6_LiveWeb

[|Andreas Weigend] MBA 267, Spring 2009-B Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley
 * Marketing 2.x: The Social Data Revolution**

=**Class 6: Live Web**= April 30, 2009 Audio recordings and transcripts: Part 1: [|mp3] [|transcript] Part 2: [|mp3] [|transcript]

=**Agenda**= //Monitoring Live Web for Fun & Profit// //Guest speakers://
 * Sean Ammirati, CEO of [|mSpoke]
 * Walker Fenton, GM of [|NewsGator]

//Objective:// reveal the next generation of tools for corporations to listen, learn & engage with the live web.

=**Notes**=

__Some lessons from Craigslist's CEO:__
 * Listen to what users want
 * Hire good people
 * No meetings, ever “I find them stupefying and useless”
 * No management programmes and no mba’s
 * Occasionally give ppl a “gentle” nudge”
 * Not really chatty on email
 * Put speed over perfection

Guest speakers Sean and Walker apply the concept of failing fast: try stuff out, learn from it, respond it it. Learn and repeat.

Social marketing is all about engaging & learning.
 * Old marketing: big message, some buyers
 * New marketing: now: stuff is happening all over the place

Example: asking s.o. “Do you think his shirt is clean” brings focus to his shirt, makes him think about the cleanliness of his shirt (vs. “nice clean shirts” as marketing message).

As a marketer who focuses on social marketing, you should act as a “cocktail party host” – i.e. give ppl stuff to talk about, and let go. The idea is to make a difference in people’s life by engaging them with an individual message: Listen, learn & engage. “With the digital world going social, we recognize that peer influence is having a greater affect on brand affinity and purchasing purchasing decisions than any traditional form of marketing.” Recommendation: Follow Sean Ammirati on Twitter

__Some other community evangelists on twitter__ Idea: Get an RSS-feed from search.twitter.com to follow on specific topics (e.g. haas, …) Interesting question: what is missing to make this a community?
 * Will Pate, ConceptShare
 * Mario Sundar, linkedin
 * Ericskiff, clipmarks
 * Marilyn Pratt, sap labs
 * Brett Meyers, zloop
 * Carole McManus
 * Damon billion, mint dbillian
 * Jim lynch, ziff davis (jwlynch)
 * Daniel H, Disqus
 * William azaroff vancity

Example: jetblue is a pretty good airline – their twitter account is being used to answer people when they are emotional about the brand (flight cancelled) It is easier to catalyze a conversation when ppl are emotional (!) Even a brand like procter&gamble could probably directly engage with their community (cheaper than super bowl ad) Companies that are using twitter can especially have an impact b/c other brands are not doing it!

Intro about the company mentioning that it started as a RSS platform and it currently manipulates RSS in every way possible. Newsgator now holds rich content of data about what is popular, given million of user using its platform.
 * NewsGator**

Culture at newsgator: “crush it for the customers” leads to current situation where “customers will do anything for the newsgator guys”. (Sean would like to bring that atmosphere to mSpoke.)  “A person’s attention is the most valuable resource they have”. They are able to build reports about customer data. The technology is catching up and is enabling measurement and possibly predictability is a much more reliable manner.

Sean talking about prediction, B2B Business idea: Which whitepaper will people download from a web-site: Translates directly into money for website operators Analysis and prediction: Number of stories does not necessarily correlate to attention. In example shown, curve for mentions of "business cycle" doesn't match attention spent on articles on that topic. Used by a client (PR consulting firm) to measure performance.

Getting the paradigm right: Spreadsheets or the computer mouse were very successful paradigms that haven't really changed that much over time. For social media, the paradigm is "**Feeds**". This includes RSS feeds, activity streams (Twitter, Facebook). Feeds make it easy to parse the social web.

No conflict between traditional web-pages and RSS feeds: Feeds can drive traffic to web-page, but even if they don't, they help you get your message out, create a connection. But. People might not see older content that is still relevant.

Discussion of etiquette: Is it ok to auto-follow when a user mentions your product/brand-name or is it spamming/stalking.


 * Engagement and companies listening to users**


 * Homework discussion**
 * Starbucks Social Community: Web site dedicated to capturing feedback, discussions about Starbucks (Starbucks Ideas powered by Salesforce). Company looking for ideas. Engagement example: Product too expensive, customers joined discussion and reaction from Starbucks employee.
 * Lucasarts Forum: Talking about Wii games being too family oriented. Very tight community that doesn't accept newcomers. Lucasarts defended product decisions. Takeaway: Persistent identity/reputation matters. Facebook Connect/OpenID could have helped.
 * Amazon: 80% of comments are positive (4* or 5*) - people in the community are fans. People just coming usually complain
 * Comcast: Reaction within two minutes ("is there anything we can help with")

During the second half of class we explored the ways in which companies are successfully using the news aggregation and content-relevance tools available today as a means towards the end of increased engagement with their customers.
 * Engagement: some examples**

>> Dozens of Dell reps sit behind Twitter IDs responding to topics specific to all sorts of areas relevant to different customers (Dell direct, country-specific, small business, Alienware, etc.) >> Representatives actively answer product-specific questions on Yahoo's platform. >> Open blog space for Dell customers to share experiences across all range of topics, going beyond technology. >> Why pay for TV airtime when people will watch you ads for free on the Internet? For now, anyway. Google will surely monetize YouTube users like these soon. >> Pictures of Dell racks of computers, cool? Somebody might think so ... >> No fans inside our class, but 28,000+ in total currently on the premier social network. Somebody asked "how many employees do they have?" :-) There is also a large amount of Dell-hating on Facebook, as well as other blogs on the blogosphere. >> A web space for suggestions that you would normally send to product management, direct by their customers. >> Also many, mostly ex-employees or current workforce networking with partners and other colleagues.
 * The Dell example**
 * Dell has been leading in social media integration/accepting and listening to feedback
 * [|On Twitter]
 * [|Yahoo Answers]
 * [|Dell Blog] (Direct2Dell)
 * [|Dell YouTube Channel]
 * [|Dell Flickr account]
 * [|Dell on Facebook]
 * [|Dell Ideastorm]
 * [|Dell groups on LinkedIn]
 * Thousands of blogs/boards/etc talking about Dell outside of their domain

>> Can you mine the blogosphere to aggregate content that we find relevant onto our site? Newsgator took relevant content and made it available to this site that was interested in tracking the business traveler. Other expamples could be Samsonite, etc. A site that requires very little effort to create editorialized content from social media sites.
 * Emerging Use Cases**
 * Listening (attention data)
 * [|BusinessWeek], ran an experiment to write an article based on Twitter posts. Publicity stunt or new-age journalism?
 * Learning (analysis)
 * Sample mSpoke report
 * Engagement
 * Roadwarriorjournal.com
 * Denver Post using Newsgator content, letting mSpoke add meta-content generate "paths of intent" to deterministically guide people to links that they are ultimately interested in.


 * How to take learnings to your company**
 * Peers matter
 * Processing matters.
 * If you invite comments, you need to engage and respond.
 * What matters is to understand how the consumers want to be responded to

When facing the challenge of presenting Marketing 2.0 tools to a new audience, we need to keep in perspective who it is that will be listening to us.
 * Overview of different perspectives on engagement**
 * Top executives (HSM), business leaders trying to figure out how to adapt their companies to this new world.
 * Don't emphasize data ("they've had a bad experience")
 * It works, it's cheap but requires often learning from failures. Small, cost-effective are the concepts they like to hear.
 * Marketing executives
 * "Data" means very little to the rest of the world, but they care about it.
 * How have the 4 Ps fundamentally changed? Think about how product, price, place & promotion are being represented in social media.
 * These approaches are cheap, you don't need full time employees to cover this responsibility.
 * Experimentation: A/B screnarios.
 * Audience who want to know what the future will be like
 * Discovery: beyond Gutenberg, beyond Google
 * Helping customers with decision making

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