sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

My overall feeling about ad:tech 2007, having been to the last 3 London ad:techs, was that 90% of what was on show was the same as at last year’s. The 10% related to video advertising, and products which claim to help advertisers to make the most of social networking, and the wonders of web 2.0.

The highlight for me was a discussion session about strategies for making the most of consumer generated content. The speakers came from 3 technology and service providers (1000 Heads, Milward Brown Precis, and Market Sentinel) and one advertiser: Avis, represented by my good friend Xavier Vallee, who is their UK Head of Marketing.

Distilling the best practice from the discussion, Fergus from Milward Brown put it well when he said advertisers needed to work out what was being said about them online, whether it mattered, what to do about it, and whether the action had worked. Some brands aren’t discussed much online (Flora isn’t, Marmite is) so they may not need to worry so much. Others need to be proactive and engage in the discussion appropriately.

The Avis case study is based on the idea of net promoter ratings, which essentially measure people saying positive things minus people saying negative things, for particular subjects, like “Avis car hire”. Avis has used this model for some time offline, and decided to start using them to weigh online conversation about them and their competitors.

Avis decided to set up the We Try Harder blog to engage in the online conversation, and made some sensible decisions about how they would execute on that idea, working with their partners Web Liquid. They wanted the blog to be authentic and honest, so it’s written by regular staff, and nobody copywrites for them. It sets out to acknowledge problems and discuss them, rather than pretending that a problem doesn’t exist. Comment and input from consumers is being used to refine Avis’s product and service offering in a way that wasn’t possible previously.

The results have been very good. Members of the public are visiting the blog and engaging regularly, and Avis’s measure of net approval has risen considerably, both in its own right and relative to its competitors. Even better, last week they won a prize for innovative use of digital channels in customer service from SOCAP. When you consider some of the statistics about the impact of online review and comment on travel booking decisions, this work must be falling through to Avis’s bottom line.

1000 Heads example of the Nokia N95 product launch showed another innovative approach to making the most of online discussion. They identified some of the key bloggers for mobile telephony in the UK and then approached them to invite them on an expenses-paid trip to New York for the worldwide launch. They were asked to write honestly about what they thought of the product, and lots of coverage and attention was generated as a result. There is an ethical question here. If Xavier was buying me dinner for writing this blog entry, you might be questioning whether I was being impartial in my praise of his efforts. The key thing, I suppose, is that they were asked to write honestly and they did cover their dislikes as well as likes about the product.

To sum up the best practice, the panellists as a group seemed to be saying:

1. Monitor what is being said
2. Analyse what is important about it
3. Plan responses and interventions
4. Test the interventions for their likely value and impact
5. Execute it openly, honestly and transparently
6. Measure whether it worked, and refine as necessary

All this has to be done quite fast, compared to its offline analogues, so it’s critical to have the right technology and people on the job.

My last question to the Market Sentinel guys was about Facebook, and the fact that it’s a largely closed community. Given the amount of discussion and interaction going on inside Facebook, the lack of tools to crawl and analyse that discussion must be a barrier to a reliable analysis.