Emanuel Rosen, the author of the very much talked about book “The Anatomy of Buzz” and expert of word of mouth marketing, gave an eye-opening talk with examples from his books and life experience. He claims that there are two main factors that contribute to the success of generating word of mouth – how contagious the product is and what action are made to accelerate its buzz. Rosen shared his top list of characteristics that will ‘make it contagious’ including compatibility, making things simpler, allowing for creativity and also evoking emotional response. Note that many of these are internal factors that derive from the product itself.

Emanuel Rosen on Buzz at WOM UK

What about the external factors? What could we do to accelerate contagiousness? Here are a few actions that could help in increasing word of mouth for your product:
•    Wide scale seeding. We live in small social clusters, so by seeding the product into multiple social clusters in different areas will increase the chance of the product getting buzz.
•    Surprise. This may seem old and used but it always works! The element of surprise will always catch people’s attention.
•    Find a hook. Introduce an interesting or unique conversation piece about the product and people will talk about it.
•    Uneven distribution of information.  When you know something that others don’t know about, word of mouth will happen. Secrets tend to spread…
•    Stimulate interactions.  Whether in forms of competitions or viral campaigns, if you can get people to interact with each other then buzz will emerge.
•    Connecting to passion. Take the example of American Express’ and their campaign to renovate local landmarks in different cities in the US. By introducing a poll to the public they were able to get communities that are passionate about landmarks to gather up and vote.

Do you have any other useful hints and tips for creating buzz? Do you think that the effort marketers put in to producing buzz will see results if the product itself is not contagious?

We often get clients asking us about all these different channels and the best way to communicate across them. Good news is that we are going to start running workshops and training days to help expand the knowledge and ability of our clients and their internal teams. This is open to people on either side of the fence (client or agency side).

Are you interested in any of the following? If so, go to http://ping.fm/rSWYc and register your interest.

* Mobile Marketing – Harnessing the power and potential of media targeting
* Online Marketing – Getting to grips with the power of online marketing
* PR – Getting to grips with how online fits into the PR mix
* Audience Building – Unlocking the keys to boosting your traffic and retaining customers
* Blogging – Authoring blogs that get readers and ratings
* Community & Web 2.0 – Building effective online communities
* How the Internet works – Understanding the key components that make up the Internet
* Podcasting – Getting to grips with designing and building podcasting strategies
* Media Targeting – Harnessing the power and potential of media targeting
* Search for Advertisers – Getting more profitable customers through search
* Search for Agencies – Getting more profitable customers for your clients through search
* Email Marketing – Getting to grips with email marketing
* Viral Marketing – Creating effective viral marketing messages
* Research for Online Audience Behaviour – Understanding your customers
* Word of Mouth & Advocacy – Engaging and motivating your audience to promote your brand
* Widgets – The way to create widgets that get results and exposure
* Trends – Understanding the strategic trends driving the digital economy
* Web 2.0 – Harnessing Web 2.0 practices and technologies in your business
* Web Project Management – Running web projects to deliver on time and within budget
Go to http://ping.fm/IqnOz and register your interest.

stats chart for UK consumer behaviour on holiday searches vs. most things recession based

It’s official. We are in a recession. So in this time of crisis, where the latest news announcements can make a massive difference to the UK consumer, what are they searching for? News on Banking Crisis? Recession? Debt? Switching Suppliers?… or Holidays?

Yes, it appears that when the sh*t hits the fan we all decide to jump ship or at the very least fantasize about what might be (if we were not sitting in negative equity on a £400,000 broom cupboard in central London). In fact, Holiday searches are actually 14 times more popular than the nearest recession term. This may sound trivial but there can be real value for brands who use aspirational or escapist campaigns to promote their product or service during these tough times. Terry Cooney in his book Balancing Acts identifies the power and role media during the American depression of the 1930’s:

“Whether [media] offered visions of order restored, affirmations of work-centered values, or celebrations of a culture … they also held out images … that might be entered through mimicry or consumption.”

People do not want to be confronted with the depression of their daily lives or the fear of tomorrow. A successful campaign would help them focus on the ‘better tomorrow’ (or at least an escape from the ‘worse today’) that they can reach via the brand. With this in mind, one wonders if there has been a better time for the BA, Virgin Atlantic sales (environmental issues to one side)? There has always been a place for aspirational marketing to consumers but for the foreseeable future it’s a space that can be inhabited by more than just the aspirational brands. Now if only my bank could make me think about when it would be good to start saving with them again…

Why not have a play with the Beta of Google’s search insight tool for yourself and see what interesting facts you can find on UK or global search behaviour.

IAB banner

Another event that you can catch the Neoco team at – or ask us for a report from is the IAB B2B forum: B2B marketing can be hugely different to consumer facing campaigns, particularly when using online advertising, but it can also be incredibly powerful when used correctly.

This essential IAB afternoon forum will give you everything you need to use internet advertising correctly to attract, convert and retain customers in the B2B sector. Whether you are entirely new to internet advertising, or are simply looking to refine your skills, this event will equip you with actions to take back to your teams, improve your business systems and ultimately increase your return on investment in 2009 and beyond.

The IAB has been providing educational material and thought leadership in the B2B sector for many years through its B2B Council. Consisting of the industry’s leading experts, the Council has put together an agenda that is packed with case studies, helpful tips and facts. It will cover most forms of internet advertising from a strategic perspective, including search, email, display and video marketing.

At the event, the B2B Council will also be launching their latest publication with every delegate receiving a free hard copy.

AGENDA

12.45 – 1.15pm
Arrival and lunch

1.15pm – 1.30pm
Chairman’s welcome and B2B Market Overview
Joel Harrison Editor for B2B Marketing

1.30 – 2.00pm
ATTRACT – Innovative online thought leadership
Hanne Tuomisto-Inch – Banner Corporation
Andrew Sibley – Head of Brand & Advertising – Cisco Systems
Cisco’s European head of brand and advertising, Andrew Sibley, will shed light into Cisco’s worldwide experiences and strategies in branding and marketing to business and IT decision-makers in the digital space. Cisco, one of the IT industry’s leading innovators, is a good example of a company that is at the forefront of innovation in digital marketing. Online is key to all Cisco’s communications from enhancing brand experience to launching new products.

BREAK

2.20 – 2.50pm
CONVERT – Delivering business intelligence through digital acquisition 2 x breakaway sessions: long and short closing cycles
Edward Weatherall – Concep

Matt Cooksley – Global eMarketing Manager – Cushman & Wakefield LLP
Long closing cycles: Cushman & Wakefield is the world’s largest privately held real estate services firm with 221 offices in 58 countries and more than 15,000 employees. The firm offers a complete range of services to various clients, from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies. Based around the long cycle, if you choose to attend this session you will learn how to convert clients for larger purchases that require a longer period of consideration.

Alastair Douglas – Simply Business
Short closing cycles: If you run campaigns within quick closing cycle sectors, this session will be perfect for tips to improve upon your campaigns from an expert in this field. Simply Business is the UK’s most popular business insurance and finance portal, using many internet advertising tools including search to deliver undeniably good results.

2.50 – 3.20pm
RETAIN – The role of Internet marketing in Retention
Richard Bush – MD – BaseOneGroup
Retention is key, we all know that, but what role can the internet play in developing and retaining our most valuable customers. In this interactive session we’ll be investigating the retention potential of a whole range of web based techniques from search to virtual seminars.

3.20 – 3.40pm
FUTURE – 2009: an IAB insight
Guy Phillipson – CEO – IAB UK

3.40 – 4.00pm
Q & A

I’ve got to say I love Google Maps and am constantly using it to find my way to different places – being new to London it saves me a lot of time and effort trying to map read (which definitely isn’t a skill of mine!). So when I heard about Google Street View, which is soon to be launched in the UK, I was immediately sold – come the spring of 2009 not only will I be able to get a map to show me how to get to my destination, but I will also be able to visualise it thanks to the added benefit of 3D video images. Google is obtaining millions of these images and stitching them together to create a virtual replica of city streets. Having first launched in the USA in May 2007, the service is now available in Australia, Japan, France, Spain and Italy.

I think it is a great idea – not only can I familiarise myself with unknown destinations ahead of going there, it also gives me the opportunity to find an excuse not to go if I don’t like the look of it! I can also take a virtual tour of a dream destination – be it walking through Times Square, strolling along the Champs Elysees or passing over San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge!

But despite its potential advantages, Google Street View has courted a certain amount of controversy; particularly as critics believe it breaches personal privacy laws. For months now, Google have had cars and vans touring the country snapping photos with specially mounted cameras, which inevitably include people in their shots.

As a consequence of introducing Google Street View in other countries, there have been lots of amusing, wacky and also disturbing sights captured on camera! For example, in Australia a man who passed out drunk on his front lawn was horrified and embarrassed to find his picture subsequently posted on the internet. As he slept in a drunken stupor, a camera car drove by to take pictures of the street for Google’s Street View website!

In the USA, Google’s roving panoramic cameras have picked up pictures of street fights and even suspected burglaries.

Despite the reservations of some groups, such as Privacy international, to the idea of a commercial organisation taking pictures of people without their consent, Google have had the go ahead to launch the service from the UK’s privacy watchdog, provided that they put certain safeguards in place. These measures include blurring out people’s faces and vehicle registration plates. Also, if you think that you feature in any of their images, Google provides a facility for you to report your concerns to them.

Google’s Street View is a fun-to-use application that most Brits will find a use for – we’ll all just have to remember to spend a little bit longer getting ready to go out, in case any of those pesky cameras are roaming around!

Proof that people involved in global online communities are much happier.

Online communities are not social networks. Social networks are not online communities. Bold statement. Let’s break it down a little further to explain. Everyone would accept Facebook as an example of a strong social network. Looking at Facebook, we can see it is all about ‘me’. Facebook for me is about my details, my friends, my activity (the feed), comments relating to me (the wall), my groups, events I’m attending… well, you get the idea. So where social networks are about ‘me’, online communities are about ‘us’. A good example of an online community is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is created and maintained by contributions from lots of people. Contributions that do not directly relate to themselves; unless I’m Bill Gates or similar, I’m not going to have a profile presence on Wikipedia. Even if I was Bill Gates, I would be using Wikipedia different to how I use Facebook. So two separate entities that use very similar tools (online user generated content) to create and communicate their content.

An analogy of the above is gardening… let’s imagine that a social network is the same as your own little garden. You are free to plant what flowers you want, put up a nice white picket fence, maybe one of those horrible water features. Whatever you do, the garden is yours and your friends can only come in to the garden and look at your work. An online community is like a communal garden. Using the same gardening tools, the community plant flowers, dig holes, put up fences, but no-one can claim ownership over the garden or any piece of it. The garden as a whole is the creation of the community.

Interesting fact:
If the UK population of adults all set about the task of rewriting everything on Wikipedia…
it would take less than five minutes

Another good example of an online community is Trip Advisor. Most people have used it at some point or another to help with their travel plans or check out a hotel review. Trip Advisor shows that for an online community to grow it cannot be owned by the brand. The brand must be part of the community. This is not to say Trip Advisor is at the whim of it’s own population but that the brand must respect the community and what they deliver. The brand must realise it is part of a larger whole. Recent stats show over 100 users spending over 40 hours a week updating Trip Advisor – more hours than most people work in a week! These are unpaid people who do this because they want to make Trip Advisor the number one travel website – the same goal as the brand itself. They do not do this because they want to generate Expedia more money! (Expedia own Trip Advisor). This shows how it is easier (and I use that term loosely) to engage online communities than social networks, as on social networks people are there for themselves. In the community, people want to contribute and basic community practice is to associate a ‘credit’ with their level of contributions to date.

Interesting fact:
25% of Expedia’s total turnover comes directly from Trip Advisor…
despite the fact it recommends many other travel service providers

Consumer communities are a form of marketing. It’s a different form of marketing with new rules and etiquette. It’s always best to consult marketers who have a wealth of knowledge regarding community marketing – conveniently Neoco can help. Neoco are an integrated digital marketing agency that have delivered a wealth of community and social marketing across digital channels. This article is one of the many insights we produce and deliver to our clients on a regular basis. Let us know if this was helpful or if you have any questions.

The latest research compiled by IAB Europe and analyzed by Pricewaterhouse Coopers has shown that European online ad spend has grown by 40% over the past year, reaching €11.2bn/£8.9bn (from €7.2bn/£5.7bn)

Predictably, the UK, Germany and France were the key markets – accounting for two-thirds of the spend. However, other markets are growing significantly – Greece grew by 91%, Spain by 55% and Slovenia by 49%.

The IAB forecasts that 10 of the 16 European countries studied will spend over 10% of total advertising budgets online by 2010 – currently 7 nations have reached this.

If these current trends continue, it is predicted that the online ad spend in Europe will overtake that of the US by 2010, which only grew by 26% to €14.5bn over the past year.

New research by the Advertising Association and the World Advertising Research Centre (WARC) has shown that the total online ad spend in the UK reached a record high of £3bn for the first time over the last year.

Online now accounts for 16% of the total UK advertising market, growing 39.5% last year and remaining the UK’s fastest growing sector.

Ad spend across all media in the UK over the last year grew 4.2% to £19.4bn. The UK cinema advertising sector saw great growth, rising by 10.1% – although, at £207m, this is only worth 1.1% of the UK’s total advertising market. Outdoor advertising also grew by 4.6%, to £1.05bn, which gives it a 5.5% share of the UK advertising market.

Press is still the largest single sector in the UK, accounting for £7.7bn, which is around 40% of the UK advertising market. However, there was some bad news for press advertising as it saw a decline of 1.6%. Direct mail advertising also saw a decline, but a much greater one, at 6.5% taking its total spend to £2.17bn.

Many analysts have long predicted that online would soon be stealing market share from newspapers, magazines and direct mail – and these figures seem to prove them right.

This Thursday, the internet’s regulators will vote and ultimately decide whether the strict rules on top level domain names, such as .com or .uk, can finally be relaxed.

If the plans are agreed, it will have a huge impact on the address system, as companies will be allowed to turn their brands into domain names. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) oversees the domain name system and has been working towards opening up net addresses for the last three years. They have said that any string of letters will be allowed to be registered as a domain, but there will be an independent arbitration process for people with grounds for objection (who hopefully won’t treat every possibility with rejection as they did .xxx – although I’m guessing they are going to). However, hundreds of new domain names are expected to be created by the end of the year, rising to thousands in the future.

While there are clear reasons as to why these plans have come about:  a) the Internet has changed so much since the original address system was established that this system is dated; and b) existing domains are running out; I can’t really see many existing brands and companies actually using them. Maybe in the future once a few others have tried and tested the new domains they will start to catch on, but to start with I think most brands will stick with what they’ve got. After all, brands know that consumers are familiar with their current addresses and that their consumers know exactly where to find them. For example, if I want to visit a site for a brand, say Nokia, the chances are I’ll type in nokia.com and that’s where the site will be. I don’t want to have to start guessing at nokia.nok, mobile.nokia or nokia.nokia (which looks stupid anyway!). Also, changing domain names to turn your brand into a domain will have implications for your SEO. Well established and search engine friendly sites are not going to benefit from starting from scratch – especially taking into account Google’s 6 month sandbox period.

However for some sites, I think the .brand domain will work really well – .ebay is a domain that it’s suggested will be introduced and this make a lot of sense for them. Individual store owners/sellers could then have their own address at .ebay, so for example, my clothes range could be on sale at laurawear.ebay. This system would also work well for other huge sites that have individual pages or subdomains – Facebook members could each have their own address at .facebook.

Another interested point is that the plan would also allow for the new domain names to be internationalised, and so could be written in scripts for Asian and Arabic languages. And again, like most things these days, it will all come down to money in the end. Icann are still working through how much the application fee to register a domain name will be, but it is expected to be at least several thousand dollars. And, in cases where there is a dispute over a domain, there will be an auction and it will go to the highest bidder.

I guess we’ll just have to await the outcome on Thursday to find out whether the rules are relaxed, but hopefully they will be because it will be interesting to see how brands react to the new possibilities.

Now you can also have your music added to your message signatures so everyone can see what you are listening too – and even click through to listen themselves. It’s a nice interaction with FoxyTunes – which is one of the best Firefox extensions ever. Not tested if it ties in with Last FM. I love it when technology starts to ‘connect the dots’ like this as it enriches dialog between consumers and makes a richer environment for digital marketing at large.

- Loving the tune? Facebook message with song signature

While on the subject of Firefox, why not help them set a new world record for most software downloads in a day. At the time of writing this, there are still 11 hours to go and currently the UK is third in the world, just behind Canada and way off the US (of course). Interestingly, the UK has delivered more downloads than Russia, Brazil and China!

– Firefox download day world record attempt

Firefox’s true aim is to step up from number two to number one in the browser market, but their current 10-15% of market share is dwarfed by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer at 80-85%. Slowly people are seeing the light and making the switch but Microsoft’s monopoly deal with PC manufacturers means that a huge percentage of users still us the browser that came with their PC. Which sucks for us digital marketing people as Internet Explorer, particularly IE7 is a pile of horse sh*t and requires additional resources to deliver the same display as Firefox.