The Digital Value Exchange: Driving influential WOM using Tweets as virtual currency

I'm seeing more and more examples of deliberate and requested leverage of Twitter to drive influential reach.

Last autumn Jack Johnson offered a free music track in exchange for a tweet as a promo for his new album, Kellogg's Krave have been encouraging Teens to barter social mentions for gig tickets, and a few weeks back I caught this tweet offering a free lunch offer from London restaurant Circus :

And it worked, was genuinely free and was very nice:

I even found  myself suggesting / recommending it as a venue to someone just yesterday.  So that worked! My free taster lunch v likely dinner spend of 6 people....  just off one tweet and a follow up email. Do the maths...

Today I've spotted this free e-book in exchange for a tweet offer:  I loved the language "Pay with a tweet".

Simple. Easy to grasp, costs me little beyond a little effort, a few clicks and a few moments of time.

I'll award more points to the Jack Johnson crowd for allowing me a few characters to adapt my tweet v this one being fixed, but overall it's another nice example of how if you are providing something useful, interesting and relevant that people are prepared to make a nominal effort to get something back.

So here's the journey:

Click on tweet flagging offer, takes you to web page above.

Click on "pay with a tweet button" redirects to 

A click and a few key strokes later and I've connected to my Twitter account and get my pre-formed tweet ready to hit post. Simple.

Posted and I get an automatic download book screen.  Too Easy.

The book (I obviously downloaded it) is 172 pages long, so I've not read it and can't offer an opinion yet, but the blurb (and in my geek world, also the distribution mechanic) was convincing enough for me to spend a few moments going through the process to send the tweet to get to the download and I've already seen it re-tweeted by 2 of my followers inside 10 minutes. Which means it's probably been exposed to a good few hundred people from just a few clicks.

For the cynics amongst you who are scratching their heads and thinking "oh but what about the ROI, any idiot can give stuff away, what are they getting out of this?"....  Note that if you looked carefully at the first image you could ALSO buy the book on Amazon.  So this is a sampling exercise.  I might read this book on my iPad or Touch or Android Phone, I might even load it to all 3, I'm unlikely to print out 172 pages of A4, staple them and cart them around getting ever more dog-earred in my bag, more likely I'll skim an electronic copy, and if I think it might be worth a proper read and investment of my time I'll buy a proper book to read later, share and refer back to.

Meanwhile the authors have given me the opportunity to trial at low opportunity cost, might get a sale out of me as well,  and in the process got me to influence people I know +/or reach so for them it's a win win.

Virtual currency doesn't just have to be about Second Life's Linden Dollars or any other form of "real money" converted into "virtual money" as any 7 year old playing Club Penguin will tell you. Undertake a task, get something back that you can get value from later.

Think about what your brand could offer or can facilitate to help drive distribution of your product / message / experience.

Recruiting Brand Advocates : Part 1: Kellogg's Krave

Kellogg's have recently launched a new teen-target breakfast cereal called Krave, grain-based puffs full of hazelnutty chocolatey filling. One serving will give you 10% of your RDA of sugar in one hit. Your dentist and your waistline might not like it but who cares when you are 14....

Everyone knows that teens are hyper-connected, living their lives online, avid sharers and creators of content be it a constant stream of Facebook status updates or videos and photos cataloguing their lives.  The Kellogg's marketing team have therefore very smartly tapped into this with an attempt to harness this very natural behaviour to good effect and broaden influential peer to peer reach for the brand.

How?  By creating the Choc Exchange.  Run across the Krave website and a brand page on Facebook, inter-connected via Facebook Connect.

The mechanic?

1) Create a currency  (choc chunks) earned via brand advocacy in social spaces and participation in brand activities.

2) Create a range of time-limited appealing prizes that you can bid for using your choc chunks
(there's currently a very groovy micro Muvi camcorder up for auction, but I've seen gig tickets and all sorts over the last week or so)

3) Further incentivise you to recruit your mates as additional advocates by facilitating sharing, pooling or donation of chunks.  Nothing worse than being outbid cos you are a few chunks short when your mate can spare a few hundred......

Completing different tasks gains you different number of points.  I'd love to know who came up with the figures and how though.  Completing a photo task will gain you 9867 chunks.  Attempting to recruit a friend on Facebook will earn you 1854 chunks and if they accept you'll get an additional 3894. Nice round numbers. Not. Maybe it's a GCSE Maths improvement exercise at the same time.  As I write this the Muvi camcorder has a highest bid of 51164 chunks against it. Some ball park maths equates that to using a sign up bonus of 1400 chunks, plus another one for staying in the programme for another week (free points per week for staying on board, smart thinking again), completing a photo task, and recruiting 7 of your mates on Facebook and you are more or less there!

Currently the fan base on Fasebook stands at 42,348.  Good or bad?

As with many of these things, hard to say yay or nay to that, I've not seen any additional specific traffic driving activity on Facebook, but I'm out of target audience demographic by just a smudge(!).  It feels like a pretty robust number to me, and because their ongoing interaction with the brand means the message is being spread around Facebook (and beyond) and it earns points, and points mean prizes, that feels like a brand:consumer win win to me. Brand mentions and messages being diffused by the consumer for little over and above the norm effort, in return for the chance to win some cool stuff.  Smart: Creating OTT (Opportunities to talk), your consumers are your new GRP's.  A few gadgets and tickets, and some social media admin time are going to cost the marketing budget a lot less than lots of traditional media spend.

Nice to see the website and Facebook working hard together to drive traffic for the sampling campaign too:  you can check if / when the sampling team are coming to a place near you, and if you go, get one, take part and then tag yourself in a photo taken at the sampling event you are already more chunks in credit.

There's also been TV advertising with a drive to site URL on the end, and there's clearly been some sort of MSN (probably display ad) activity (which I missed, but which also makes a huge amount of sense given the number of teens that use MSN IM avidly and log in every day) because the Krave team were tweeting about it.

We'll award them some marks for search - they have bought Krave as a paid search term but no gold stars as they didn't think beyond the obvious...

Search for chocolate cereal and Nestle's Shreddies Facebook page wins on paid search and Nestle Nesquick or Kellogg's own Frosties beat them to natural results.  I'd like to think that was a Kellogg's portfolio management decision but I'd bet £5 it wasn't. There are still far too many clients who've got their head around category management instore but not in digital spaces.

Overall on the surface it seems like a well thought out and well executed campaign derived from some smart insight about the behaviour of the target audience.  Good stuff. Nice to see.  I wiill keep my eyes peeled for any results releases and will be interested to see whether they've been smart enough to plan beyond the launch phase, when the auctions finish mid-May.  Having rustled up that many fans it would be sense-less not to have an ongoing communications strategy to continue to engage with them.

Top of my current smart ongoing conversation strategies are Walkers Crisps who have done a good job (IMHO) leveraging the significant momentum gained during the "Do us a flavour" campaign last year, and are building that at the minute with an amplification of the flavour-voting idea to include 15 new limited edition flavours, but more on that another day.

Post script:
Friday 16th April: Just saw this Krave polling ad on Facebook's home page. Not sure how long it's been running but they seem to have added another 3k fans since Wednesday. I love the polling ads, makes it hard to resist clicking when someone asks you a question.  Hot air ballooning is the current vote leader.

How the iPad became known as the iTampon and other stories...

(I refer of course to Rudyard Kipling's great story of "how the elephant got it's trunk")

The last week has flown by and somehow it's been a week since Steve Jobs announced the launch of the Apple iPad, and I've only just had chance to blog about it.



Yes, without question it's an interesting new toy, the reviews are many and divided.

Lots of ooooh, shiny new toy perspectives, lots of it's just a big iPhone / iPod Touch with bells and whistles and lots of but hmm, but it won't support flash, I have to plug in extra bits if I want to take pictures off an sd card, and fine if I'm vegging on the sofa surfing and watching the box, but could I use it sensibly on a train to commute?  If anyone fancies buying me one, I certainly won't object, preferably one with 3G v just wifi (for reasons I'll come on to in a post to follow shortly about mobile metrics), but whilst it will start at $500 for a basic one so it's not ridiculously unaffordable,  I do question whether I'd be popping one in my handbag for some extra work productivity time on the train?  I can see my osteopathy bills rocketing up if I have to try and write documents of any length on it, unless I go and raid a department store china department for one of those decorative plate supports my Grandmothers found so handy. Hmmm.

A great device for leisure use, but I'm not sure I've been won over from the netbook category for the in between my smartphone & desk needs.

For me what made the iPad launch so interesting to follow was to see how quickly the product name got lambasted for it's similarity to feminine hygiene products, and just half an hour into the launch event it was already beginning to be referred to as iTampon.

 

The idea caught, the jokes went on and on, constantly evolving, with enterprising swift to react people capitalising fast with mocked up creative and aggregating jokes.

 

Within 4 hours of the iPad's launch,  iTampon jokes were over-flowing (forgive the pun), taking the topic to the #2 trending topic on Twitter (and the first being an auto-tag so doesn't really count!)

 
I sat there captivated, watching the search results jump from nowhere to 15k in 4 hours, to 22k 2 hours later still. Just phenomenal evidence of how far and fast and idea that captivates imagination can spread, and how little control brands have over these things.  Although if I were Steve Jobs I don't think I'd be unhappy about that level of buzz connected to my product, even if it wasn't likely to have been anticipated. By harnessing the sanpro angle the joke reached further than the techy alerts ever would have done.

Within 6 hours of launch the iTampon topic was trending all the way around the world. Amazing.

Facebook groups sprung up, images on Flickr, the joke clearly appealing to a broad range of men and women around the world.

This spoof video made and posted way ahead of the iPad launch suddenly found new life, jumping from 54k views when it was first tweeted past my radar to over 1.5m view in a week, the vast majority of which were clocked up in just 72 hours.



Whilst the buzz died down again in 3 days or so it's a joke base that I know will never die. As the product comes to market, all the jokes will resurface, when the iPad 3 GS or whatever the next generation product will be called is released there will undoubtedly be another whole round of fun, probably not reaching the same intensity but this one is going to run and run.

If that story doesn't convince marketers of the value of listening, that they need to be in a position to react swiftly if they want to participate and derive benefit from these fast moving trends, I don't know what will.

Believe in influence / word of mouth and power of social search

I offer you in evidence,  the following screengrab fresh from my Facebook newsfeed:

1) Someone asking his friends (not Google or Bing) for help / cake recipe advice
 
2) 3 responses, the first in just 5 minutes

3) Two of the responses cited / recommended brands (Mrs Beeton & Waitrose)

Think about the importance of that as a consumer behaviour, only likely to be amplified in the future: - No search engine used, no chance as a brand to intervene via paying for "sponsored links" , just the advice of people you know and trust.

That's why the time is now to build relationships between consumers and brands, based on product or service experience that delivers certainly, but far beyond that also allows the brand to nudge in a relevant way, on a regular basis to remain top of mind  (and not always necessarily based on product benefit / ad lead news).

Sure, you won't necessarily be able to control when those pearls of wisdom are passed on, but does that always matter? Have trust in your consumers, they can work out when it's relevant all by themselves.  The brand gets recommended, the sharer gets "friendship brownie points" for helping out / providing trust advice.

Brand advocacy via (e-)word of mouth can occur at any time...

Many Marketers are slowly beginning to get their heads around the power of word of mouth brand advocacy (or seeing every consumer as an OTT (Opportunity to Talk)).  Great!  And whilst it's easier than ever before to get some sort of handle on what consumers are saying via buzz monitoring / listening tools (of which there are many), it's still a real struggle for them to understand that you can't deliver predictable reach within a given time period like you can on TV.

Which is not to say that reach can't be achieved by Word of Mouth. Wrong. It's harder to predict and to be exact in the measurement but if you are stressing about that you've kind of missed the point.

Consumers will only talk about things that are relevant to them or they believe are relevant to their potential audience when it suits them. And they'll do it in their own way.  Which doesn't necessarily mean repeating what's written on the pack / voiced in the advert.

So to make the point (whilst I am on a snow-related blogging theme)... Yesterday I spontaneously posted this shout out about what I've called "snow chains for shoes" (which is not what they called them on the limited cardboard insert packaging) on Facebook...

Utterly genius product idea, from a brand called YakTrax,that I happened to have tripped over before I headed for the mountains at Christmas, found to be brilliant, and never thought I'd be needing to wear in London anytime soon.

So why did I post it!? Because I was happy to share my brilliant find with my friends, who equally might find them useful especially now that yesterday's snow has frozen and turned a lot of places into lethal skating rinks.  Yes,  I might get some vague intangible recognition / friendship brownie points from my friends for sharing but mostly I did it because I think it's a great product that deserves to be shouted about, and it was contextually relevant.

I also emailed a pile of people (mostly older people not on Facebook), so it was more than just a shout out in one channel to one audience.

Will YakTrax ever be able to attribute an actual value to my promotion of their products. Unlikely. Will they nonetheless have gained awareness from my action.  Certainly.

Mutual value exchange & smart word of mouth campaigns

Flying around the web and the Twittersphere today has been a great example of the power of the people / word of mouth marketing.

Musician Jack Johnson has a new album out on the 27th October. He's started off a seemingly pretty effective word of mouth campaign via Twitter.

Smart thinking has gone into this too.  Word of mouth relies on people voluntarily passing on something that's interesting, fun or relevant. However, you can encourage word of mouth with incentive.  Like all good relationships it's about mutual value exchange:  Do this for me and I'll do this for you.

Which is exactly how, and quite probably why there have been so many people obligingly tweeting out to their own networks about the forthcoming album release. Why? Because by visiting his site & sending a pre-set tweet (but allowing for 20 characters of personalisation on the front, nice touch) in return you can get a free mp3 download of a track from said album. Everyone likes free stuff. Or sort-of free stuff 'cos you have to make a little bit of an effort to get it, but the value exchange stacks up enough to bother.

It would have been churlish of me not to oblige, so of course I did. Judging by the number of tweets I've seen personally on the subject today, so did many others and the whole campaign would appear to be working rather well, an opinion ratified by a quick Twitter search:

There's also a fair few people tweeting about articles they've blogged on the topic (like this one), so double whammy and well done to Mr. Johnson. He's successfully harnessed the power of the people (people being the best new media vehicle out), by creating OTT (opportunities to talk), and thereby propelling his sample & message (at very low cost, i.e bandwidth & releasing the track free, no media costs in a traditional sense) to audiences that might never otherwise have been reached by traditional advertising whether on or offline.

Good stuff.

Move over bumper stickers here's Twibbon

Thanks to my squirrelling around the web (see last post), I just found Twibbon.

Twibbon effectively allows you to add a badge to your Twitter Photo icon, allowing all the people following you to see that you are happy to be associated with whatever your Twibbon says/shows. There are loads to choose from already, ranging from that pesky photo-crashing squirrel to all manner of charities and causes whether it's I love Firefox to Breast Cancer's pink ribbon.

It's easy to add to your profile, easy to remove, and not hard to create one either (you just need a gif / png file), as I learned playing around. I'm too short of time right now to go and create a new one just for me but to evidence the point here's one I just adopted.

I can think of so many ways this could be used by brands, even if you only choose to sport a particular twibbon for a short while. What a fantastic way of amplifying your message via your brand advocates. Better go and mention it to some clients!

Word of Mouth: What works and why

I could write reams on this topic as I am endlessly frustrated by brands coming to me and saying I want a "viral".

Let's be clear: Swine flu is a VIRUS.

Something can be transmitted VIRALLY (adverb).

There is NO SUCH THING in digital marketing as a VIRAL.

Viral transmission of content is SOMETHING THAT HAPPENS.

People will only VOLUNTARILY pass on things that they think are interesting, funny, useful and that will reflect well upon the sender in the eyes of the recipient.

Rant over.

To illustrate the point here's a snapshot of something someone sent me earlier today and I am now choosing to share with you because a) it made me laugh and b) it evidences the point I've just made.


The full version is here and well worth a click.

There's another point about time-sensitivity and WOM that needs to be made but I'll save that for another day. In the interim I'll make the point the short way by saying that yesterday someone flagged up to me the well-established-but-until-now-had-passed-me-by phenomenon of the photo-crashing squirrel, which had me in stitches yesterday, and then again this morning when having sent a friend the link to an "insert the squirrel into your picture" site they sent me back their attempt. Imagine harnessing the value of that level of consumer participation and positive sentiment to your brand by facilitating something similar.

I'm saddened that Reader's Digest (the original offline Twitter?) has filed for Chapter 11 this week, but as a tribute to a longstanding part of their publication I'll sign off, with "Laughter: The best medicine."