The Bolin Marketing Blog

A few people asked me to take a look at Domino’s online sentiment profile for their new pizza vs. previous sentiment of their “so bad they needed to change it” pizza. From the graphs below, you can see the Domino’s new pizza product hasn’t really delivered on expectations. While there’s a couple percentage points for margin of error, it looks like positive sentiment dropped, and negative sentiment increased as well as neutral sentiment. This was based on a sample of roughly 6,500 online mentions. I have not tried the Domino’s new pizza recipe yet, so I can’t weigh in with an opinion. We do work with Schwan’s consumer brands which include frozen pizza, so I just wanted to make that clear for transparency sake. Thanks to Consumersphere for putting this data together.

Domino’s New Pizza Online Sentiment Comparison, originally uploaded by TaulPaul.

I was getting back from lunch with a colleague, and a thought hit me. We monitor online conversations of people when they talk about us, and talk to us. Do you sit at a dinner party, and only listen to people when they talk to you, or about you? Don’t you learn about people when you listen to them when they talk to others? Being a good listener is taking cues when it’s appropriate to respond. It’s all about timing. We want to be better at timing. You can’t have good timing when you’re not listening correctly.

So, let me illustrate how it works today. Bob says something bad about Product X on his blog. Product X’s team has listening tools, and are alerted to Bob’s post. Product X’s team, posts an appropriate response on Bob’s blog comments. Makes complete sense, right? Bob has a problem, and Product X tries to alleviate that problem. Problem solved. Product X, then swoops away in the middle of the night until the next comment is made referring to them. That sounds like a pretty weak way to build a relationship. It’s a start, but we can do better.

What if we listen to fewer people. The people who are interested more in us. We listen even when they’re not talking about us. If they’re having a bad day, we reach out, and do what we can. Is this possible? Can we measure how it affects them in the minutes, hours, days, and weeks afterward? Remember, we’re talking about people, and people have emotions. We’re building connections and relationships, one person at a time.

I don’t tread lightly on the subject of where I think interactive marketing is going tomorrow: (Social Gaming). It seems like the writing has been on the wall (for me at least), for some time now. Whether it’s an Xbox 360, Playstation 3, or Nintendo Wii, the convergence is going to happen. When it does happen, it will be very fast. I’m not talking about in-game advertising, but about a new breed of games in the “Social Gaming” genre. Don’t go to your local Best Buy to get one off the shelf, because they’re not here yet. I’m talking about the integration of social platforms into the gaming industry. We’ve seen sites like Xfire as a first step in bridging the gap of communication, but I’m talking about a seamless gaming / social experience that goes across platforms, and utilizes information culled from all your social networks. Elements from your real life (RL) will be utilized to create your in-game (IG) or virtual reality. If your agency does not have a gaming platform, ask your boss to expense out one, two, or all of them, load up on some games, and research the hell out of them before you get left in the dust. Social Gaming will be the next time sink, and for all your marketers, you better be ready.

Many of you may have already seen this augmented reality project by GE. It’s actually using a Adobe Flash based version of ARToolKit called the FLAR Toolkit. We see a lot of potential for this technology to help our clients that have product visualizers. This may help their clients bridge the mental gap of what the product may look like in their house. This would allow anyone with a printer and webcam the ability to view a product rendered in 3d, in the exact location they choose. It’s still pretty new technology, and we’ve spent some time getting it to run smoothly, but we definitely see the potential in both the mobile and home settings, as there is a kit for the iPhone as well.

We will be posting some demos in the following days and weeks.

Following is a Twitter overview presentation Bolin’s Paul Saarinen did almost two years ago.  Still a very good reference for understanding Twitter.  The presenatation covers:

1. “Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations.” ~Paul Rand
2. What is Twitter? Blog Instant Messenger Mobile Text Messaging
3. Breaking down a Tweet Icon Outbound Short URL Username (linked) Relative Posting Time Reply to User Posting Service Outbound URL Set to Favorites List
4. How can I send or receive Tweets? Web (twitter.com) Instant Messanger (GTalk) Mobile Phone (SMS) RIA / Widget
5. I’m ready to Stalk! What’s Next?
6. How people are using Twitter today current status questions events local news updates cross posting media special offers
7. How will people use Twitter tomorrow? API driven RIA Multidimensional Analysis Brand Integration Alternate Reality Storytelling Micropublishing

Wolfram Alpha is a knowledge engine based on Mathematica. Here’s an interesting article giving hints on what it is, and how it could impact how we look for answers online. What will be your first question for Wolfram Alpha?

It’s about 4 or 5 PM last Thursday, and I’m sitting on my couch at home suffering from a low grade fever of 101 degrees, and a thought occurs to me. Well, it’s the thought illustrated in my little diagram above. I always tend to think of data, and how it can be used through a marketing filter. This is my first of many problems. In order to try and understand the diagram above, I had to forget those thoughts…at least for a few hours.

We now can bring three seemingly unconnected, but readily available data points together, and look for connections in a whole new layer. Are there implications, or will anything be on the other side? I’m trying to get my small brain to wrap around something much larger than I can swallow. I guess what I’m trying to peer into, is a collective consciousness, and how it relates to real world events.

Step 1. Gather Twitter api search feed.
Step 2. Utilize GPS coordinates for tweets that have them, or sub in location profile data for those that don’t have GPS data.
Step 3. Parse each 140 character tweet for emotional trigger word and give a value (this will be tricky, and pretty loose)
Step 4. Use open source heat map API synced with Google Maps API to visualize impact
Step 5. Start looking for patterns with real world events (I have a few ideas on this)
Step 6. Determine if the patterns prove out over multiple occurences

Well, that’s as far as I have gone. What are your thoughts?

Today online marketers can tell a lot more about you from your Twitter feed, than from the information on a traditional website “contact us” form. Could this be the future of website forms, or at least the next step?

There’s been a lot of talk about online video product placement in the last year.  There’s been little information on the benefits of online video product placement, or the outcomes of using online video product placement.  I’ve always had a gut feeling that online video product placement works, but up until this year, I didn’t know how it impacted success metrics.

I’ve been loosely involved in the Video Blogging community since 2005, so it was pretty easy for me to identify an online video content creator partner for this campaign.  Finding a online video content creator can be tricky, and confusing.  I haven’t met many online media buyers that have a good understanding on selection criteria.  They usually try to map values to the same metrics as banner buys (i.e. site traffic, time on site, frequency opportunities, etc…), but that discussion is for another post.  What I want to convey in this post is how online video product placement was effective for our client, and our success metrics.

The goal of our campaign was to drive online video submissions to Youtube.com for a contest that had 3 tiers of prizes.  The top prize was $5k dollars cash, and about another $700 in prizes.  Beyond the prize incentive, we used two paid media tactics to drive targeted traffic to a site that had a call to action, directions, and rules to enter the contest.  One tactic was a partnership with EpicFu.com to make a mention of the contest to their community, the other was more of a traditonal online media buy on another popular video website.

Below is the analytics chart showing traffic for the two tactics.

While the traditional online buy drove around 10 times the traffic, traffic wasn’t the success metric, video submissions were the goal. We had approximately 75% of sign-ups on our form that followed through with a submitted video for the contest. The most interesting statistic, approximately 50% of the submission came from the time period of the Epicfu.com product placement video. While we were on a shoe-string budget, the traditional online media buy cost 6 times the amount as the online video product placement. While awareness and traffic are nice, our goal was submitted videos. Dollar for dollar, the online video product placement drove more submissions.

Realizing Consumer Generated Content is on the rise, and is forecasted to get even more popular, targeting users that create online video is very difficult. Comparing our contest to other popular brands that had done similar contest, we saw better than anticipated numbers and quality of submission. Over half of the submission were shot in High Definition, and the quality of ideas were very impressive.

I have been getting a lot of questions about the work we’re doing for Carma Labs, makers of Carmex Lip Balm.  These questions usually center around online customer service, and how we advise Carma Labs.  Since this topic of online customer service, and how it ties in with services like Twitter, seems to be interesting to a lot of you, I would like to share my experience and thoughts.

Corporate culture is probably the most important key in the success or failure of any online customer service initiative.  Paul Woelbing, the President of Carma Labs, had told us about how he answered every letter sent to him, regarding their products.  We immediately knew there was an existing behavior that would benefit more Carmex users, by taking this online.

One of the immediate benefits of answering questions online, pertains to search, making those answers available to everyone.  Now you probably won’t have to answer the same question 20 times.

A lot of clients are fearful of people pointing out flaws with your product or service.  Answering questions about problems shows that you are aware of a problem, and working on a solution, instead of trying to dismiss or bury the problem.  In extreme cases, this can also mean you can catch problems that would eventually kill your product or service.  They may be small fixes, or big ones, but you’ll probably know before you spend major money marketing something that no one will like.

We deliberated on what platform to use for quite awhile (a month or two).  A lot of people I spoke to, thought Twitter would be a great way handle some of the items mentioned above.  While there are a few questionable success cases, your organization has to be set up to handle a few things differently.

1. Twitter users tend to expect immediacy in response.  Taking over a day to respond is usually not perceived as a good response time.  (I’m still waiting (months) for responses from several companies I sent messages to on Twitter)  This means you’ll probably have to delegate this duty as a part or full-time job.
2. Good luck answering all your questions in 140 characters, or less.  While some questions or responses can be answered in brevity, this requires a separate platform to link your tweet to a full response.  This could be a blog, or forum.
3. It’s pretty unreasonable to expect one or two people for most organizations to have access to all the answers.  This means they’ll either need direct access to the subject matter experts for those questions, or you’ll have to have more than one person for your company on Twitter.  We’ve seen both examples in Zappos and Comcast.
4. This also gets us to the problem of consistency of voice, and perception of brand.  How do I communicate that I’m an official or unofficial voice of an organization?  Best Buy is a good example of this issue.  Internally it may all make sense, but from an outsider’s view, it can cause confusion.

There has been a lot of hype centering around the usage of Twitter for online customer service.  It may work for your organizaton’s online customer service.  We decided to opt for the Getsatisfaction.com platform, because of the issues mentioned above.  Most importantly, it was the platform the client felt most comfortable using.  In the end, that is probably the biggest factor.  Take a look for yourself, and let us know how you think Paul and Carmex are doing with online customer service?