Smart things: buzz and snappy science (1.26.12)

Smart things – bookmark them, write them down and turn them into a blog post.  In hopes of sharing some content I’ve found interesting and noteworthy, here are five smart things I’ve heard lately.

1.   Negative buzz vs. crisis on social media.  “Brands with social media experience know they don’t need to respond to every ounce of negative buzz in the social sphere; often, letting consumer brand advocates do it for them can address the problem while also showing how loyal some customers are to the company.”  eMarketer: Do Social Media Postings Always Require a Brand Response? 

7 Creative PR and Marketing Ideas

Not everyone gets feedback from David Pouge or Robert Scoble for their PR pitches, but creative PR and marketing ideas do have a way of earning the right attention all on their own – and hopefully from customers.  I like to keep an eye out for those really creative ideas, but the reality is they don’t come along every day:   The list of seven below was nearly a year in the making.

1. Earning more blog comments.  “Commenting seems to have decreased over the past six years,” wrote Geoff Livingston on his blog recently.  You wouldn’t know it by the number of quality comments on Adam Singer’s blog, The Future Buzz. Perhaps that’s because Adam does something very clever in rewarding great commenters:  every so often, he turns the best comments on his blog into a blog post.  It’s a savvy tactic I’ve also observed elsewhere, like Mack Collier’s blog.  People like to be acknowledged for their thoughts and this is certainly a nice way of doing it; bonus for re-using great content to develop an easy, but value added blog post.

Prediction #3: Marketers regain sense of control

Note:  this is the third and final prediction in a series of predictions I’m making for 2012.  The first two can be read here:  Prediction #2: Favor tips towards credible media and Prediction #1: Social media slides down the pedestal.

Marketers are no longer in control of their brands.  Do you believe it?  I did.  But as in my first prediction, my thinking is changing. 

As I’ve spent nearly a year away from my day job in PR, I’ve found the distance has given me a new perspective.  Sometimes we need to step back to see things in perspective.  Geoff Livingston’s post (the photo credit also belongs to Geoff via Flickr), The Customer Is Not Your CMO, made it click in my mind:

Prediction #2: Favor tips towards credible media

Note: this is the second of three predications I’m making for 2012.  The first one is out and can be read here:  Prediction #1: Social media slides down the pedestal.

There’s a growing backlash against infographics.  The backlash scale ranges from the inevitable call for the death of infographics to mere issues with aesthetics, but I think The Atlantic was the most scathing.  It classified infographics as a plague.  

“95% of infographics from unknown sites are full of distortions and lies inserted by internet marketers to get you to link to their websites,” reads a presumably satirical infographic. The article continues by pointing out the factual in accuracies of several popular infographics including the “Hazards of Hospitals” and the “Prison/Princeton.”

To PR pros, this criticism is similar to that of surveys (here’s a little anecdote about the Pope and surveys that sums it up this criticism).  However, this time I think it’s different – and it’s indicative of an underlying theme:  a trend towards credible media.

Prediction #1: Social media slides down the pedestal

Blog posts on predictions are predictable and common.  Forecasts range from what sort of content will flourish, what networks will thrive and how the behavior of consumers – and by extension marketers – will change are plentiful. 

Many of these predictions are well-grounded, but even as a social media enthusiast, I’m beginning to get a sense that the allure of social media is waning. 

In making predictions I offer a caveat:   social media will continue to be an important part of content consumption and marketing.  However, I tend to think of social media behavior in the context of Tuckman’s stages for group development.  

Media coverage drove Twitter’s growth, report says

Media coverage drove Twitter’s user base, which now rests at about 300 million. That’s the conclusion of a new report which analyzed the site's growth pattern from 2006 to 2009.

In case it’s overlooked, it wasn’t a self-anointed PR measurement guru that drew this quaint conclusion, but rather MIT civil and environmental engineers that used the analogy of contagion, which epidemiologists and viral marketers alike, will find familiar. Contagion is the process of how diseases are transmitted.

Twitter’s aimpoint centers on clients

Several years ago, a client of mine and venture capitalist said to me there were three reasons for one company to acquire another:  to acquire technology, to acquire customers, or to kill the competition.

Few were surprised then when Twitter acquired Tweetdeck for a reported $40 million because they were addressing a trend:  more and more users were using unofficial client applications to interact on Twitter rather than using Twitter.com.  Actual numbers were conflicting.  At the low end, about 40% of users were estimated to be using clients (i.e. Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, CoTweet, listing), while at the high end, insiders at Twitter said that number was upwards of 90%.  In any case, at least 40 million users enjoyed the service, but avoided the interface.

The market opportunity: sizing up the PR market

As an industry PR is challenged:  it struggles with who we are, what we do and how to measure our work.  It should be no surprise then that there’s a great deal of discrepancy to be found in the methods and results of sizing up the PR industry.

Case in point?  The latest VSS Communications Industry Forecast:

“The only Traditional Marketing segment to outperform the economy, Public Relations & Word-of-Mouth Marketing, will see CAGR of 14.0% in the forecast period to $10.96 billion in 2015, as the role of PR in integrated marketing campaigns expands and social media fuels gains in WoMM spending.”

If you can get past the  verb “outperform” as applied to categorization  of  “traditional marketing,” you’ll see the data was part of a report that will cost you a mere $4,000 to read, produced by PQ Media, which sells research services, and commissioned by private equity Veronhis Suhler Stevenson, which funds debt for leveraged buyouts. 

Unintended consequences: don’t blink, it’s buyology

Ever see cigarette warning labels in Europe?  They’re pretty gross (pictured nearby).  Think they work?  Surveys of smokers say yes, but interviews with their brains say no.   In fact, researchers have found that warning labels actually trigger smoking stimulus. Talk about unintended consequences.

So says Martin Lindstrom in a new book called Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy.  Market researchers scanned the brains (think MRI) of smokers and found that warning labels seemed to indicate an inclination, rather than aversion, to smoking during viewing.  This despite indicating on a survey that those same smokers felt warning labels had the same effect. What does that mean for your market research survey?

Feedback wanted: do you like this new blog design?

Taking a tip from @adamsinger, who also recently launched a redesign of his blog The Future Buzz, I've hired the same company to redesign this blog.   They've offered a mock up of a potential template and while I started to provide feedback, it occurred to me I should share the design here before it do: What do you think of the design?  What feedback do you have? 



Reloaded: deliciously purity of social sharing

Web 2.0 is delicious.  Delicious in the intellectual sense:  how it’s weaved, related and repeated. It’s been a relatively short life that feels like ages -- a continuous ideation, yet reinvented.

Delicious – the social bookmarking site – is an icon in that sense.  It was an idea that manifested early and became, as the New York Times said today, “popular among the technorati, but failed to catch on with a broader audience.”