CGM & Marketing Roles of the Future: The Future is Now

Ben McConnell at the Church of the Customer Blog wrote an interesting post in reaction to Dave Sifry’s most recent State of the Blogosphere report. McConnell identifies the need for a new marketing role within companies: the social media analyst. The role would be a kind of “consumer insights” expert for the blogosphere. These analysts would find ways to sift relevant information from blog posts and comments, and would combine that with industry and company-specific insights to form the basis of marketing recommendations.

Stowe Boyd poo-poo’s this idea as too much business intelligence fairy dust. Instead, he recommends that marketers begin to define the role of blog relations. Similar to media relations, these experts would cultivate relationships with influential bloggers with the goal of eliciting coverage in blog posts. 

My take? I think they’re both right, and that it’s not the wave of the future, it’s happening today. Nielsen Buzz Metrics, Cymfony and Umbria all offer blog mining and analysis on a fee-for-service basis. These companies provide Fortune 1000 companies with insights regarding brand awareness and buzz in the blogosphere. Clearly there is a need for a self-serve version of this for smaller organizations that lack six-figure marketing research budgets. Blog relations is a blossoming PR practice. All the major PR shops now have blog experts, and in some cases agency leaders themselves are now blogging.  New agencies are forming just to meet this demand. Certainly some of the most prominent bloggers hail from the world of PR or journalism, including folks like Steve Rubel, Jeff Jarvis and Om Malik. 

But with all due respect to Mssrs. McConnell and Boyd, I would add a third domain to the consumer generated marketing portfolio: Digital Word-of-Mouth (WOM) Marketing. WOM marketing is not new. Amway, Avon,  and MCI’s Friends & Family are all great examples from the prehistoric pre-Internet era. What’s different now is the ability to efficiently design these programs to meet the needs and interests of micro-segments of consumers. The blogosphere (and other forms of CGM) represent millions of conversations on a daily basis. These conversations are among passionate (or at least interested) users who are thinking and dreaming, designing and building a vast array of products and services. Digital WOM enables marketers to tap into these centers of conversation and harness that energy on behalf of the product or service. It’s part digital evangelist, part alternate sales channel.

Today there are a number of smaller shops and intra-preneurial units within larger agencies trying to figure out the magic behind digital WOM. There are no clear leaders yet, though the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) is beginning to coalesce the community and define standards.

CGM is having profound impacts on marketing. Given the eroding effectiveness of traditional media, it’s logical that marketers would explore CGM as an alternative. But it’s early days, and marketers are just beginning to learn how to tap into this wealth of insight and activity.

Technorati Tags:
 
CGM, Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Analysis, Word Of Mouth

Comments

[Andy Sernovitz]

Leslie --

This is a great summary of the state of thinking. Thanks!

Andy

[Jason]

Leslie,

Isn't digital WOM just another name for viral marketing?

[Leslie]

You raise a great point though I think that practitioners would draw a distinction between the two. Wikipedia highlights the differences in its entries on the topic.

According to Wikipedia, Word-of-Mouth Marketing tends to refer to programs marketers undertake to generate personal recommendations for products and services. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_of_mouth_marketing)

Viral Marketing refers to marketing techniques that seek to exploit pre-existing social networks to produce exponential increases in brand awareness, through viral processes similar to the spread of an epidemic. It is word-of-mouth delivered and enhanced online; it harnesses the network effect of the Internet and can be very useful in reaching a large number of people rapidly. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_marketing)

In a sense Word-of-Mouth Marketing is the strategy and Viral Marketing is the tactic which accomplishes it. Interestingly, there is a note on the Wikipedia entry for Viral Marketing that suggests merging it with the entry on Word of Mouth Marketing. So clearly the subject is open for debate.

Thanks for reading and commenting on MarketerBlog!

[Rohit]

Leslie,
You raise a great point about the role of Digital WOM and it's relation to the emerging PR practice of "blog relations." For my part, I find too many converted PR people focus on the relations aspect in a crisis management sense. Those of us with marketing backgrounds see the natural link between CGM and an opportunity to amplify our message by having our most fervent brand believers spread their love for a product or brand online. The true power of CGM is in the ability for a single opinion to travel farther. The smart experts will be the ones that help clients focus on amplifying the positive instead of containing the negative.

[Mack Collier]

"In a sense Word-of-Mouth Marketing is the strategy and Viral Marketing is the tactic which accomplishes it."

I would explain it this way....WOM is organic, natural conversation. Viral Marketing is where the participants have a vested interest in spreading the message.

To use a very simple explanation.....let's say a movie theater is opening in a small town in a week. Most of the town would likely hear about about the opening in a week's time, as natural WOM took over.

But let's say that the movie theater owner put a sign up on the theater that read 'Grand Opening in 7 days! Free Popcorn to all patrons on opening night if more than 200 tickets are sold to 7pm showing!'.

That's viral marketing, because now the community has a vested interest in spreading the message of the theater's grand-opening....free popcorn!

[Ben McConnell]

One option is to assign social media analyst duties to a call center director. That way, the director can correlate what's being said online to what's being said in the call center. When there's a disconnect between the two, the director will know to take action.

[Leslie]

Ben –

You make a great point about the need to bridge so-called “marketing” functions with sales and customer service (a.k.a. the channels). In too many companies there’s an artificial barrier drawn between the two. But the real world doesn’t work that way. Customers perceive it all as part of the same company, service or brand. CGM makes these artificial distinctions even more irrelevant. Smart organizations will understand this and leverage it as a strategic asset.