There are two central concerns in online marketing: creating attractive content and distributing that content effectively.  Both factors are dependent upon the industry, product or service and the relevant online market.

Rather, both factors require an accurate Q2 (quantified and qualified) assessment of said market. To address both factors, one needs a Q2 evaluation of the social media surrounding the target market.

Content is three dimensional. It should be visual, viral, and current.

Good content is visually appealing to one’s clients or consumers. The content must be viral in that the information is info that the consumers wish to share–it must infect the individual’s network and not just the individual. Current content is essential. Studies emphasise that WOM (word of mouth) in the chaotic market that is online social media has a “sensitive dependence on initial conditions“. That is, change one letter in the address bar and one’s entire audience is new.  Current content combines the past and the present.  Current content knows the real time concerns and considerations as well as the history of the immediate trends. Current content connects the initial “sensitive dependencies” to the modern market. It is that connection and timely awareness, cleverly and creatively communicated, that makes worthy content viral.  And zing, you’ve just infected a network of interested individuals, aka customers, clients, your market.

But wait.

Content requires effective distribution. Despite the chaos of the online market, or perhaps due to this chaos, esoteric communities and networks specialising in equally valid content remain entirely sealed off from one another. In quantum physics, this phenomenom of multiple realities is called the multiverse. In business, it’s called redundant.

Successful distribution online is also three dimensional.  Successful distribution needs to be authoritative, influential, and proactive. The distributor should have intimate knowledge of her market.  Her authority should be obvious in her engagement with the online community. Distribution needs to be influential. The method of distribution must be broad, connecting several different networks and always searching for additional networks to add to the growing spiderweb of interconnectivity.  This is why all distribution must be proactive, soliciting potential clients to access the content that will influence and create new markets.

Here’s a great story about the transport company DHL in relation to a Swedish artist (Erik Nordenenkar) claiming to have done the world’s largest drawing by putting a GPS tracker in a suitcase that DHL had to transport all over the world. In the end, the story about the DHL trip turned out to be fake. A giant YouTube viral stunt by the artist, but not necessary good publicity for DHL.

A blogger (Dan Calladine) has illustrated the story using Attentio’s Trendpedia blog search engine to show that DHL’s buzz is going “viral” all over the world right now. The blog posting is a nice example of how social media monitoring can be used by consumers as well as businesses to track buzz around certain events. Read Dan’s blog posting to get the rest of the story. This blog post illustrates the artist’s DHL viral stunt using Trendpedia. It includes the artist’s original YouTube video. Here is DHL’s buzz around the story as reported on Trendpedia. See the full drawing on Wired.

Presidential candidates in the US race have spent a mere five percent of their campaign money online. Yet this five percent, “experts” argue, may prove to be the most effective money spent swaying undecided voters. Candidates can geo-politically target potential voters with information that is judged to be of immediate concern to the voter’s profile.

CNN reports that if a Democratic candidate discusses a penalising tax for SUV drivers on a morning TV show in Ohio, GeoVoter technology can identify all the SUV drivers in the area of the show’s broadcast. Within hours of the show’s production, a Republican campaign can send each of these drivers an email designed to pique the interest (and, it is assumed, the anxiety) of these potential voters.

The Internet is an amazingly well-informed “invisible hand” that marketeers and their companies (or candidates) are increasingly adept at manipulating. But does this really mean that they manipulate the market? I would argue that we haven’t quite come to that, and perhaps never will.

Internet use is increasing apace, and studies demonstrate that more and more people spend time surfing the web. (This is probably a byproduct of the fact that few jobs allow employees to leave their computer space during the course of the work day. Even the guy who runs my gym spends 60 percent of his work time at his desk. And I suspect he is not looking at the spreadsheets covering the expense of the gym equipment–at least not the whole time.)

Further studies (and there are always further studies) determine that most surfers are looking at content, not receiving or sending information. Being an avoider of email myself, I can identify with this. People are not paying a lot of attention to the arrows that the advertisers send to their inboxes. For most of us, it’s all we can do to peruse the email from the people we care about, much less the people that care about us (or our money/vote, etc.).

What’s a poor marketeer to do?

Target the content, not the consumer. Consumers look at content, consumers love content. They seek it out. They do not seek out emails, or sms, or targeted advertising. Quite the opposite in fact.

Know your consumer, your voter, okay. Know what they like to read, watch, and listen to online. Then put the add or the information there. Let people discover what they want to care about rather than tell them what their consumer/voter profile tells them they should care about. Anybody in the virtual world or the real world can report that profiling is far from popular these days, most especially by those that are profiled.

This is still targeted advertising. But it targets content, a far less threatening concept to most consumers. No one wants to be a target, especially for technologically guided SPAM designed to conform to your profile.

Consumers personally engage with content, they duck impersonal bullet points. The most effective marketeer is the one that engages in return.

We spend a lot of time telling people about the power of blogs and the networking that is possible. It is something we really believe in and through blogging we have made great contacts and find it a super place to find and share information.

Just recently, this was brought home to me. When reading Tom Raftery’s two months ago I saw that Shel Israel (co-author of Naked Conversations) and Rick Segal (Canadian investor/blogger) were coming to Europe. I saw that Ireland and other European cities were on their schedule but not Belgium. I thought I should ask why they were not coming here to Brussels, given an emerging interest here in start ups, collaborative software and of course our central position in European affairs :)

Shel responded and asked “Why Brussels?”. A fair enough question, so I gave him the selling pitch (I think I included great beer and chocolate). He said he would talk about it to Rick and come back to me. It turns out that Kris Hoet from Microsoft had also been in contact with them for the same reason and in the end they are coming over on the 21st of October and we will get together a group of bloggers, entrepreneurs and eMarketers for a round table and dinner. (Hopefully we can experience some Brussels night life as well…)

In conclusion, the blogosphere is a great way to make contacts and most of all it’s fun. Their agenda is below

Oct. 14. London– dinner with small group of entrepreneurs.
Oct. 15-16–Scotland. Learning about social media in public education system
Oct. 17–Cork. Meetings with entrepreneurs/blogger dinner
Oct. 18–19 Dublin. Blogger dinner; participate in SaaS conference Trinity College
Oct. 20–Brighton, England, meet entrepreneurs
Oct. 21,2–Brussels, meet with entrepreneurs
Oct. 22-24–Estonia, meet leaders of online community, private dinner.
Oct. 25–Berlin, meeting with entrepreneurs as well as companies in Jenna.
Oct. 25-30. Rome, Guest of American Embassy. speaking meeting with Italian entrepreneurs. 

I had a podcast today with Tom Raftery, we mainly discussed the evolving requirement for tracking user generated media (blogs, UseNet) and how much this was on the radar of European companies. Definitely worth a listen :) He has a lot of knowledge around podcasting, blogging and web 2.0, so if anyone wants to get up to speed on those areas just listening to his last 5-10 podcasts will certainly help…

I was asked recently by a market research journalist, why blog tracking is relevant for business. Blogs are now on most companies’ radars, but often the discussion is on how they can use blogs as a dissemination tool, not on how they can be used to gain customer insights. There is no question that the numbers are increasing (30 million and doubling every year) For Attentio, this is our business and blogs are only one example of people generated content (UseNet and consumer review sites are very important too), but here is why we think blogs are specifically interesting.

1. Search engine relevance: If you search about an issue, a product, or company it is likely a blog will figure highly in the results i.e. in page 1 or 2. This means the content of a blog will have a large audience of search users. My mother reads about a Gucci handbag in a blog, a patient reads about a new drug in a blog, a person looking to buy a new computer reads about Dell customer service issue in Jeff Jarvis’s blog etc.

2. Connectedness: Bloggers link to other bloggers. Tools like track-back add to this connectedness and often it is possible to follow where an issue was first discussed and how it spread through this network.

3. Content and set up: Blogs are easy to set up and have no editor. There is nothing to stop anyone creating a blog and writing about widely discussed issue or niche topics that interest them. In a sense they can take advantage of the “Long tail” with micro-communities of interested people or post about more mainstream topics.

4. Predictability: If an increasing number of bloggers are talking about a specific product and the sentiment is positive, this can translate into more sales or at least more enquiries. This is product and influence dependent, but there are plenty of case examples. The corollary of negative sentiment also applies.

Attentio can help give perspective on what the buzz around blogs means; to do this we use technology, methodology and standard reporting. A good way to start seeing if this is relevant for your company is by checking Technorati or Google blog search and see how frequently people post on a specific area of interest. Then check out Google Groups and do the same for discussion forums. If the numbers are large, then it might be worth paying professionals to do the analytics work…

For more information on this topic there is a great article from Business Week on the impact of blogs, also a post on this blog from November has a good number of sites to go to.

I’m Simon McDermott, a co-founder of Attentio and previously did my blogging from simonmcdermott.com. I have put a few of these previous posts in the Attentio blog because the subject material is around the area of blog tracking, web 2.0 and the change in relationship between company and customer. I want to write in future about what makes this burgeoning industry special, why organisations and individuals can benefit from this space and of course other interesting trivia (I of course determine what is interesting…). Other members of the team and advisors will also give their views and opinions on Attentio’s space and we look forward to a great discussion. 

Trust “MEdia” - How Real People Are Finally Being Heard

This article identifies in great length the impact of blogs, the incredible growth of the phenomenon and some tips for companies to understand how to work with this media. I still believe that blogging is in some sense hyped, what is really interesting is that so many people can get online, post their thoughts and get involved in online communities. Blogging is one way of doing this but new ways will arise, which is cool so long as people just keep writing…

s.

First published on www.simonmcdermott.com

There are some useful links for those that want to measure the impact of blogs on their business or just want to learn more about this area… I got these links from http://www.themeasurementstandard.com

Blog 101 Bibliography:
Basic references to keep you in the know and get you starting measuring:
Wikipedia defines blogs in detail
A great introduction to blogs from BusinessWeek
Google Blog Search
Inexpensive places to start blogs: livejournal, blogger and typepad.
Top ten weblog design mistakes
Technorati searches 20 million blogs
PubSub instantly notifies you of new online content of your choice
Blogpulse is Intelliseek’s “automated trend discovery system for blogs.”
Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Legal Guide for Bloggers
Forbes’ “Attack of the Bloggers”

First published on www.simonmcdermott.com

As I work through a project I am doing with Vlerick, it occurs to me that they deserve some credit for the recent Economist ranking. They have increased their position to number 12 in the world… For a school that is quite new, it represents a great achievement and most probably acknowledges the student involvement in the MBA, strong alumni and improving faculty.

IESE are considered number 1 but there is heavy criticism of the salary data from people who seem to know the school…

http://www.yannicklaclau.com/2005/10/mba_rankings_ta.html

I wonder though if there will be a move away from ranking and perhaps a bigger focus on simply highlighting the life experience of an MBA and what you will earn when you leave… I can’t think of many other reasons for doing an MBA and selecting a school that fulfils these requirements is probably most important for the majority of applicants…

Still, number 12 in the world! :)

First published on www.simonmcdermott.com