Grounded In Reality

I had the opportunity to attend Nielsen Buzzmetrics’ Consumer-Generated Media Summit today in NYC. Pete Blackshaw kicked things off with a great discussion about how much the digital media landscape has evolved over the past year. Key points:

• Word of Mouth remains the most trusted source of influence for consumers who are making purchasing decisions.
• Search continues to have a huge impact on corporate reputation. Influential communities like Wikipedia are “credibility brokers” for companies.
• Consumer-generated video and audio is exploding, largely due to simple editing, publishing, and storage services. Nielsen refers to this as consumer-generated multimedia, or “CGM2.”
• Consumers are increasingly dictating how branded content lives (or dies) online. Nielsen calls this “Consumer Fortified Media.” Fancy term aside, it means that online marketing initiatives aren’t completed until consumers inject their POV via comments and other methods. In other words, consumers “finish the story” by evaluating and amplifying content that marketers produce (e.g. embracing, DIGGing, spoofing, protesting). This reinforces the fact that marketers no longer have complete control of their messages. The Web has created a flat playing field.
• The “wave of consumer emulation” has arrived. More than ever, brands are mirroring how consumers communicate and act. Look no further than the Presidential candidates who are using Web 2.0 to the max: Add the Fred08 widget to your page! Follow John Edwards on Twitter! Get text messages from Hillary! The takeaway: Brands are benefiting by communicating and acting just like consumers. The warning: Consumers spot imitation and exploitation instantly. Authentic messaging remains critical.

The Summit continued with a series of excellent breakout sessions covering healthcare buzz, media & entertainment, advertising & engagement, and defensive branding. There were great insights from attendees, although we’re prohibited from blogging the deets (Nielsen request).

More at Peter Kim’s blog.

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By: Andrew Foote
GCI Group - NY

Over the past week, Dell has been the topic of many conversations in the blogosphere, spurred by a Forrester Groundswell Award and BusinessWeek article discussing the company’s transformation from digital bystander to leader.  In reading these posts, I am incredibly proud of the GCI team that helped make this happen. (NOTE: Dell is a GCI client)

Below are a few highlights from the blogosphere:

• BusinessWeek: Dell Learns to Listen: Jeff Jarvis takes a guest columnist role to discuss his two-year relationship with Dell and an overview of Dell’s social media initiatives. The online version is complete with a 25-minute video of an interview with Michael Dell (also available on Jeff’s blog: BuzzMachine).   He also posted the un-edited version, which notes a very measurable impact of Dell’s programs:

“Thanks to this new relationship, the company learns about issues online before they do in the press or sometimes in-house. They are stanching the flow of bad buzz. By their measure, negative word of mouth in blogs has dropped from 49 to 22 percent. And my Dell Hell posts, which used to come up third on a Google search for the company, are now relegated to second-page search-engine Siberia. ‘That change in perception just doesn’t happen with a press release,’ Menchaca says.”

• Direct2Dell - Dell’s Blog: Lionel Manchaca did an interview with Jeff near the end of the day and posted the vlog that resulted on Direct2Dell.

• Forrester’s Groundswell blog also mentions Dell’s transformation when referencing the Forrester Groundswell Awards that were given out last week.

Company transformation. Dell.
We created this new category to capture the powerful changes happening across all functions at Dell. The Dell Customer Advocate program, which pursues fast resolution of support problems, decreased the negative share of online comments about Dell by 25%. Direct2Dell, Dell’s frank and informative blog, generates 3.5 million page views per month. Ideastorm, Dell’s innovation community, tallied 500,000 votes for over 7,000 ideas and generated a new product, Dell PC’s with Linux pre-installed. And Employee Storm, an internal idea community, has generated 2,700 ideas and seen visits from 22% of Dell’s employees.

• From Geoff Livingston at The Buzz Bin:

Relationships and RELATIONS are about being human — not God. Together as humans we experience life and grow together. Mistakes happen, and good PR can overcome this. Consider Dell’s incredible lesson in admitting wrongs, listening and changing. This week’s BusinessWeek story is a celebration of relations.

• Our own Paul Walker mentioned that he is “really proud of the people and programs mentioned in the article. Thanks, Dell, for letting us be a part of it.” 

On behalf of GCI, I want to give the entire team a big pat on the back! The consistent creativity and innovation in new media waters is something to be extremely proud of.

An interesting new crowd-sourcing site appeared recently, still in Beta, of course, from The Nielsen Company and is (not-so-cleverly) called: Hey! Nielsen.   The site requires that you register to participate and share your opinion, but without registration, you can search through the results of other folks recommendations.  Feels to me like a mix of Digg, IdeaStorm (for Dell, a GCI client), and TV Guide.

There are a couple of things to look at on the site:

• Opinions
  In topics labeled TV, Movies, Music, Personalities, and Internet, members can post opinions about current shows, bands, songs, people, Web sites, etc.  Then the crowd gets to agree or disagree and add additional comments.
• Rankings
  “Each topic (TV show, Movie, etc.) earns a Hey! Nielsen Score, determined by user opinions, comments, and ratings. Calculated daily, the Hey! Nielsen Score also factors in internet buzz via BlogPulse.com.  There is currenlty about a 7-hour avg for updating statistics information.”
• Calendars
  Soon enough this will be the “TV Guide with opinions”…but it will have to launch first.
• Members
  Looking similar to other social networking profiles…and very similar to Digg’s latest ‘profile’ launch, you will be able to click on a member to see which shows, music, etc they like and dont like.  The earlist member date I saw was in May for NatGuy who claims “I’m one of the folks involved in helping to build this site.”  Nielsen lists how many recommendations they have made and lists all their posts.
• Widgets
  What would a site be if you couldnt see if scrolling on your blog? :)  Therefore, they have created a nice scrolling widget for you to keep up with the latest and greatest recommendations on the site.  Hopefully this will become customizable.

Naturally, if you are related to the entertainment industry, this would be an ideal place to gather consumer insights and responses to your content.  However, it would not be an ideal place to promote your entertainment client unless you are extremely open and transparent in your role.

Eventually, Nielsen sees using the information as statistical evidence in each catagory, but personally I think you will need to let the site live for a good amount of time before you can qualify the information collected as valid.  I am also still stuck on the problem of the ‘online demographic’ setting the opinions of a whole set of humans.  I still feel like it is skewed unless mixed with other forms of information collection.

I am interested to see how others respond to the site and the use of the information as statisical analysis.  Would you believe what they say, just because its Nielsen?

Four weeks ago, Facebook, with 25 million users, launched a new strategy to be a technology platform where anyone can build applications for social computing–with one clever caveat, that all third-party applications, if approved, will be routed through Facebook’s servers. This, together with the carte blanche rights to monetize these applications through ad dollars, are good causes for businesses to revisit their social networking strategy.

Marc Andreessen has a brilliant analysis of the Facebook Platform. Here are my three cents concerning the business implications of Facebook applications:

1. Ease of use: It’s amazingly easy to add applications with a single click, and like widgets, applications serve a single, non-ambiguous purpose. Q: What campaign initiatives might be communicated in such a compact, eye-candy fashion?
2. Applications are intelligent: Because they have to be pre-approved by Facebook, my applications are linked to and have access (with my permission) to the information that I have previously shared. Q: How to build on this consumer behavioral data and design a targeted, personalized campaign?
3. Naturally viral: I am cued to new applications that my friends have added thanks to updates from the News Feed. (Think of News Feed as a wire service for what my friends are up to.) In other words, applications come recommended by “word of mouth” as friends observe each other. Q: What’s a meaningful, mention-worthy application that makes the user look good (think ‘Live Strong’ bracelet) among friends?

Additionally, having likely learned from MySpace, Facebook has provided easy-to-use privacy settings for all applications.

InformationWeek wrote an interesting article this week about the latest generation of college grads entering the workforce and what technology they expect to be made available while on the job.

I can vouch that there have been times I was not allowed to access technology  necessary for me to be fully capable of doing my job…with a Google Toolbar being the simpliest of things.

IDC research numbers show(ing) that 45% of companies have workers blogging, 43% use RSS feeds, and 35% of companies have employees using wikis.

What’s interesting about that, according to Susan Feldman, VP of content technologies at IDC, is that the study also showed that IT managers and executives largely didn’t know any of this was going on.

It is understandable that a company would have progam downloading banned from users, but there should be a policy in place for requesting access to relevant sites/downloads.

She (Susan Feldman) told InformationWeek that with Web 2.0 technologies increasingly becoming part of people’s social lives, they will demand that it be part of their work lives, as well. And a lot of companies may have this new technology inside their firewalls that they simply don’t know about.

“We’ll have to deal with the reality of people coming in and using tools that aren’t in the firewall,” said De Beer. “Web 2.0 empowers users beyond creating content. It’s about how we interact. For the next generation, it will be about mass collaboration, using social networking.”

In my opinion, things will morph.  Just as companies had to create ‘blogging policies,’ they will also have to create other Web 2.0 poilicies. 

Check out “The complete Web 2.0 directory”

The site can help you to get an overall view of the different Web 2.0 tools and survey the scene of online communities.  Maybe you know the directory, maybe you don’t – but I think it’s impressive.  Remember to use the tags!

Kristian Levring Madsen
GCI Mannov, Copenhagen

Check out the latest social networking application called Fidg’t by Santa Monica-based PROTOMOBL. It brings together all your different social networking tags, profiles, friends’ lists and conversations. Similar to Trillion and Pidgin (formerly Gaim) that integrated different chat applications under one roof, Fidg’t makes it easy for users to control and manage their online social life.

The Fidg’t Visualizer is a cool application that needs to be downloaded and works with Macs, PCs and Linux platforms. There is a central magnet where you type your query or tag. There are white bubbles that represent individual users and networks. The magnet is then drawn towards groups and users who are discussing the tag.

The user interface looks protoplasmic and very edgy in an extraterrestrial way. Apart from its cool looks and fun features, most exciting to me is the fact that it could act as the ‘little black book’ for the media community. You now have access to a central nerve control station of people coming together, talking and sharing ideas. Sounds pretty cool to me!

 Check the video of the Fidgt presentation at Innovate! Europe 2007 fromYouTube… 

If you know me, I have probably told you that I think everyone should have one…and I do.  But this morning, as I go to read my morning paper (AKA my Google Homepage) it has this funny letter in front of it?  An i.  But why?

I did the ususal to find out what the creative decoration of ‘Google’ meant by scrolling across it — nothing.  So, I close out of my personalized page and go to the main page to scroll across it — nothing.  What next? Google’s blog, where of course, I find the answer:

For a while now, we Googlers have used a bit of shorthand to refer to the Personalized Homepage — a name that connotes interactivity, the Internet, and personalization all at once. Please meet iGoogle, the new name for the Google Personalized Homepage.

Not a fan.  The lowercase “i” is WAY overused.  More than ‘that’s hot’…more than ‘duh’, ’sych’ and ‘dude’ all combined.  IMHO, Unless you are in a deal with Apple and required to start your products with an “i”, then DON’T DO IT. (anyone else feel this strongly?)

– I digress –

There is some interesting news following the name change (if you can get past it).  You get more capabilities and they come in the form of a photo gadget, a “GoogleGram” greeting card-style gadget, a YouTube video channel gadget, and a free-form gadget.  Create your own.

The photo one should be popular, based on the popularity of photo slideshows on MySpace. This will definitely consume some of my time today, but it will have to wait until this afternoon.  In the mean time, someone else should send me a GoogleGram!

I’ve been exploring Twitter, and I came across an interesting application: twittering a TV premiere. During the premiere of FOX’s “Drive” last night, the executive producer and director, Grey Yaitanes, twittered his personal commentary.

There might be something to this for companies to use. If you have an interesting, high-profile person twittering the “inside scoop” on an event or product, people might just tune in.