I’ve been reading online about the importance of social media monitoring in reducing the money wasted on advertising.  Mediapost had some nice things to say about the recession and companies learning to shore up their budgets by being more cautious about their marketing.

In Europe, word-of-mouth and online marketing is not only a low cost with a great many benefits, it’s the safest, most respectful way to reach clients and consumers.  The EU is very protective of European consumers.  “Push” advertising, in-your-face, direct-to-consumer ads, are frowned upon.  For some corporations, this kind of marketing can even result in legal action.

For example, pharmaceutical corporations are very limited in the information that they can provide to consumers, and they’re even more limited in their methods of distributing this information.  France has required Yahoo! to limit the information that can be accessed by French consumers to be more in line with French rules and customes.  The French Parliament is now considering making encouraging anorexia a crime, and in some Southern European countries, models are already required to present health certificates to their employers.  One has to wonder how this trend in consumer-citizen protection legislation will eventually affect marketing.

Online marketing, however, is saving time, money, and respect for different legal and cultural traditions by creating content that “pulls” consumers rather than push them.  This, the EU and European States determine, is okay.  If a consumer accesses the information rather than has it foisted on them, then everyone is happy.

Larry Ellison, the chief executive at Oracle, pulled in a cool 92 million pounds in exercised stock earnings in addition to salary last year. Howard D. Schultz, CEO of Starbucks scored a salary plus stock options that topped 50 million pounds.

AC Milan’s Kaka is expected to gross (only?) 7.5 million pounds this year, and chances are the aforementioned chief executives will be spending more time at the top of their careers than the footballer. Physical ability tends to peak at some point, while CEO salaries…don’t.

It’s a competitive corporate market, and CEOs are the new celebrities. These demigods of commerce are usually made up of a face, a known name, and a paycheck that sparks shareholder controversy.

Studies suggest that the share value of a company can be correlated to the “value” of its chief executive officer.  This is part of what nailed Nardelli, the highly criticised former CEO of Home Depot. Yet despite Nardelli’s short, less than shiny record at the head of that somewhat shaky ship, the man got a sweet send-off to the tune of 210 million US dollars, over 106 million pounds. Now that is heavy censorship.

CEOs are more and more the superstar, scapegoat, and celebrity of the modern corporation. They trade in trust and infamy, linking their own reputations to the firms they represent. A lot of the value of a CEO is tied up in his visibility. One has to wonder, who’s the buzziest of the big business men, and in relation to which topics?  And just how is that affecting share price? Or company brands and products?

At Attentio, measurement is underway…

So we launched Trendpedia last week, this is our “showcase” product for Attentio. For the site we had cleaned the look and feel and added new sharing features - email, delicious, stumbleupon etc. The tool helps people see what is hot in the blogosphere across a big group of European languages. Kudos to Casper and Per for getting this out.

We have only really used social media to pass the message out plus some emailing, twitters and facebook from Caroline and myself. There will be a “traditional” release next week. There is already some good feedback from bloggers and we know we need to add a widget, help people add their blog to the index and increase the number of blogs and perhaps offer more date options (we have plans for a few other nice features).

I would like to thank Bruno, Tom, Andy and Tom DB for their helpful feedback and of course all of the other bloggers out there that have linked to the site or added more valuable critique. You can find out more of the buzz by checking out the Trendpedia site (I would say that, right?)…

So when an economy stutters companies want even more assurance when they buy a service there is a keen return on investment (ROI). We care deeply about this of course and want to explain why companies should spend 10,000 -250,000 EURO a year on this type of monitoring and measurement. It goes without saying that this data needs to fit into decision making processes in communications and senior management, we see this more often in Europe now driven by a more social media savvy marketers and an agency network often driven by more “modern” PR companies. For exact ROI of course we need to talk directly to the brands or agencies but below here is our take on the high level drivers for ROI.

1. Campaign effectiveness: Conversation levels are the new metric, compare successful campaigns (benchmarks) with your own campaign and determine if the levels are good, bad, indifferent. This type of measurement enables companies to see what generates the best word-of-mouth and construct more “buzzy” campaigns. The ROI is driven by making more efficient advertising and targeted communication.

2. Digital brand evaluation: The digital brand is the online component of the brand and the same drivers apply, such as, 

i. Recognition

ii. Recommendability

iii. Customer sentiment

iv. Cultural/Regional factors

By actually measuring the influence the online brand has in social networks, blogs and forums companies can more effectively evaluate what they need to invest both offline and online. More concretely the word-of-mouth drivers for brands in online are not really being evaluated yet, so companies are actually wasting money on campaigns where they are already getting word-of-mouth support or even worse ploughing money into activities than will never get this warm hand of approval.

3. Insurance against issue that arises in social media first: The analogy - monitoring the news tells you the weather outside, monitoring social media tells you the weather forecast over the next weeks. Companies can also track issues back in time, seeing where the issue arose, by consistent monitoring (and storing) they also build a digital memory that can be anlaysed at any time.

4. Organisational benefits: All companies are now monitoring social media, often this is still ad hoc, done by interns, PR or marketing people. This is a good first step but when the volume becomes too high it is untenable. Would a company trust opinion polling to an internal person? Normally they use outside providers, this is becoming the same for social media (impartiality is important). Social media technology and monitoring enables a distinct process and methodology and if the person who handles this leaves the company then there is a system already in place. I have heard of countless examples were the “guy who had the RSS feeds” leaves and takes a whole process and methodology with him - this is not acceptable anymore…

5. Content strategy: Good well structured, timely content is valuable and expensive to produce, by using monitoring tools companies can see what people talk about really and what information they lack e.g. UK bloggers connect to US bloggers regarding medical issues, company sees this need and provides information site for European web users dealing with different regulation and treatment options. This saves money.

6. Targeting: Simply knowing who is influential can help make a product communication happen faster. This isn’t cynical it just shows that companies are listening to the countless discussions out in social media and trying to speak with the right people. There is a pretty well known group of “A” list blogs but there are 10’s of thousands of other highly authorative people that can be reached and are often interested in new products, content and information. This also has an extraordinary impact on search engine optimisation which further drives ROI.

We have put actual numbers on this with clients and it is normally very easy to explain the value. In my opinion companies will start to have more departments that look like a mix of PR/Marketing and these groups will develop around social media expertise. When this starts to happen the ROI discussion will become more about what tools drive the best ROI not that social media monitoring and measurement drives real value…

In trekking through the Internet, one looks for peaks from which to survey the landscape.

It’s a bustling and bewildering bombardment of information. Isolating a trend can seem impossible. You know you’re not alone, but how to connect the scattered conversations that talk about your topics?

Fear not, weary trend trackers. Trendpedia is here. Attentio has just created a peak for pinpointing the Buzz that you want to see. Trendpedia is a search engine that tracks social media trends throughout the European blogosphere. It’s free, it’s fun and it can be a bit prophetic.

Consider this trend:

There’s talk of an EU President, a leader to rally the tribes of the European continent. The name that keeps popping up is the former Prime Minister of the UK, Tony Blair. His Buzz trendline on Trendpedia eerily echoes the trendline of the potential position. The two lines are moving closer and closer together. Could this be a match?

Or this trend:

Out of the current lady soloists working their way up in the WOM (word-of-mouth) online, Yael Naim, the international Israeli-French vocalist swept the Palmarès Victoires de la musique 2008, and Leona Lewis got a number of nods at the Brit Music Awards 2008. But the real consistent crooner creating Buzz is the up and coming Welsh singer Duffy. She’s belted out a few ballads that are attracting a European wide audience on the radios and online.

Things have been busy here at Attentio, limiting my time to blog. I’ve been reading blogs and forums, however, and I’m fascinated by the evolving cultures.

Blogs range from introspective to soapboxing–blogs are just more personal and thus more political. People blog to tell you something.

People participate in forums to discover something. They exchange experiences, advice and information. People on forums share.

I’m researching more and more to the differenences in these online cultures. It’s noticable more and more that online, expertise is not enough. People want experience to validate that expertise. Consumers today are suspicious of a news culture that vibrates between journalism and “churnalism“, that is, journalists that spend hours reading public relations releases and “churning” the information presented into news stories. People turn to blogs and forums to find out which news to credit and which news to ignore.

On that note, I’m glad to say that Attentio is once again teaming up with Emakina Academy, experts at mixing social media and PR with an impact, for another conference in Gent this Thursday. With Attentio’s measurement and monitoring tools and Emakina’s expertise, we’re exploring the capacity for social media to create long-lasting and valuable relationships between consumers, brands, and products.

Health care today is an individually-consumed good that produces benefits for everybody.

But there is a problem–”health” is subject to interpretation. By the patient. By the doctor. By the nurse. By the judge or the lawyer or the jury or the neighbour or the parent or the secondary school counselor or the teacher or the boss that sends/does not send the kid home.

Health care consumers know this. That’s why individual consumers are taking ownership of their health care-online. They post and participate in sharing side effects, suspicions, and successes with medications, diets, and treatments.

Online, there are no national boundaries limiting the information about medicines and health care services. Consumers price shop, compare experiences, and exchange advice. But not with everyone. Consumers prefer to talk to each other-consumer trust other consumers, in health care as in all other consumer goods.

Consumers do not trust the professionals-at least, not directly. Direct to consumer (DTC) advertising is despised. Expertise is suspect.

But experience is king. If a pharmaceutical has good word of mouth online, it attracts a dedicated and appreciative following. Consumers are “pulled” to the medication by positive reviews, rather than pushed a drug by DTC.

Each Friday I plan to feature a social media campaign measured using Attentio’s tools. These won’t be clients–I’ve set up projects to follow campaigns featured in the online news, like the Cheetos Underground ad campaign and Nissan’s viral video campaigns, also linked to NBC’s Heroes.

This week, I want to play on a theme introduced in the last blog. Social media and government–in this case, social media and statehood.

Edward Bernays, the alleged “father of public relations”, thought that to successfully rule the people, government had to be hijacked by a skilled elite. Then this elite needed to successfully sell themselves to the people.

Bernays did not believe debate and measured opinion equalled votes or even effective government. A former propagandist for US President Wilson during World War II, Bernays thought it best to appeal to the irrational masses, not the rational individual citizen. Earn their appreciation and acquiescence, then do what’s best for them. After the war, Bernays went into business and branding. He was incredibly successful.

Veton Surroi, a Kosovo statesmen, told The Economist that earning national sovereignty–the recognised right to govern yourself–requires a certain amount of nation branding a la Bernays. Prior to setting up a government for the people, most of the people must buy into the idea that the nation exists. This means marketing your nation to the international community as well as the people that must eventually make up the nation. Kosovo is a controversial brand at the moment. Not even the European Union can afford the new nation, although some nations have made an early investment.

Rather like some populations and national leaders begun investing in the new hot nation-brand, Tibet. While no one can afford to isolate the established brand that is China, Tibet has picked up an impassioned consumer base–on the ground and online. There are hundreds of websites and many more blogs closely following the territory and its people’s movement for independence. Tibet has sailed past Kosovo as the poster child of national independence. And other groups are Buzzing about more autonomy as well—who will be next to adopt the trend towards statehood? Time will tell which state sells its sovereignty with the most success.

In the Spring issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas in a piece entitled “The Foolishness of Crowds“, Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, pours scorn on the thoughts of New York lawyer Beth Simone Noveck. Noveck, a social media enthusiast, quotes George Bernard Shaw, who claimed that professionals conspire against the laity, to promote the idea of wiki government: policy making using the anyone-can-edit techniques familiar from Wikipedia. Keen counters that it is these very techniques that are a conspiracy against the professionals.

Keen‘s point about wiki government is that it risks being hijacked by ideologues who want to impose their own agenda on policy and government. To the extent that such a thing might already have happened, I wouldn’t want it to continue online, but Keen is just too enthusiastic in his criticism of the power of participation that is social media.

His biggest complaint is that professionals cannot afford to give away their specialized labour for free. But the truth is that the non-pros can’t afford to let the pros be the only ones putting a price tag on their services either. There’s a difference between selling useful knowledge for a fair price and making a profit through a monopoly on information. What a pro knows may actually be worth what you or I are willing to pay, but it can also be worth a lot less. The trick is to find the balance.

We should never forget that there is always an asymmetry in information — online media simply makes it easier to diagnose and address. Expertise should feel obliged to continuously improve, refine and prove its knowledge. The population is more informed and thus more suspicious. Lobbyists can no longer pass as pure experts, and experts must question the structure that produced both their ideas and ideologies more closely — they must be more critical about their own content, a boon to both their studies and their students. Everyone has an agenda. Attract an informed audience willing to consider yours.

Attentio pairs with Emakina, the largest interactive agency in Belgium, for conferences to educate Belgian marketers about the power of social media. The first conference this past Friday went well–Emakina’s always attractive slides were especially “sexy”, the market “mot” of the moment.

Literally sexy.

Emakina began the explanation of social media with an old PR Joke: If you see a beautiful woman at a bar, and you want to sleep with her, you have two options. One, approach her yourself and say, “Hey, I’m good in bed.” Two, send a friend (preferably female) to give you a good-in-bed review. Chances are, the less direct method is more effective. Women tend to trust reputations rather than declarations. Call us cautious. This analogy seeks to describe the difference between direct marketing and social marketing.

From that point forward, Emakina’s slides made social media out to be the attractive, feminine audience buzzing at a mixer. Potential dates and consumers all comparing notes on their plans for weekend outings and possible purchases. Companies, Emakina suggested, could go in aggressively like the ancient cave men–or, in the very poignant Emakina slide, chauvanistic karate kids–and start a fight with the ladies. Emakina intelligently suggested that this approach is not wise.

Cut to a slide of two women practicing judo. In light of earlier discussion, this was an apt metaphor. Instead of working against the women, slide into the discussion, listen to what they have to say, and use your own expertise and knowledge (and importantly, your new listening skills) to really contribute to the conversation. Be masculine but not machisto. Demonstrate commitment and credibility, not just expertise. Don’t taunt, but rather tango (another slide) with the clientele.

After some doubtful moments of intermittent feminism, I decided the metaphor was okay. After all, it puts the power in its proper place, with the clientele.

After all, as the producer in the relationship, the company always wants to sell, rather like most men, let’s face it, consistently want something else. But they only get what they want when the consumer, or the lady, decides she wants it too.