compared to those that are generally negative.  A computer makes this determination based on the presence of certain keywords.  The system is not infallable, but does a pretty good job of sorting the good stuff from the bad.

Passion: Measures the likelihood that individuals talking about your brand will do so repeatedly.  Again, this is gold when looking for your brand's driest tinder.

Clout: The number of unique individuals referencing your brand divided by the total number of individuals.  In other words, your brand's clout is determined by the percentage of the totel Twitter universe is talking about you. 

WARNING: If you check your brand strength on Twitalyzer they will Tweet your results without your permission for the world to see.  If you are an emerging brand with a low brand strength score this can be embarrassing and harmful.  If people see your score and perceive your brand as weak, they may disregard it. 

I am very disappointed Twitalyzer does this.  They are willing to sacrifice the privacy of a customer's analysis for their own self-promotion.

The base level of service is free for both TwitterReach and Twitalyzer so click through, type in your brand, and give them a try.  They could be valuable tools in your PyroMarketing arsenal.

Spread the fire. GS

Affinity is the new proximity

The law of affinity is replacing the law of proximity.

In Gestalt Psychology the law of proximity teaches that "spatial or temporal proximity of elements may induce the mind to perceive a collective or totality."  In other words, we assume that things that are near each other physically belong together.  This, in turn, leads us to define people by their geographic location.  E.g., "We are Americans" or "They are Michiganders."  It's assumed that we are similar to the people that surround us.

For most of history this was true.  Without far-reaching communications technologies we could only connect with people who were physically near.  And, as we interact with our neighbors we exhibit motor mimicry which causes each of us to adapt our own behaviors to match the behavior to those with whom we interact.  After a while, and because of mimicry, people living near each other often become quite like one another.  This explains geographic cultural differences.

But the arrival of new digital communications devices like cell phones, email, SMS, video conferencing, social networks, et al, has changed the equation. Our social interactions are no longer limited by geography.  I Skype with my sister in Prague at no cost.  I interact with high school friends on Facebook though we are separated by hundreds of miles.  I swap text messages with my wife from an airport barstool without ever exchanging a word with the people sitting beside me, each of whom is using their cell phone or laptop to engage with his or her own social network.

Proximity no longer governs our social interactions.  Affinity does.  I ignored my neighbors at the airport bar because they were strangers.  Proximity was no longer enough.  Digital technology enabled me to connect with people I already knew and loved instead.  I mean no offense.  I'm sure my bar mates were nice folks and I might have enjoyed a convversation with them, but I like my wife a whole lot more and so I connected with her because...because I could.

Ideology is the new geography.  Affinity is the new proximity.  When digital tools make time and distance disappear, people can organize with those who share their beliefs, their passions, or their history.  And they do.

Once, markets were vertical, named for cities and defined by the coverage patterns of their media.  Campaigns would target Atlanta, Chicago, and New York.  But those places are markets no more. 

Now, because people can connect around their affinities, markets are horizontal; cutting across every city and hamlet and jumping from continent to continent.  Markets are "people who love icecream" or "people with athlete's foot" or "outdoor enthusiasts."

Keep an eye on this trend.  It will shape the future in important ways.  Spread the fire. GS

7 Minutes to Reinvent the Internet: Live Stream

What happens when you give 7 smart people 7 minutes each to reinvent the Internet to better connect people and brands?  Find out today at 1:30 pm Eastern time.  Gather your marketing staff around a computer and watch the event live as it happens in New York.

You can catch the live stream and read all the details at 7 Minutes to Reinvent the Internet.

I have a special interest in this program because Bob Garfield of Advertising Age and National Public Radio is one of the seven participants.  Bob's presentation comes largely from his new book, The Chaos Scenario, which I am helping him publish and promote. 

Bob gave me a sneak peak at his presentation and I can assure you it is typical Garfield; funny, informative, insightful and, for once...short.

Judging the Winner by Applause

I contributed one idea to the event.  VideoEgg, the event's creators, had planned for a panel of judges to grade each presenter and declare a winner...American Idol style.  But since the event was about social media and the Internet, I suggested they assign each participant a unique hashtag and let the audience vote by repeating their favorite idea (along with its hashtag) on their Internet real estate (blogs, Twitter, etc.).  A week later we could use social media monitoring software like Radian6 to count the posts related to each hashtag.  Each post counts as a vote.  The presentation with the most votes win.  It's the digital-era equivalent of judging the winner by applause but it also dramatically increases the event's reach and exposure by equipping the audience to spread the word via their social network (fanning the flames).

I hope you get a chance to watch the presentations and participate by reposting your favorite idea.  Spread the fire. GS

Trialogue: Marketing in the New Economy

Here's a piece I wrote for a banking client's internal newsletter.  It describes the transformation from the mass media era to the digital media era and the implications of that shift for marketers and so I thought I would share it here.  Enjoy and, as always, spread the fire. GS

_______________________________________

A revolution in media and marketing triggered by recent digital technologies has fundamentally changed the world.  Most companies see it as a threat.  You can see it as an opportunity. 

 For the last century advertising involved a monologue.  Brands spoke to consumers through mass media with powerful results.  Brands also enjoyed a message monopoly.  The cost and complexity of television, radio, print, and outdoor prevented consumers from participating, but no more.  Personal computers, smart phones, affordable software, social web applications, and ubiquitous broadband connections have equipped and empowered nearly everyone to take part and people are using this new-found power to express their love or loathing for brands.  This groundswell of connected consumers’ represents a threat to companies entrenched in the past, but a vast resource to businesses prepared to engage them in new ways.  But how?

 Trialogue

Thriving in this new environment requires engaging audiences in a Trialogue™.  Trialogue is more than a communications tactic; it is a strategic platform that routes the true experience of a brand among all its constituents.  In a Trialogue, messages and experience move along three dimensions:

 B:A - From the brand to the audience

A:B - From the audience to the brand

A:A - Among audience members

 All brands exist in a Trialogue.  The only choice is whether and how to participate.  Those that strategically leverage it can develop more relevant brand strategies, expand their advertising impressions, better manage their image, and enhance the trustworthiness and authority of their messaging in a marketplace they no longer control.

 Trialogue by Fire

Dell discovered the need for Trialogue when, in 2005, blogger Jeff Jarvis began recounting his customer service nightmares on his BuzzMachine blog in a post titled “Dell Hell.”  Like a magnet, his post attracted other unhappy customers who left similarly scathing comments.  Soon it was all over the web.  Search “Dell” on Google at that time and “Dell Hell” was on the first page of organic results.

 To its credit, Dell embraced Trialogue and transformed a nightmare into a vision for the future.  

·        It built a system for tracking online conversations involving its brand and began proactively reaching out to people with problems. 

·        It joined the conversation by starting its own blog; winning praise from customers for authentically addressing positive and negative issues.

·        It launched IdeaStorm, a site where customers can suggest and prioritize ideas from new products to service improvements and Dell can report on its plans and progress.

Today Dell relies on Trialogue interaction with its customers to support its rejuvenated business.

 Implementing Trialogue

Implementing Trialogue in your business involves three steps.

Listen

The best brands, like best friends, are good listeners.  Begin by uncovering brand conversations.  The Buntin Group recently built a Brand Monitoring Dashboard for a client that monitored websites, blogs, chat rooms, forums, and even Twitter in real-time for conversations involving the client’s brand or its competitor’s.  It tracked the volume and tone of that chatter and identified the people making those comments so the client could connect with them online.

Lead

The most effective way to influence your brand image in the Trialogue era is to control your customer’s experience.  With a quality product and excellent customer service in place, you can further lead by:

·        Creating venues for brand discussions like social networks and forums

·        Inviting your customers to participate in new product development and service improvements.

·        Designing systems that enable customers to more effectively engage with your business.  ATM’s and online banking are good examples from the financial services industry.

·        Joining the conversation by commenting on existing blogs and forums, and/or starting your own.

·        Reinforcing brand truths with targeted advertising through traditional channels. 

Leverage

Equip the audience with tools that leverage its connectivity to help them share your brand message with their social network. New digital tools make this easy and affordable and can radically extend brand strategy, communications reach, and advertising impressions. 

 At The Buntin Group, the agency in Nashville where I work, we believe Trialogue is a transformational business driver and also a unique business intelligence tool and have retooled our creative, media planning and digital functions to enable brand-fluent Trialogue solutions that deliver business results.