Had a very pleasant evening at the inauguration of the impressive Janes Financial Center at the Argyros School of Business and Economics. The Center is equipped with twelve Bloomberg terminals providing state-of-the-art, real-time, financial data and business research information to students. So now the score is that Chapman University has twelve Bloomberg terminals while USC has two, or was it one? [Read more…]
Tonight, we discussed the Harvard case study on Demand Media (of eHow.com fame) in my Social Media Marketing MBA class. It is a fascinating story about how content can be systematically produced on a vast scale and result in almost guaranteed demand from viewers and consequently also in profits for the advertisers.
The controversy regarding so-called “content farms” revolves around the opportunistic creation of content to meet current demands but doing so in a way that compromises content quality some claim. For example, Jeff Jarvis called Demand Media on this as he stated that they “create crap just good enough to fool the algorithm.” Google's search algorithm, that is. Clearly, Jeff Jarvis has a point in that somewhere, a line in the sand has to be drawn, and it is also clear that Demand Media is not striving toward writing dissertations on the topics they address.
The idea to develop and publish content that is likely to be searched has now been gaining traction for a number of years with bestselling books such as “Inbound Marketing” by the cofounders of HubSpot. What strikes me with this case, though, is the level of sophistication that seems to lie behind the proprietary algorithm used by companies such as Demand Media as they try to expedite the statistical analysis of search trends, paid ads, and statistics from social networks to get the order for the right content out there as soon as possible. See how Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt defends his model:
Then, of course, someone has to produce the said content and the identification and recruitment of a vast stable of relevant content creators clearly represent another necessary strength needed in this space. It becomes clear that for one's own postings to be noticed for popular keywords, one has to be both fast and clever in terms of how posts are tagged and outlined 🙂
If any business still wonders whether they should be on Twitter, they should take note of the likely future Harvard Business School case study “How Oreo Cookie ate from the Super Bowl.” The key learning points:
You have to pay to play goes the saying and in this case, the ticket price is significant, $3,8 million for a 30 second commercial. Even if companies not placing Super Bowl ads also could get into the social media conversation during the game, it is more likely that you will be top of mind and followed by the socialverse if you have at least one entry in the ad mix. Oreo's entry was quite an engaging at that at least according to me and my 9-year-old daughter watching it. You judge for yourself:
http://youtu.be/6kMWLYYcAYw
It has now been quite established that companies need to prepare the IT infrastructure for spikes in traffic during the Super Bowl. Also, if you sell online, you may need customer service and order representatives on standby to ensure that everything runs smoothly. In this case, the preparedness was manifested in how the agency 360i set up a mission control room where they monitored the game. Key was also to include Oreo executives of sufficient seniority so that the team could get necessary approvals on the spot.
Finally, the mission of the team seems to have been to be on the lookout for noteworthy things during the broadcast and then quickly come up with engaging content related to it. Why is this effective? Well, as David Meerman Scott calls it in “Newsjacking,” you act fast to get included as part of a bigger story or the second paragraphs of newspapers covering the bigger story. Also, this blog post is just one of many others writing about this right now. So, what did this Oreo team come up with? Well, when the power went out during the game, Oreo went to work and after 15 minutes, the posted the following tweet.
Power out? No problem. twitter.com/Oreo/status/29…
— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013
Obviously, humor and B2B marketing don't go well together, OR perhaps it should be the other way around! Humor and B2B marketing can go extremely well together! At least, it worked out greatly for Cisco a few years ago when they released a Valentine's video produced by leading business comedian Tim Washer. Check out the video below!
In the early 1990's, companies started to listen more systematically to the “voice of the customer” (VOC)* after the quality movement made it clear that companies had room for improvement in this regard. Companies could more precisely identify how to provide the most value by dissecting the customers' voice so that they could hierarchically structure and prioritize their needs. Many companies learned from this exercise and customers benefited.
However, VOC also missed the boat in one major way. The voice of the customer approach assumes that the customer is talking to you. But what if the customer is either unwilling or unable to articulate anything? This is the “silence of the customer” which could be equally if not more important than what customers actually say such as when “96% of customers who are unhappy don't complain.”
Thinking about it, in a B2B context this could also mean that social media listening efforts could be misdirected if listening is limited only to direct customers. Instead of trying to listen to direct customers when they may not have anything to say, companies could be better off holding their ears close to the ground where the customers of the customers interact instead. Why? Well, imagine if we could hear customers' customers concerns. Wouldn't that put us in a better position to also predict what our customers' needs are, articulated or not?
* Abbie Griffin & John R. Hauser (1993), “The Voice of the Customer,” Marketing Science, Vol. 12, No. 1, Winter 1993.