The Conversation Manager

The second day at the Womma conference was dominated by Storytelling. People like hearing stories. How do stories like Robin Hood survive for centuries? People simply love those types of stories and tell them to others. The art therefore is for companies to tell a story. Preferably a story with the necessary 'juicy’ elements to motivate people to tell the story to others.

It can be funny, but it works better if it comes from your heart

The day started with a duo presentation of the 'Kitchen Sisters'. The duo is apparently quite well known here in the U.S. They host a popular radio show. To be honest: after an evening with perhaps a little too much wine, I had hoped for a presentation with more power to start the day. It was a bit like watching a radio show - and that at 8 o’clock in the morning... The message of their story was of course very pertinent: people are looking for stories. Their most important tips in this story are about visualising and defining stories. Make sure a story has a face. Later that day I listened to a great story about Ben & Jerry's. The nice thing is that their story has the face of the two founders. Furthermore, people are always looking for a secret and something that is not actually directly related to the brand. This seemed to be an interesting conclusion. If you start thinking that way, a Facebook page can take on a much sexier role than is currently the case for most companies. Yesterday, the Sales Director of Facebook explained that the Coca Cola fan page has 12 million fan visitors per month (versus 270,000 website visitors). Sharing any number of ‘secrets’ through this page creates a good story. Stories do not require inventing, every company has them. Stories are everywhere, so say the Kitchen Sisters. Do not invent fake stories; just use the existing stories of your people. I liked their final tip the most: a story may be funny, and will work, but it will work much better if the story comes from the heart.

Ben & Jerry’s manage the story very cleverly

During the introduction to their presentation, the people of Ben & Jerry’s introduced their brand as follows: “We are not a brand, but a company with unique values that bind people together”. That was the start of a good story. Their whole philosophy is about giving people something to talk about. Only recently have they begun traditional advertising, something which I think is unnecessary. Someone asked what the ROI of their Twitter activities was. I think the pertinent question was: ‘what is the ROI of your above the line advertising?’ I fear it generates little added value since their story is already so beautiful and strong in itself.

Sampling is in the culture of their brand. Their Free Cone Day is of course iconic. It started in the 70s as a day to thank their customers. In 2010, they gave away more than 1 million ice creams! The next step is to involve social media in this story. Via their Twitter account @benjerrystruck they asked their followers who was in the mood for free ice cream. In the New York area, they then planned a route to give people their ice cream. In doing so, they deliberately looked for digital influencers. The more followers they had, the more likely they were to pay them a visit. They generally visited companies. One part of that visit was proclaiming the sender of the Tweet a hero. Everything was done to create maximum buzz. You can hear the importance of ‘location based’ tools in many stories too. Foursquare has suddenly offered a third dimension for companies to trigger consumers. According to Ben & Jerry's, the structure of their programme is one of their factors for success. For example, they did not travel the entire country with ice cream, but began in New York and only did so one day per week. After all, they had no idea how many calls they would get. When they discovered that it was actually quite manageable, they added Boston and went out with their Truck on a daily basis. They started on Twitter and only added Facebook later on. When I heard this great story, I thought how much other brands could learn from this. Ben & Jerry’s is such a strong brand, and if the number of tweets and posts was manageable for them, how could other brands possibly complain about a lack of resources to get started with social media? This has more to do with lack of guts than a lack of resources if you ask me.

Give the influencers a story

Hotel and casino group Harrah's presented a strong story about leading the conversation with influencers. Their problem was a wrong perception about their hotels. Most people associate Harrah’s with gambling alone. While they want to be something much broader: a romantic place that offers top-notch entertainment. To change the existing perception, they created an influencers programme. In it, they used three categories (similar to the model from yesterday’s session): social/digital influencers (e.g. Gary Vanerchuck), opinion leaders within the category (travel blogs), and finally their own customers. They invited these people to events and happenings. They gave them all possible support to facilitate the conversation. In a few months time, this programme resulted in more than 800 tweets, hundreds of photos and fifty blog posts by influential people. Together, this resulted in research showing that 85% of visitors to Las Vegas would now consider their hotels. Before this programme, this was only 17%. Impressive!

Gillette had another challenge: increase the number of shaves per week of the average man. It truly is incredible - if every man were to shave once more per week, their sales would increase by about 600 million U.S. dollars. Truly food for thought, right? They accepted the challenge with a viral video. Again by turning to influencers and giving them something to talk about.

Owned media as a steppingstone

Your own media are becoming increasingly important. If you want to tell stories to the world, it can be quite handy to have your own media. In the case of Ben & Jerry's, the importance of their own website and mailing list was emphasised once more. If you look at what Unilever is doing with Yunome in the Benelux, creating own media is a brilliant move. Advertisers pay millions to the media to reach (half) their target audience. If at some point you have your own media, which fans will by definition be attracted to, this is an incredibly strong channel.

Today has been fun: I heard a lot about storytelling, and the link to your influencers and the role your own media plays in it. Good cases and ideas. Tomorrow is already the last day; I’m especially looking forward to the final presentation of @jowyang.

As a bonus: a quick look back at today's most hilarious presentation. The story was about the promotion of safe sex in New York. These people created an account @NYCondom (unfortunately it no longer exists). On it, they went looking for people who send Tweets about nightlife and sex. The condom gave them some good advice like ‘don’t forget me tonight’ and entered into conversations. Hilarious

I’m a lucky guy: I’m in Vegas enjoying some really nice weather. Next to that, we have the Word-of-Mouth summit here and I really hope to get some inspiration here.

During the opening speech of the conference, it became very clear that the big boys want to claim the WOM domain. McKinsey recently published an article about measuring the business value of WOM. Next to that, the latest edition of the Harvard Business Review is covering the topic as well. Once these kind of organizations are claiming a domain, you can be quite certain that the hype is over. The hype is now a trend. In 2011 companies will (more than ever) acknowledge the power of word-of-mouth. However, most of them will still suffer with the ‘how’ question. How can we manage this.

It is NOT about social media

This conference is about how consumers influence each other through conversations. By the way, did you know that you can find about 500 billion branded conversations in 2010 on the internet? 250 billion can be found on Facebook, Twitter and other social media. The other 250 billion can be found on blogs. Even though these stats are pretty impressive, these online conversations are just a fraction of the total amount of branded conversations between people. It’s only 6% of branded conversations that is taking place online. Managing this combination of online and offline WOM is the challenge of companies in this current era. Word-of-Mouth is the form of marketing with the highest impact, that’s why the opening speech of this conference mentions that WOM should be central in the marketing department of every organization. I think we need to take it one step further: WOM should be integrated in everything a company does.

Managing influencers is a new key competence

Managing influencers and measuring the impact of them is the central theme of day 1. In his keynote speech, Josh Bernoff, author of Groundswell and his new book Empower, describes how you can map and manage your influencers. There are three levels of inluencers: potential influencers, mass influencers and social broadcasters. The social broadcasters are the most famous bloggers (e.g. Mashables). These people aren’t always the biggest influencers, but they are great to increase your awareness. Challenging them with a great story is the challenge. The biggest potential is the other two layers of the pyramid. Especially the mass influencers are very relevant. They like to tell stories to other people. These people have a high impact on social media, but also in the offline world they are known to be credible sources. This group is capable in changing the opinion of other. They can help you to get your brand in the considered set of brands of consumers.

Question is: how can you influence them? Easy: through great customer service and conversation management. Bernoof uses the example of BestBuy on Twitter. Through their @twelpforce account, they help clients and answer their questions. Their approach is so great that it can only create more influencers. When I send a tweet about this example during the conference, I found out that Bernoff wasn’t exaggerating. Two minutes later, I’ve received a thank you tweet from these guys. Pretty impressive!

Measuring the impact of influencers: a story of Sony

When you invest in influencers, you want to know the return, right? Conclusions of today: traditional research is not sufficient to do the trick. The only way to create a complete story is to combine traditional survey based research with observational research. In the first situation you ask the questions, in the second case you look for answers without asking any questions.

The survey results showed that Sony was the best brand in the TV industry, but in the online world Sony appeared to be only one of the average brands, certainly not the top. Next to that, the online buzz showed a pretty strong correlation with sales intention. So, something to worry about.

Where do you start? Internally!

During the discussions people wonder where to find these influencers. Funny is that they often tend to forget their own employees. In previous blog posts, I have been talking about the ‘Superstar’ company. I heard this idea coming back in several speeches (without using the term, though). IBM has 17000 bloggers among their employees. The Jamba Juice story brings out the passion of their employees as well. I guess this is probably the coolest form of advertising these days: cool and convincing stories from your own employees.

Conclusion: when you have planned an influencer program, start within your own company. Find your superstars and facilitate them.

Yesterday we headed to Amsterdam for a conversation with Micael Dahlén, Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics and author of the upcoming book Nextopia. In Nextopia Dahlén describes the so-called ‘expectations society’ we’re living in, and our evolutionary drive to strive for the next big thing – which will always be the best one, a utopian hope that affects lives today.

The idea of Nextopia and the expectations society is rooted in consumer behavior and consumer psychology, but it’s not just a business story. It basically affects everything we do: how we date, how we progress in life, how we manage our careers, etc.

We really enjoyed the talk, this is what we’ve learned:

We are living in a world of endless opportunities in which we are all IBL – ‘Involved But Looking’

As a metaphor to our current state of mind, Dahlén refers to the way people are categorizing themselves on dating sites & social communities: ‘involved but looking’ (IBL). We are in some kind of a relationship, but always open for new things.

We were not programmed to stick to routines in the first place. But in this world of endless opportunities it becomes very compelling to switch to new things. All the time we are being reminded of things we haven’t tried before.

The expectations society established itself around the millennium, with the diffusion and adoption of the Internet. And it hasn’t stopped growing ever since. Unfortunately we’re not adapting, and still doing business as usual. We interact in the exact same way we did before the millennium, when the world was really completely different.

There is nothing that can make you unique for a considerable amount of time. Whatever you do, you are always competing with tomorrow

From a business point of view we can’t make anything perfect anymore. The standards and expectations are just changing too quickly. And we have to deal with that perspective.

Consumers think: ‘I’m happy with you, but if something better comes up, I might go for that’. Loyalty is less flexible than before. Hence, as a business it’s crucial to challenge the status quo more than ever before. Basically what people really buy into is not what we’re offering today, but what we’re offering tomorrow.

The launch of a product is not the beginning of business, it’s basically the end of it

‘As soon as you launch a product, it’s more or less dead’, says Dahlén. Anyone, anywhere can do something similar anytime. The traditional product life cycle belongs to the Yestermillennium.

We have to move the business more before the launch, selling the idea of the product and inviting consumers to be part of that story. Consumers, or anypreneurs according to Dahlén, can be a force beyond everything what has been possible before. We have to collaborate with them, after all they are our best marketers if we just activate them in the right way.

Dahlén refers to the iPhone & iPad launch as an example. In both cases the entire set of sales figures was based on presales. The iPhone had no less than 17 million Google hits before it was actually launched. Everyone was adding bits & pieces to the story, driving the conversations around the product. We clearly need to think about new ways of involving people in order to subscribe to the future.

We are all working in B2B today

Within this expectations society, consumers have become very smart, sophisticated & demanding. Actually, tables have turned: they are tendering offers to us now (check out etsy.com as an example).

You can be terrified and do everything to stop or control it. But it’s a fight you can’t win. Instead let’s start thinking about how we can leverage this renewed context. Nextopia provides us with interesting insights to understand ourselves and tap into the Conversation Age. The book will be launched in the second half of November. In the mean time you can buy the e-book version of Nextopia for €1.5 via this link.

by @dadovpeteghem