Marta Strickland of Organic has a terrific article in AdAge on the looming intersection of semantic web and marketing. The article’s title What Can Semantic Web—or Web 3.0—Can Do for Marketers? was bound to raise some hackles: our Utopian semantically-rich online future meets marketers flogging their wares online. Strickland introduces the concept of 3.0 and uncovering meaning behind the data, and contemplates what semantic capability could mean for making ads relevant and metrics meaningful.

The value of understanding meaning as well as words is becoming ever clearer. Marketers looking to understand how far buzz is resonating as well as where to place campaigns are all too familiar with the limitations of simple keyword matching. And any web user who has searched for Pink the singer versus Victoria’s Secret Pink lingerie versus breast cancer Pink can relate to their keyword pain.

How might Web 3.0 change this? Google AdWords currently places ads primarily based on a keyword approach. How long will it be before AdWords or other prominent ad networks develop or partner for semantic capability, ensuring marketers know which “Pink” they’re getting?

Today there’s still some confusion about which online marketing tactics are resonating, and how best to measure their ROI. Marketers are still learning where they can and can’t play successfully online. Strickland poses the right question at the end: anyone promising to bring semantic benefit to your business should be able to readily explain how their technology will make your ads more relevant and your metrics more meaningful. Bridging the disconnect with ad-weary consumers and helping marketers measure their results will help marketers better target their onlne efforts—always important, but vital in a downturn.

Tags: advertising, marketing, semantic web by admin
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For everyone that missed the excitement: Motrin, a staid J&J brand, had a social media campaign blow up in their faces last weekend. They posted an online video, aimed at mothers with young children, that was perceived by some ‘Mommy Bloggers’ as condescending and preachy.  A firestorm rapidly ensued on Twitter, video parodies appeared on Facebook, and the social media cognoscenti emerged to offer their counsel to the surprised brand managers. Motrin, to their credit, reacted quickly, pulling the advertisement and issuing an apology within 48 hours.

To borrow a phrase from State Farm’s ad campaign:  Now what ?

Counterintuitively, Motrin is in a great position for its next foray into the social media conversation. The outpouring of customer opinion, albeit negative, has been a fire-hose of feedback on the Motrin product and brand. This feedback can be a valuable resource for Motrin when constructing their social media engagement.

Motrin has the opportunity to use this episode and its unsightly residue in the blogosphere to learn three things that will help their future social media efforts

1. What were people’s initial perceptions of product or brand?
This incident probably generated more text from consumers about Motrin than has been written in the last five years.  The insight mined from these comments can be used to help steer future product innovations or marketing planning .

2. Who are the key influencers in the social network?
Knowing how opinions spread, the key channels, and the node influencers, will help Motrin avoid future problems. By understanding whom they might reach out to and give them a roadmap to spread desirable messaging.

3. How long will the damage last?
Motrin will learn how badly this incident has tarnished their brand, if at all. (Personally, I view this as a case of ‘any publicity is good publicity’). Motrin has found itself with a naturally-occuring case study for gauging the ROI of social media investments.. This lesson can help them weigh the benefits of social media marketing, as well as understand the pitfalls.

Tags: advertising, brand, brand monitoring, uh oh by edward
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Joel Spolsky writes an excellent post on anecdote, pointing out how compelling vignettes are often strung together and used to support conclusions.  As a marketer I’m a big believer in the power of the story, but the oft-quoted “the plural of anecdote is not data” (long, indeterminate attribution here) definitely applies to brand and opinion monitoring. The most obvious problem is that anecdotes are not systematically selected; they’re selected as supporting points while other, conflicting anecdotes are inadvertently or deliberately ignored.

For those selling opinion monitoring into the large organizations, it’s a balancing act between providing the core, statistically valid analysis of the data, while “storytelling” with enough of the vivid anecdote for the client to hear the customer’s voice and engage. While opinion percentages are revelatory, an incident like Motrin Moms (summary from AdAge) tends to speed the adoption cycle dramatically.

Tags: customer voice, measurement, uncategorized by admin
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The two weeks since the election have been filled with theories about what, precisely, fueled the Obama victory. Technophiles and social media gurus have been quick to connect the dots between the huge gap in the youth vote (Obama led McCain among the under thirty crowd by a 2-to-1 margin) and the Obama campaign’s extensive use of “hip” technologies to announce his running mate, raise money, and defend himself.

It is a joke to assume that every one of Barack Obama’s 3,164,379 Facebook friends voted for him. The lesson behind the punchline is that “friending” is a lesser commitment than voting―but the latter is fostered by the former. The real takeaway for brand managers is not the Obama campaign’s use of the internet to make news or to raise money; it is its use of the internet as a way to turn semi-interested supporters into devoted, uber-committed brand evangelists―especially via fightthesmears.com―that we find most exciting.

To paraphrase Mack Collier, brand evangelists are committed to your brand to the extent that they are willing to go the extra mile in order to see the brand succeed. The Obama campaign recognized that whether the “extra mile” is spent driving a bit further to a beloved local book store or walking down a stretch of sidewalk knocking on doors for your candidate, the principle is the same.

What’s the next “brand” challenge for Obama? Obama has set the bar high by connecting directly with voters to drive evangelism/engagement. It’s an entirely new order of magnitude―and perhaps an important measure of success―to maintain this connection as he transitions from campaigning to governing.

Tags: brand, marketing, politics by Megan Costello
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The estate of Martin Luther King, Jr. is pondering legal action regarding the sale of unlicensed King imagery in the commemorative items cropping up all over in the wake of Barack Obama’s victory. Whether this legal action strikes you as sensible image protection or overzealous profit-seeking, the real takeaway for me is the power of consumers to remix and, to a lesser extent, remake your brand.

Long gone are the days when companies could effectively police brand style guides with their logo non-interference zones, and showcase “walls of shame” depicting egregious logo misuse. Consumers have the power to reproduce and manipulate images — both in their appearance (see this Starbucks “Consumer Whore” logo parody) and in their intended use (the Diet Coke/Mentos experiment was probably not in either brand’s marketing plan, but the YouTube video has been viewed over 7M times).

Bottom line: strategic brand managers have always been all about the experience, but now it’s as much about including consumers as enticing them. No word yet on Dr. King’s family’s decision about how to manage the imagery, but the challenge becomes more difficult as infringements “pop up like mushrooms”.

Tags: brand monitoring, marketing by admin
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Last week, I attended the CMO Summit in San Francisco, and this week my colleague Cesar Brea and I presented at CMO Club in Boston. Our focus was a framework for engagement — defining “structured collaboration” as a sort of a brandprint for identifying and filtering

In both venues, questions arose about the changing role of marketing in the Web 2.0 environment. CMOs today face huge challenges: rapidly shifting channels, ever shorter tenures, interaction with IT as technology becomes core, and managing relationships with legal (which are captured beautifully here by David Armano). In addition, some cultural barriers remain in transitioning from brand command-and-control to a brand experience shaped by the ever-widening concentric circles of social media.

Tags: events, marketing by admin
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We’ve often noticed that people tend toward extremes when assigning online product ratings. For Amazon products with an theoretically average (3 star) rating, more than 65% of all ratings lump into either the best or worst score – a ‘bimodal distribution’ in stats-speak. There are many potential reasons: a lack of clear criteria for different ratings, a desire to influence the displayed score, shameless promotion, spite, and so on. Whatever the reason, the end result is that many rating systems are essentially a thumbs-up, thumbs-down proposition and often give misleading information.

Fortunately, the lack of sophistication doesn’t carry over from quantitative ratings to text-based reviews. From what we’ve seen in the distribution of ratings, we might expect text-based reviews similarly to espouse straightforward points of view. Instead, most text-based product reviews actually contain ‘complex opinion’— writing with at least one observation contrary to the overall argument. (There are some notable exceptions to this trend.)

As an example, in this Amazon listing for a Casio camera, 61% of the 46 English-language reviews mention both a positive and negative aspect of their experience. Considering the average review is only about four lines long, the amount of even-handedness is surprising. Other merchants, such as Best Buy, include designated fields in their review systems for Pros and Cons to encourage more considered opinions.

Tags: research by edward
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Election fever is everywhere. Online, you can feed your fixation with an endless stream of polls, pro bloggers, YouTube videos, or Twitter election updates. And whatever the result tomorrow, the punditry has only just begun.

Here at Crimson Hexagon we’ve been monitoring what blog RSS feeds are telling us about people’s perception of the candidates. We’ve searched and pulled down a whole bunch of feeds, determined categories based on those results, and then filtered the opinion to find: What does the blogosphere like least about John McCain / Barack Obama?

Here’s what we found:

McCain
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Obama
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When you start to track foibles over time — whether McCain’s or Obama’s, we noticed that campaign tactics are something our monitors flagged for the negative watch list.  We also can see how real-time events influenced people’s opinions: the launch of the Britney/Paris celebrity ad resulted in a big backlash against McCain’s negative campaign tactics that has only escalated. Obama’s much ballyhooed infomercial?  Generated a huge amount of discussion, 3x of any recent prior event for him, but the sentiments in those discussions were more of the same.

The New York Times is declaring that technology and Web 2.0 capabilities were a palpable force in this campaign. We believe that we’re just beginning to see the impact of distilling the opinion from a wide range of voices.

Tags: news, research by Candace Fleming
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