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What's the bigger social media idea: marketing stimulus or business process innnovation?

Lately I've been so busy that I haven't even had time to recap in this blog important, conversation-triggering articles I've penned in my Advertising Age column.  I'm hoping to change that, even if I have to backtrack a bit.  Below are excerpts from perhaps my most read and "shared" (according to Ad Age metrics) article to date, and my core premise is this: the bigger idea in social media might be as much about business process innovation than next-gen communication.  Here's excerpts, and I also encourage folks to skim the comments and blog posts that either build upon or challenge the argument.

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What's the bigger idea: social media as marketing stimulus or social media as a way to innovate business processes?

Every brand manager or CMO should recognize that it's both -- and in a disruptive economy, you need to take advantage of both outcomes. And when the potential dividends of a marketing effort include changes to a company's process, we need to rethink the entire notion of ROI.

This isn't an easy task, as marketers typically leave things such as organizational strategy and technology implementation to other stakeholders -- keeping lines cleaner and allowing marketers to focus on, well, their areas of focus. You let technology folks do technology, quality folks do quality and service folks do service.

But social media softens the silos. It's hard to turn over a rock in social media, dip your toe into Twitter or comment on someone's blog without rethinking the fundamentals of a firm's organization, product development and even listening infrastructure. Such firsthand experience begets inspiration. Inspiration powers change. And change is needed more than ever before as we're asked to contract our resources.

Social media and communication
Social media, at the end of the day, is about reinventing communication. Executed wisely, it's a new covenant of interaction between consumer and consumers, and, more recently, consumers and business. You could even argue that it's the long-overdue realization of one-to-one marketing that we over-romanticized back in the 1990s and inexcusably put on the "direct marketing" shelf.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pete Blackshaw is exec VP of Nielsen Online Digital Strategic Services and author of 'Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000' (DoubleDay). His biweekly column looks at the relationship between marketing and customer service in the age of consumer control.

But "organizational" communication, across thousands of companies and brands, is an area so bankrupt with inefficiency and scared of change that it's hard not to wonder whether your latest Twitter "aha moment" is better shared with the chief information officer or human resources than with the marketing team

Driving innovation
Then there's innovation -- the engine of value creation and company growth. Social media is one massive feedback loop. It's chaotic on the surface, but unmistakably efficient if you consider the life cycle of vetting a good idea or absorbing the ideas of others. If you really peel the onion on what's happening across blogs, Twitter and other online communities, brands are setting up de facto listening labs that rewrite the rules of gathering and managing feedback. We're getting more ideas faster. The funnel is broadening. The filters are sharper, more immediate and grounded in deeper levels of intimacy with the product or proposition.

The end outcome, whether intentional or incidental, is a disintermediation of existing, and potentially more expensive, processes. That alone should be reason enough for the CEO to personally initiate "Social Media Day" or "CGM [consumer-generated media] Day."

Procter & Gamble's Kim Dedeker, speaking to the Advertising Research Foundation's recent Listening Summit, suggested that brands need to reinvent "how to listen" not merely to figure out how to turn on online strategy or social media, but far more importantly, to reinvent and "inspire" the entire market research department. Put another way, listening is about reinvention.

The irony here is that a free tool known as Twitter was being used in real time by many of the attendees, the resulting data streams inspiring new ideas and playback throughout the conference.

Joel Rubinson, chief research officer of the ARF, called it "an amazing record of our research transformation conference, definitely more insightful than my old-school note taking. The big idea was that listening creates a fast-learning organization, which is the only way marketing can catch up to the consumer."

Driving margins, saving money
Let's end by hitting the sweet spot of practicality. At the end of the day, our foray into social media is teaching us how to save money. Consumer-generated media and social-media-enabling tools allow us to create websites and blogs for extremely low prices -- a far cry from the multimillion-dollar websites we built when I was co-leading interactive marketing at P&G back in the 1990s. Brands including Ford, Comcast, Toyota, Southwest, Sony, Denny's and others are testing new models of customer service on platforms such as Twitter that, under the old "enterprise" rules, would have cost millions to launch or even test. It's not that everything's cheap, but the barriers to low-cost earning have plummeted.

Whether we as marketers admit it or not, our dips into the collective social-media learning lab are making it really hard to justify $5,000-a-pop conference trips where we listen, learn, interact and collect leads. One could easily argue that the collective, real-time wisdom of social media, thoughtfully absorbed, easily substitutes for attending a "live" conference. And online video makes the substitution all the more tolerable. Video is a process innovation that is rewriting all the rules of efficiency.

Across the social-media airways there's no shortage of inspired thinking about what's possible. At a time when organizations are under intense pressure to reinvent themselves -- to take lemons and make lemonade -- it might be the right time to focus our efforts, even for a moment, on the overall "business process" equation. That's probably the easiest and most obvious way to demonstrate ROI around all of these efforts.

"Tell 3000" NYC Book Launch Notebook: I Love New York!

Time magazing just published a wonderfully positive review of my book, Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3000.  (The image to the left is from the article.) Notes reviewer Andrea Sachs: "This book deserves a spot on the desk of every executive who worries about his company's reputational risk."   Earlier in the week, CNBC wrote another flattering review in the "Bullish on Book" sections. 

“SATISFIED CUSTOMERS” is a great guide for business leaders and marketing officers who want to build a trusting, authentic and lasting relationship with today’s vocal consumer.

Launch Events: The reviews were just a couple highlights of an absolutely incredible week in NYC related to my book launch, and I'm just winding down. In addition to keeping up with my regular work flow, I participated in three successive book launch events: one by my classmates at HBS (thanks, Rick and Jen Lerner and Bill and Daphne Hildebolt or ExpoTV.com), another absolutely incredible of ("amazing" insists my wife Erika) hosted by Nielsen at the incredible Soho loft of Karen Watson (Nielsen's head of Corporate Communications), and the third hosted by the P&G Alumni Assocation NY chapter (big thanks to Tina Adolfsson) held at the breathtaking offices of Marina Maher communications (thanks, Marina). At each event I had a chance to catch up with old friends, talk briefly about the book themes, and answer a questions. 

Overall Engagement:  We're only a week into the book's official release, but I do sense a real and genuine level of engagement around its themes and issues. Everyone, it seems, is curious and engaged about the big questions: If consumers are in control, what does that mean for me as a business manager or stakeholder?   What is the proper and appropriate protocol for engaging with consumers in this environment?  And most importantly, how does my business stay credible in the process? 

Final Footnote: The ultimate irony of this amazing week is that it actually kicked off on Tuesday at at event entitled "How Should Research Leverage The Ability To Listen To Consumers In A Web 2.0 World?  Joel Rubinson, the new head of research of the Advertising Research Foundation, pulled together a dozen or so industry leaders in the field of market research to vet out this topic, especially around the power of the "unprompted consumer voice."  The discussion was deep, stimulating, uncomfortable and breakthrough -- one of the most gratifying sessions I've participated in all year.  (Huge thanks to Joel and ARF head Bob Barocci for leading this charge). 

If you want to stay engaged on the book or the book themes, here are a few options:

• The Tell 3000 Group on Facebook is almost up to 400 members.  I expect a host of superb conversation here.  The group draws in part from the Tell3000.com site.
• Twitter Feeds:  My personal feed or the Tell3000 feed (which tracks at the brands that actively use Twitter to engage companies: Dell, Southwest, JetBlue, Comcast, Virgin, Zappos, etc)
• Ad-Tech Chicago Keynote Panel 8/6 featuring Edelman, Nestle, Blogher, Dell, and Comcast.  I'm the moderator. 
• 8/30 Book Chat & Signing: Joseph Beth's Cincinnati

Tell 3000! My Book Just Launched! Keep Listening, Stay Credible!

I’m incredibly excited to announce today's release of my very first book, “Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3000: Running a Business in a Consumer-Driven World.”  Published by Doubleday Business, the book is now available in most major bookstores as well as Amazon.com and other online venues.   

The book’s core question is critically important, and one I’ve been thinking about since testing new feedback models in the California legislature back in the early 1990s (and all the way up through my tenure today at Nielsen Online):  how to establish and maintain credibility by being authentic, listening and responding to customers, and forming relationships built on openness, transparency, and trust.  The growth of the web, and the unprecedented power and leverage it provides consumers, puts this question in a unique, if not urgent, context.  This Q&A from Sunday's Edition of the Cincinnati Enquirer provides helpful background on the book themes.

Ongoing Participation: Beyond just reading the book, I also hope you will participate in a sustained conversation and debate about its themes.   Toward that end, I’ve created a website entitled Tell3000.com that provides key resources, open-forums, video reviews, and most importantly, a series of audio-based consumer interviews about brand experiences that I hope to update nearly every day.  Here’s the short list of ways you can stay involved.

• Participate (provide comments, even complain) on the Tell3000 blog

• Sign-Up for Tomorrow's Nielsen and Nielsen Online sponsored webinar

• Join a Discussion in the Tell3000 Open Forums

• Join a “Tell 3000” Facebook Group Dedicated to the “Service is Marketing” Theme

• Join Me at a New York, Cincinnati, Chicago, San Francisco, or Pasadena (My Home Town) Event.  All events will be posted here.

• Follow Me on Twitter or the Tell 3000 feed of brands that respond/engage

• Send ideas or suggestions for my new bi-weekly column in Ag Age about the symbiotic relationship between “service and marketing.”  Here's my last article. Send to the following.
  

• Share your candid (even critical) reviews, or join a discussion forum related to the book themes, on Amazon. 

A much longer list is cited in my book, but an enormous and grateful thanks to all of those who provided support and encouragement,  especially my wife Erika (who's featured in this "day before launch" commemorative photo along with my three kids: Liam, Leila, and Sophia.)

Ad-Tech Diarist: Ten Questions on the "Art of Conversation"

This year's Ad-Tech, which I'm still attending, is very special.  Most importantly, the first "keynote panel" of industry experts focused on an issue that rarely gets top billing at industry confabs: the art of conversation. This is an important shift in our collective industry "attention" and "engagement," and while we're all far from finalizing the perfect white paper or case study about managing relationships with consumers in this age of consumer control, we're finally starting to talk about it, and at minimum, ask the right questions.  I was deeply honored to moderate this first diverse panel of industry experts, which included (right to left after me in the photo) Tom Asher of Levi-Strauss, Beth Thomas-Kim of Nestle, Jordan Warren of Agency.com, Todd Cunningham of MTV, and Rick Clancy of Sony Consumer Electronics.   I was also thrilled to debate, discuss, and vet out all the relevant issues in several spirited meetings and conference calls before the actual event.  (Key learning: the "conversation about the conversation"  as as important as the end result.) You can skim various blogs (or Twitter feeds or see a superb cNet News story summary) that recap the panel, but what I'd like to do here is simply list the key question we probed and discussed. I truly believe every marketer needs to hit the white-board sooner than later on these questions. 

1. In what ways does Web 2.0 or the digital space expand the boundaries and opportunities of having meaningful conversations with consumers? Does it reinforce or add value to what we are currently doing?
2. What makes conversations truly authentic and genuine?  Is blogging the answer, or is it just an entry strategy? What's the right way of setting expectations with consumers?
3. How do we keep conversation with consumers trusted and credible? In the age of consumer control, do we have a higher threshold to meet this torture test?   What is the relationship between search and brand reputation, and how is 'conversation' impacting what shows up on the shelf?  Can that be influenced?
4. If conversation is king, is customer service or consumer affairs the new marketing? What's the true value of listening and being responsive to issues consumers raise directly to the brand?  Nurturing loyalty and advocacy among enthusiasts? Garnering big insights?
5. If we agree consumer affairs is a new centerpiece of managing conversations with increasingly empowered consumers, why is this group so divorced from marketing or media planning? How do we change that?
6. How do we begin to train, or expand the wings, of customer service reps to embark upon these new conversations with consumers, even outside of the company's backyard?  Who else should be involved?  What's the right and appropriate way to enter a blog or online community and address or clarify an issue?  Or is that even appropriate?
7. Who should "own" the conversation among marketing stakeholders? Corporate Communications (Ricks' group), Consumer Affairs (Beth and Tom), the digital agency (Jordan), the research folks (Todd), or someone else?  Or is that the wrong question? How do we use conversation and social media to soften corporate boundaries and silos?
8. In what ways should employees be enrolled in conversational marketing?  In what ways can their passion and credibility be unleashed?  Are employees a more trusted ad channel? Can it go too far? 
9. What is the value of "internal" learning in this area? Can organizations become better primed to exploit the power of conversation, CGM, and social media through internal use of Web 2.0 tools, blogs, and beyond.  What can internal networks borrow from consumer innovation?
10. How does conversation impact the retail channel? What are Apple, Sony, and Levis retail store venues learning about the relationship between "service" and marketing. How does the consumer benefit from this mindset, both offline and online?
11. Bonus Question:  What can go wrong?  What if every marketer jumps into the conversation?  Nirvana or Spam 2.0?   What happens if we lose consumer trust?

Many of these themes will be tackled at many levels -- and with finer levels of granularity -- at the upcoming Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) conference entitled WOMM-U.  I provided background about this last week.  Here's more info.

Other Ad-Tech Notes:  Late last night, I was flattered to receive a special Ad-Tech industry achievement award.  I dedicated it to my recently deceased father, William Blackshaw, who taught me all that can be good in advertising -- provided we keep it trusted and credible.   Other industry achievement award winners included Rich Lefurgy and Kate Thorp, both of whom I deeply respect and admire.  My message to the audience was that if we continue to keep the consumer right smack in the center of our radar, everyone wins -- always. I still think there are so many important issues we need to pro-actively address -- privacy, word-of-mouth ethics, ad intrusion, and more -- so while awards are appreciated (even humbling), we still have so much more work to do.  But before we get too serious here, I'd be remiss not to direct folks to the full list of award winners, including "Elf Yourself," which swept three categories.

Business Week on Consumer Vigilantes: Customer Service, Emotion, and CGM in Focus

Business Week's 3/3 edition (available online now) features a very important cover story by Jena McGregor entitled Consumer Vigilantes: Fighting for truth, justice, and the right to speak to a manager. The issue also includes an annual ranking of "Customer Service Champs" -- many of whom, interestingly, have been profiled in either this blog or my forthcoming book, "Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3000!"  -- as well as a provocative (and spot-on) op-ed by Jeff Jarvis entitled "Love the Customers Who Hate You".  Importantly, McGregor writes:

"The sting of a bad experience can cut so deep that it transforms an upset customer into an activist no longer interested in just a refund." 

As we've probed many times in this blog (see tagged links), and in nearly a dozen ClickZ columns, marketers and business executives have yet to internalize the critical symbiotic relationship between brand/service "experiences" and "media" output (and I'm not talking about paid media). McGregor's piece helps make that connection more obvious and transparent.  The propensity to speak out (hence generate CGM or social media) is inextricably tied to depth of consumer loyalty or disloyalty, and its powered by the web's growing arsenal of megaphones that seem to get even more powerful every day thanks to the advent of multi-media (e.g. video, audio, photos) as well as "I second that emotion" community and social-networking capability.    The upside of extreme loyalty and brand emotion might be found in places like Facebook's 40,000+ member Southwest Airlines group or the nearly 70,000 member "Addicted to Starbucks" group (more perspective here). The downside of extreme disloyalty and boiling emotion -- what McGregor describes as "venom-spewed tales of woe" -- can be found in tens of thousands of places on the web's digital trail, from message boards to blogs to YouTube.  (As Jarvis suggests, just go to Google and add the word "sucks" to a brand query.)

So What Next?  Business Week does a great job diagnosing the problem, and the "winners" part shines light on a host of best practices (Fairmont, Lexus, Trader Joe's, Lands End, Enterprise), but I still worry whether there's a big missing piece of the conversation around "what next."  Importantly, are the marketing leaders -- the owners of the biggest discretionary budget, and arguably the most influential drivers of change in large enterprises-- internalizing the message, and translating these new insights around consumer behavior into better "media" models.  If "service is the new marketing," as they say, what's the blueprint for re-engineering the marketing department along these lines?  How should the CMO -- or the constellation of communications agencies (media planning, advertising, PR, digital) -- be incented to move in this direction?  And will there be rewards and recognition for the mostly undervalued (and typically non-strategic "cost center") owners of the call-center, email feedback, and more?   

First Things First: Since 2000, I've attended over a dozen conferences of the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals, one of the largest industry group's representing corporations and brands that own the "listening pipe." While not nearly as glamorous as the "new media" or Web 2.0 confabs and conferences, these SOCAP events always hit me like a refreshing cold-shower because they are grounded in the real nuts and bolts of listening, training the front-lines, adapting to an increasingly diverse (e.g. Spanish speakers) and demanding consumers, developing fair and consistent methods for responding to consumers, and navigating impenetrably complex legal barriers (and fear).  I have also learned that this department is consistently underfunded and under-resourced, and mostly divorced from marketing.  As boring and mundane as their work seems, it's hard not to conclude that if a company can't nail the "basics" of consumer listening they'll never get it right, or be credible, in the far more vexing and volatile social media zone. (Remember, most of the vigilantes Business Week's McGregor highlights initially reached out the company, but those experiences were poorly managed and only made the situation worse.)  So you have to start with the source.  That said, like the CMO, the consumer affairs and customer relations leaders also need to step up to the plate, a point I underscored last fall in a SOCAP keynote entitled "Wake Up and Listen to Consumer 2.0."  If they want more budget, more respect, more leeway to nurture meaningful consumer loyalty -- and hence positive word-of-mouth and CGM creation -- they need to make their case, and do so now at a time when the resource-rich marketers are dotting every third word in speeches and memos with the word "conversation."  My book lays out a host of strategies for making such a case, but short of even reading a book (or Business Week's story) business leaders simply need to take a long, hard stare at today's consumer and negotiate a new relationship.  The good news is that there's a growing laundry list of best practices in this area I like to refer to as Listening-Centered Marketing, from Dell's Ideastorm to the 800-number-all-over-the-place Zappos.com.  We're also seeing new metrics and measurement protocols (this is part of what I do in my day job) that make it far easier for brands to understand and act upon varying degrees of consumer emotion (the building block of consumer loyalty or even defection) flowing across the CGM landscape.

Final Question: And so I end this post with a simple question: how do we shift from consumer-powered "vigilantism" to company-powered "service vigilance."  Business Week's piece fires up that conversation, and I really hope it continues down the right path.

Super Bowl Multi-Tasking: Blogging, Twittering, Monitoring Hey!Nielsen, Running Polls

Talk about multi-tasking.  I'm halfway through the Super Bowl, and I've got over half-a-dozen measurement tools in front of me.  All fascinating, but also a bit frenetic.  As part of my Nielsen Online responsibilities, I'm helping oversee our Super Bowl monitoring work.  But in addition to our "official" metrics, I'm keeping my eye on just about everything, including the degree to which brands are driving offline/online synergy.  (Verdict: Ok so far, but not nearly as well as I would have expected.)  Anyway, here's what I've got open on my laptop right now:

• BrandPulse (our formal monitoring tool)
• HeyNielsen.com Super Bowl real-time panel (real time voting)
• Floodgate (a real-time blog analysis tool)
• YouTube & MySpace game sections
• Twitter (following what my friends/contacts are up to)
• Websites of just about every advertiser (plus the any mini-sites)
• Yahoo IM (trading notes every couple seconds with Emily Sobol, my colleague)

Is Customer Service the New Marketing? In CGM Land, You Bet!

Is customer service the new marketing?  That's certainly been a long-standing contention in the blog, and it's the theme of a one-day conference taking place in early February.  A firm called GetSatisfaction is the primary host, and it looks like a promising -- if not long overdue -- confab.  The timing is for this conversation is just right, and I frankly hope we'll see more of this in 2008.  My upcoming book (which I'll start previewing in future blog entries), Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3000, hits this very theme right smack in the strike zone.  In particular, it makes a forceful argument that marketing in the age of consumer control needs to be completely realigned around customer service and consumer affairs.  With millions upon millions of CGM comments across the web indicting (or complimenting) varying degrees of customer service, or brand listening, there's plenty of empirical evidence to support such a direction.  The key for brands is to draw specific linkages between key dimensions of the service experience and what I like to refer to as the "CGM echo effect."   Such analysis is critical to drive investment or media-mix reallocation.  In the wireless category, for example, customer service issues related to "billing" tends to have a higher word-of-mouth or viral impact that other issues.  This became obvious to me starting in 2000 while analyzing hundreds of thousands of letters on PlanetFeedback.com and more recently across thousands of online expression venues. Certain issue hit core emotions more than others, and customer service is at it heart consumer emotion. (See article: Attention! I Don't Want Your Freakin Attention!) Conversely, brands like Amazon and online shoe seller Zappos.com tend to be rewarded by great service delivery or shipping.  (See recent NY Times story entitled Put Buyers First, What a Concept.) What's needed is a new science of "cause and effect" around the service experience that heavily factors in advocacy and word-of-mouth.  Consumer affairs and customer service departments, in partnership with marketing, can help lead that charge, and that was my hold-no-punches challenge in my October keynote to the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals (SOCAP).  The CGM revolution and Web 2.0, I argued, is finally lending credence and strategic relevance to consumer affairs -- so it's time to lead and set the new agenda. We'll revisit this issue at Ad-Tech San Francisco in April, so stay tuned.  (I can't attend the February conference, but I'm jealous of anyone who can.) For more fun reading on this topic, see: 

• Consumer Affairs: The New Advertising Department

• The Conversational Divide

• Postcard from the Welcome Mat: Levi's Wall of Letters

• Servicing Search: A Better Ad Model

• Postcard from the Welcome Mat: Sheraton Solicits Photo Experiences

• The Science of Talk Value

• Listening Centered Marketing

• 2006 Agency of the Year: Nobody (Max Kalehoff)

Back to the Advertising Future

My ClickZ piece this morning, inspired in no small measure by the many excellent pieces of feedback I received in my Facebook CGM Group, focuses on my latest strategy to drive smart investment online (including consumer-generated media endeavors).  The strategy is called "Back to the Advertising Future,"  and I focus on three core core foundations in marketing: focus groups, the store shelf, and television.  I write: 

Let's get back to basics. Yes, the boring, vanilla, everyday basics. When I started at Procter & Gamble, such fundamentals weighed heavily in my training like the Great Books of Western Civilization. Indeed, there was a whole science and discipline around category management (managing the shelf), TV copy effectiveness (television), and consumer understanding (focus groups). These fundamental still matter, maybe even more than ever. We just need to tweak them to fit the new environment.

Back to the Focus Group Basics:  Within the first 48 hours of starting at P&G, I was coleading live focus groups with Hispanic moms in Miami and Los Angeles. Deep, intimate listening, I learned, especially around unmet needs, really matters and translates to business success. Focus groups still matter, of course, but the universe of harvestable content has exploded across the CGM (define) universe. Offline focus groups still matter, but you often find a more honest, unprompted, unsolicited candor in the online conversation. With the explosion of audio, video, and personal Web site mash-ups, consumer expression has taken on unique new meaning, and marketers are only at the tip of the iceberg of this insight-rich conversation. Even if you're still scratching your head about the Web's role as a marketing vehicle, there's no question it's a far superior focus-group platform. The Web also has the opportunity to be far more efficient and less expensive. This is why I'm such a strong believer in CGM analytics.

Takeaway: The focus group endures, but now it's on steroids and takes place independent of marketer recruitment efforts.

Back to TV Basics:  Sure, folks are reaching for the TiVo or DVR, but let's face it: TV ads still work, and I'll bet my bambinos that Super Bowl advertisers will continue to fork out nearly $2.5 million per :30 spot in 2008. As I learned well at P&G, great TV copy works because it connects emotionally, allows persuasive "benefit visualization" (e.g., side-by-side demos), and often works around a single, engaging, dramatic big idea or insight. But lo and behold, those are the same factors driving the off-the-charts popularity with online video. Consumer-generated multimedia (CGM2) is particular persuasive and engaging online. Far from reinventing the wheel, advertisers should simply start their online exploratory by porting over proven principles from successful TV copy development and tweak them based on the medium's unique characteristics. Can my brand, for example, use the power of on-demand video to explain or demonstrate how to use products?

Takeaway: Use everything you know about TV as an accelerator to the Web's most promising new feature: online video.

Back to the Shelf Space Basics:   Brand managers live and breathe category management. If a product slips up or down the shelf or two slots to the right, millions of dollars in incremental or lost sales could be on the line -- or even a promotion to VP or marketing director. P&G's A.G. Lafley captures the essence of this principle in his "first moment of truth." What consumers see on the shelf, and where it's placed, matters. Why not apply the same logic to the online space, especially as more buyers zip through the Web research aisles before they buy? Google has built a company with a $200 billion market cap selling access to the virtual shelf in the form of advertising that hangs on the margins of search results. What about the value of the organic middle? If CGM dominates search results when you type "pampers," "tide," or "huggies" into the search box, what's that worth? It obviously depends on the favorability of the comment, or what we might call the attractiveness of the conversational packaging. Google search results are a shelf. Wikipedia results are a shelf. Brand Web site content are a shelf. And the questions we ask to build, promote, and protect shelf presence online are similar to what we ask offline:What specific steps do I need to take to improve my shelf presence? How will my product launch be impacted by early shelf results? Can I shape that?

Takeaway: Your brand standing is still your shelf landing.

   

Apple Wastes No Time In Exploiting Early iPhone Buzz & Testimonials

Why is it important to stay three steps ahead of early buzz?  Because every conversation -- every review, every post, every love letter or nasty-gram -- is material to your marketing strategy.  No one needs to send that memo to Apple computer, which continues to ride an unprecedented wave of pre-launch buzz/CGM around the iPhone.  Take a look at this morning's Apple.com startpage.  The centerpiece of the page is a list of all the positive reviews the brand has received around the iPhone -- from David Pogue of the New York Times, Walter Mosberg of the Wall Street Journal, USA Today's Edward Baig, and others.  Put simple, the brand is exploiting early buzz to drive further momentum.  Importantly, all of these media "influencers" have a material impact of broader conversation by other bloggers, and we're seeing an unprecedented number of links by top bloggers to these early reviews.  Key takeway: always stay close to the pulse of early feedback.  If it's working for you, don't hide it! 

Apple and the Website:  The other key point here is the extent to which Apple makes effective use of it's website.  If you carefully analyze Apple's buzz going as far back as the iPod and Video iPod, you'll note that the brand website has been a powerful ally in providing 'social currency" to buzz-makers and CGM creators.  Put another way, the site gets a huge number of links from bloggers, forum operators, and others. Moreover, the relevant content is always easy to find, easy to share, and often prominently featured during ideal time periods -- e.g. the start page featuring positive reviews.  Key Takeaway: Marketers still have control, and your brand website, if executed smartly, can be your best ally.

Want a Bigger Bite of the Apple?  Later today, I'm co-hosting a webinar entitled "iPhone Mania: Sales Leading Indicator or Evangelistic Hype?."  Starts at 12:30 PM today EST.  Sign up here.

The Chaos Continues: Garfield on "The Post Advertising Age."

Next month I'm moderating a panel at Ad-Tech San Francisco entitled -- get this -- "The Next Big Thing: Is Advertising Still Relevant?"  The panelists I recruited represent a diversity of voices that touch and bond with consumers in far less traditional -- yet hugely promising -- ways.  Scott K. Wilder of Intuit is in charge of Intuit's massive online community of product enthusiasts; Beth Thomas-Kim is Director and Head of Consumer Services for Nestle USA (and President-Elect of the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals (SOCAP); Paul Woolmington is a founding partner with Naked Communications; and Marti Bledsoe is an interactive marketing strategist at spot-on (read my related ClickZ story)  Resource Interactive.

Garfield Helps Write the "Discussion Guide":  Needless to say, I'm more pumped about this panel than just about any session I've moderated in recent years -- and I'm doubly pumped because I feel as though Bob Garfield just wrote a big chunk of my "discussion guide."  In tomorrow's Ad Age cover story, Garfield continues his highly provocative "conversation" about the future of advertising with Chaos Scenario 2.0: The Post Advertising Age. ....a conversation that initially started with the original Chaos Scenario and then migrated to Listenomics.  Garfield covers a ton of ground, a chunk of which validates his initial forecasts, but perhaps the most thought-provoking part of his piece lays out "five reasons the online world will not online transform traditional modes of advertising, it will largely displace them altogether."  They include:

1. People Don't Like Ads
2. But they Crave them Information
3. The Consumer is in Control..No, Really
4. Diversion of Ad Budgets
5. Pay-Per-View

But why spoil the fun with a half-baked summary.  In fact, ignore the blog blurbs on Garfield's piece like this one.  Just read it!