Published on Wednesday, July 29, 2009 .
Tomorrow I’m getting married, so I probably won’t be posting for a while. Not, of course, that I’ve been posting a lot recently.
Without wanting to get sentimental (it’s not that kind of a blog, and I’m not that kind of a man) I can say that not only did I never believe that I’d find someone like Krista, but that now I have found her, I still can’t really believe it.
I’m saving the rest of what I have to say for my speech tomorrow evening. There are all sorts of little surprises planned for the day, but one of the biggest surprises right now is “what Mat will be saying in his speech” because I’ve yet to write it. Tim has told me “be nice to everyone and try not to sound like Hugh Grant.”
Anyway, the hashtag for my wedding will be #wediaczar. Given that the audience is startlingly low on digital media bods, it’s not like I think it’s going to trend or anything, but it seemed like too good a hashtag to waste.
Published on Tuesday, July 14, 2009 .
Geek alert: if the title of this post isn’t a dead giveaway I should tell you — unless you’re interested in APIs and badly-put-together bits of code — this probably isn’t for you.
I’ve recently found myself using a service provided by Damon Clinkscale called DoesFollow. All it does is answer the simple question “does twitter user A follow twitter user B?” Apart from a frill which lets you reverse the order of your question (”does twitter user B follow twitter user A?”) that’s all it does. You can even interrogate it from the address bar like this: http://doesfollow.com/barackobama/mediaczar
While I was thinking about how useful a service this is, I was suddenly struck by a moment of clarity. A lot of the research I’ve been doing could be simplified by something like this.
Continue reading ‘A first stab at a perl script to create Twitter friend/follow matrices’
Published on Wednesday, July 1, 2009 .
A couple of weeks ago, I asked a bunch of people to send me their OPML files (for those of you who aren’t aware, an OPML file is what tells your RSS reader what feeds you’ve subscribed to — it can act as a way of moving your subscriptions between readers.) Some of the more trusting among them agreed, and that gave me the raw material for the first bit of my experiment.
Some red herrings
Along the way I uncovered a couple of things that were interesting but not (entirely) relevant to the experiment.
- Some people are cagey about sharing their list of feeds: whether they consider it intellectual property, or whether they think that it may be too revealing, I don’t know.
- Lots of people said things like “oh — my RSS reader? Haven’t looked at that in a while. I get all my news off Twitter these days.”
Continue reading ‘The #interestingOPMLexperiment (stage 1)’
Published on Tuesday, June 30, 2009 .
The current approach to WOM is to try to stimulate positive WOM while addressing or countering negative WOM. A sort of “accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative and don’t mess with Mr In-Between” strategy.
But what if we could do it a different way?
This idea stems from a conversation I had back in February with Martin Kelly and Andy Cocker of Infectious Media. Since that time I’ve chatted it through a couple of times with various interesting people. It’s not properly thought through yet, but following a chat a couple of weeks ago with Ketchum London’s new Head of Digital, the excellent Fernando Rizo, I’ve decided to put the idea out into the public domain to gauge what (if any) interest there is and whether I should continue to work on it.
“Word of Mouth” is hard to do well
I’ve read lots of word of mouth marketing case studies (there’s a great list over at WOMMA) and it strikes me that WOM is hard to do well for a few reasons. I don’t want to go into these in too much detail, but here are a couple of the structural issues:
- Unless I’m a journalist, an A-list blogger or media personality or have some kind of platform, I probably have a very low reach.
Despite everything pointing towards personal contact being the best impetus for positive word of mouth, most word of mouth campaigns compensate for my low reach by trying to get me to self-service my relationship with the brand and the campaign.
- “Viral” distribution just doesn’t work the way most people seem to think it does; and this is particularly true when it comes to WOM.
While I’m quite likely to tell stories about my personal experience of a brand and fairly likely to tell stories that involve a mutual friend, I’m much less likely to tell stories about other friends’ experience, and not likely at all to tell stories about friends-of-friends.
Furthermore because of the ‘clumpiness’ of most people’s social graphs, geometric progression (the “I tell two people and they each tell two people and so on” effect) just doesn’t happen.
Homophily
One of the many reasons that WOM works is a thing called homophily — which roughly translates to “birds of a feather flock together”, or “you can tell a man by the company he keeps.”
I’ve written about examples of this before: for example, my analyses of twittering US Congresspersons and Westminster MPs which showed that one can predict with some reasonable degree of accuracy the political colouration of any given twitter account based on their mutual friends and follows (if you want to know more about the methodology, it’s worth reading Robert Hanneman’s chapter on cliques and subgroups.)
But there’s another side to the homophily coin; the social pressure to conform to the group’s norms.
Continue reading ‘Thinking differently about word-of-mouth’
Here’s an interesting ethical question: is it OK to ask employees to share company and client news through their personal social networks?
Here’s a hypothetical example. An agency has just launched a new ad campaign and posted the TV spot on YouTube. Is it OK to send an all-hands email asking people to share the link on Twitter and Facebook?
Let’s take it a little further. Is it OK to ask them to sign into YouTube using their personal accounts, and rate the video? It seems harmless enough, doesn’t it? You’re not telling them how they should rate it, after all.
But what if you asked them to leave comments? Any normal agency or client side social media policy will tell them that they have to disclose their relationship with the makers of the video. And you wouldn’t really want a whole bunch of comments that start “Hi, I work for the agency that made this ad and I think it’s really great,” would you? What makes the two things different?
Continue reading ‘Should we ask employees to tweet client stories?’
