Highlights From Fluent

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Why does the world need another report on social? Because Razorfish believes that no one is analyzing Social Influence Marketing from the perspective of the marketer. We hope that Fluent will provide our clients more insight into how to apply Social Influence Marketing. Fluent contains a couple of important sections that we’re going to discuss today:1. The first-ever Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Survey, which unearths the importance of social media in influencing consumer purchase decisions. 2. A new tool to help you measure the impact of your brand in the social world. The measurement tool, which we call the SIM Score, measures brand favorability and reach among social influencers. We believe the SIM Score is an important break-through that shatters a myth that you cannot effectively measure social.Now let’s dig into some of the key findings of the Social Influence Marketing Survey.

We believe social world demands a new and more pivotal measure that recognizes the participatory nature of branding. Accordingly, in Fluent, we’ve introduced the Social Influence Marketing (SIM) Score, which measures two critical attributes: • The total share of consumer conversations your brand has online • The degree to which consumers like or dislike your brand when they talk to each other about you online — consumer sentiment The first attribute on this list is a measure of reach. The second is a measure of likeability. The SIM Score combines the two attributes to essentially measure favorable impact of your brand. In time, we believe that a SIM Score will be as important as, say, a Net Promoter Score. channel. What we have here is the first step in that direction.

The largest auto brands together have significantly greater market share than all the other auto manufacturers. We chose the corporate brand rather than the product brand as auto company reputations are built on the corporate brands first and foremost. With product brands in a state of flux, given all the issues affecting the auto industry, we also saw this as a more useful approach to take. The total number of conversations over a six-month period was 2,106,523.It is not surprising that Ford leads the share of voice metric with all of its various Social Influence Marketing programs underway. In terms of net sentiment though, Honda is highest. With regard to the SIM Score, Ford barely wins by virtue of its share of voice being the second largest and its sentiment just a few percentage points behind Honda’s. All in all, given the turbulence in the auto industry, people still like to talk about the auto brands and do so largely in more favorable and neutral terms than in unfavorable light.

Not about reading through 1000s of conversations, drilling down within aggregate views of spikes/dips in activity.A series of indexes assembled across monitoring partners, localized by region.

Today’s digital consumers are rapidly adopting and integrating social media into their everyday lives. Previously Razorfish shared our hypothesis that the way people are influencing each other online is giving rise to a whole new form of marketing that we call Social Influence Marketing. To better understand the relationship between social influencers, brand affinity, and purchase decisions, we conducted the Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Survey. Razorfish surveyed 1,000 consumers split evenly between active social network users and a sample drawn from the general population to test for variations in response between them. Concentrating on the 18-55-year-old range, the panel had equal gender representation. We uncovered a number of findings, and I am going to share a few with you. But the biggest take-away from the survey is this: traditional top-down branding will become increasingly impotent as social media grows. Consumers continue to rely on personal networks to learn about products and services. They’re shaping brands as much as brands themselves are. Brand management will require greater transparency and a stronger connection to consumers than ever before. Today, consumers do not have complete trust in marketing efforts of brands on social platforms --- making brand management tasks all the more difficult.

A significant number of respondents in our survey said that they contribute to social media, with 71 percent saying they share a product or service recommendation with others online at least every few months. And yet, when respondents were asked if they sought out information from brands through social media, a full 62 percent said no. Conversations about brands, products, and services are increasingly woven into the interactions of social networks as a means to connect with others, and these conversations have great influence even though people aren’t consciously asking about brand opinions. To us, these findings really shatter a popular myth that companies have finally “figured out” the social world. In fact, despite efforts to generate awareness through social, brands really aren’t reaching consumers. In our view, the problem is that too many companies are treating social like just another channel to broadcast messages. They aren’t really sharing meaningful content that consumers want to share with each other. They are not having a dialogue with consumers, either. They’re just broadcasting the same ads you can get on TV.

Meantime, ownership of the brand no longer resides in the hands of the brand itself, as consumers are shaping brands as much as brands are shaping them. So what are the implications for brands?:1. Brands must socialize with consumers. It won’t be enough for brands to craft powerful messages and push them through different media channels. They will need to participate directly in conversations with consumers.

2. Brands must develop a credible social voice. Brands will need to focus on developing a credible voice for Social Influence Marketing.

3. Brands must provide a return on emotion to other consumers. Presently, loyalty between consumers & brands is asymmetric. The more consumers sense a symmetrical relationship, the more loyal they will be. Social media is a great tool for building symmetrical brand relationships, in which both the brand & consumer recap equal returns from their relationship.

If control of the brand no longer resides completely in the hands of the brand itself, what are the guideposts to help brands join the conversation? To answer this, we looked at how consumers are influenced by social media as they move through the marketing funnel.When asked how certain sources influence respondents in the awareness, consideration, & action phases of marketing a purchase, respondents consistently attribute strong to heavy influence to word of mouth from known peers, both online and offline. In terms of brand perception during the awareness phases, independent blogs play a moderately influential role, trailing peer influencers by 31 percent. Interestingly, user-generated content from social influencers was just about as influential as corporate blogs. But as we move toward the action phase – when a purchase is about to e be made – influence from known peers asserts a substantial lead position. Independent blogs form key influencers exhibit little sway during the purchase phase, and branded corporate blogs exert almost none.

Brands must know who influences perception. For your specific brand, it is important to know what type of influencer is affecting brand affinity and purchasing decisions for your target consumers.

Brands must know the effect of influencers throughout the marketing funnel. It is essential to know how influence changes in each stage of the marketing funnel. That information should drive when to focus on which influencers and how to surface content from those influencers on corporate-owned digital properties.

Known peer influencers matter most at the bottom of the funnel. This group of family members and/or close friends, both online and offline, have the most dramatic impact on brand affinity and purchase decisions. Identifying consumers’ inner circles and how those inner circles influence your consumers is key.

Don’t forget the impact of offline influencers. It is getting difficult to separate online peer influence from offline peer influence as SIM blurs the lines between digital and physical worlds. As a result, it is necessary to remember the effect that offline social activity has on purchasing decisions, too.

As a testament to the growing popularity of Facebook fan pages and other brand affiliations, 29 percent of respondents said they associate themselves with specific brands on social networks. Fans of brand pages are not simply forming affiliations and forgetting about them – 57 percent of respondents indicated visiting fan pages every few months or weeks, and 27 percent reported interacting with them every few days or even daily.Why do people interact with a brand page? Mostly because consumers are interested in the product or content or because a friend referred them. By the way, rewards programs and promotional offers rank dead last for generating consumer interest, which supports our contention that consumers want great content, not a sales pitch, in the social world.And some categories of brand pages do better than others. Music and entertainment sites are the clear winners., with technology and electronics brands scoring well for consumer interest. The rest of the categories such as travel and financial services suffer from the weak likelihood that consumers will want to interact with them on brand pages.

Consumers look for brands that help them connect. People naturally gravitate toward brand categories that can help them converse and connect with others, such as music and entertainment, food/beverage, gadgets, arts, nonprofits, and causes.

Brands aren’t connecting enough with consumers in a social environment. Our data suggests that brands need to do a much better job of engaging with consumers on social platforms, as witnessed by the lukewarm reception and high level of indifference consumers have about brands in social media. Nearly one-third of respondents had a neutral position about the role of brands.

Fans of brands visit, and re-visit, those sites. Fan pages aren’t forgotten properties on social platforms. Rather, consumers return to them from time to time and, as a result, brands must put more effort into building, maintaining, and encouraging conversations with their consumers on them. They shouldn’t be treated in isolation fashion, either.

Trust plays a key role in influencing a consumer’s interest in purchasing a product. Our study looked at peer influence and networks alongside a more traditional media mix of expert reviews, search listings, and advertisements in order to determine how and where trust comes into play.The findings might surprise you. Our survey shows that consumers view TV ads as more trustworthy than ads on social networks when purchasing decisions are made. The problem is actually not all that complicated: marketers are treating social just like TV -- as a broadcast mechanism. So we should not be surprised that consumers trust TV more than social ads. TV has been around for decades. Consumers are more comfortable with TV in many respects.

It’s also interesting to note that although offline friends rank Number 1 for trust, online friends rank lower than you might expect. Why? Perhaps people define their online “friends” more loosely in the digital world than in the offline world?. We have hundreds of Facebook “friends,” for instance, including people we have never met. We willingly friend and follow each other on Twitter in the spirit of the social world, but that doesn’t mean we rely on our Facebook friends to make purchasing decisions.

Brands must look at influence holistically. It is not enough to look at how social influencers affect brand affinity or purchasing decisions just online or offline. As the two worlds blur, brands will need to look at the role influence plays regardless of the channel, platform, or location of that influence.

Brands must focus on value exchanges. The most influence occurs around products and services, and not in terms of affiliations with a particular brand. When practicing Social Influence Marketing, brands should focus on the fact that their customers are seeking each other out as they make product purchasing decisions.

Brands lack significant credibility in the digital realm and on social platforms. Brands should explore new ways to marketing on the social platforms that help built trust and credibility first and foremost. It is no use devoting significant marketing efforts to this space unless you’ve already figured out how to serve as a trusted brand. The social platforms require a new marketing language.

First and foremost, you need to establish your SIM Score relative to your competitors and benchmark it against the average for your industry. You must then track your SIM Score on an ongoing basis and note how it changes each time you run a digital or offline advertising campaign, a social marketing effort, a product launch or make some other major announcement. Managing your SIM Score is going to be important.Second, you must try to map your SIM Score to your offline share of voice and sentiment. Those numbers matter too — as much as your SIM Score. You need to pay attention to why one may trail the other and how sentiment in one domain can impact sales most directly. The methodologies aren’t perfect as yet, but the approach used above is an important step in that direction.And third, you must put tactical Social Influence Marketing measurement objectives in place at the start of any online effort — whether it is a display banner campaign, a SIM campaign or a blogger outreach program. The success of your program should be measured against these objectives.

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Highlights From Fluent - Presentation Transcript

Highlights from Fluent
The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report
http://fluent.razorfish.com
Shiv Singh
@shivsingh
shiv.singh@razorfish.com
http://goingsocialnow.com
Why Fluent?
Measuring Social Influence Marketing
First the Net Promoter Score
The SIM Score: A brand measure
What is the relative health of your brand in the social web?
SIM Score
Net Sentiment for the Brand with volume
Net Sentiment for the Industry with volume
/
=
The SIM Score Formula
Tracking your SIM Score today
What’s your SIM Score?
Tracking your SIM Score tomorrow
What will be your SIM Score?
SIM Score = Share of Conversation + Sentiment for online and offline world
Calculating the SIM Score for GM
Data Sources
- Different conversation monitoring vendors provide positive, neutral, negative and mixed sentiment
- TNS Cymfony captures content from best in breed content aggregators which bring together all the data
- Data pulled from millions of blogs, hundreds of thousands of message boards, forums and review sites
- Content is cleansed of spam with a six step process
- Tonality engine is applied to determine sentiment
Looking at the auto industry
Looking at the auto industry with offline
Looking at the financial services industry
Looking at the financial services industry with offline
Looking at the pharmaceutical industry
Looking at the media industry
Creating Industry SIM Scores
Apparel Retailers over three months
SIM Score questions to ask
- What impact does advertising in the different mediums have on your SIM Score?
- How does your SIM Score change from the start of a campaign, through it and after it has ended?
- What does it take to put a program in place to manage your SIM Score effectively?
- Can a SIM Score that holistically accounts for both online and offline be developed
- Does the SIM Score adjust appropriately for varying levels of influence?How does the SIM Score metrics sit with other business metrics like sales and loyalty ones?
Looking at SIM Scores with other metrics
Tips when using the SIM Score
- Valuable relative to competitors
- Track ongoing to derive most meaning
- Adjust for influence when feasible
- Quality of data drives usefulness
- Don’t mix and match data sources
- Recognize limits of data sources
SIM Score coverage
The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Survey
Introducing the Social Influence Marketing Survey
Key finding: top-down branding increasingly ineffective
How frequently do you share recommendations online?
Implications for brands
1. Brands must socialize with consumers
Implications for brands
2. Brands must develop a credible social voice
Implications for brands
3. Brands must provide a return on emotion
Key finding: influencers drive brand affinity
Implications for brands
1. Brands must know who influences perception.
Implications for brands
2. Brands must know the effect of influencers throughout the marketing funnel
Implications for brands
3. Known peer influencers matter most at the bottom of the funnel
Implications for brands
4. Don’t forget the impact of offline influencers
Key finding: product interest drives engagement
Implications for brands
1. Consumers look for brands that help them connect
Implications for brands
2. Brands aren’t connecting enough with consumers in a social environment.
Implications for brands
3. Fans of brands visit, and re-visit, those sites
Key finding: trust & influence on purchase behavior
Key finding: trust & influence on purchase behavior
Implications for brands
Brands must look at influence holistically
Implications for brands
2. Brands must focus on value exchanges
Implications for brands
3. Brands lack significant credibility in the digital realm and on social platforms.
Three concluding points
If you feel like you haven’t yet figured out the social world, you’re not alone.
Social Influence Marketing does not surpass TV and other media. SIM stands alongside other forms of marketing.
Social and should be measured. SIM Score is one important measure.
Thank You
Shiv Singh
shiv.singh@razorfish.com
http://goingsocialnow.com
twitter.com/shivsingh
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