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.

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…

The US Superbowl is this Sunday. Advocacy groups can’t wait.

Last year, General Motors featured a suicidal robot in its 60 second 5 million dollar ad. The robot’s portrayal of mental health offended a loud percentage of viewers. This prompted the huge corporation to publicly apologise to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention for its distasteful machinations.

Snickers featured two masculine auto mechanics that shared a moment of physical intimacy over a candy bar. After realising their “mistake”, they attempted to out-compete each other in displays of stereotypical masculinity. They pulled out their chest hair. This insensitive portrayal of chauvinistic male pride offended the Human Rights Campaign, a gay advocacy group. Mars sincerely apologised only days after the ad aired.

Online viral videos–that is, user made or modified or just uploaded video content–generates huge audiences, and even its own content. Note the viral videos spiraling through the blogosphere for Nike. The brand showcased commercials featuring the hip hop basketball free stylings of streetball unknowns. Students, B-ball fans, and online netizens flocked to the YouTube and the search video sites to watch the show again and again. There were no famous celebs, no hulking (highly-paid) professional athletes. Just a bunch of kids and a ball in nicely woven montages that generated more wall-paper/screen-saver madness than ever before seen. People commented on and tried to copy the videos using their own computer equipment and inspired skills.

Ads today aren’t made for a small space of air time. Like the French ad art nouveau posters from the early 1900s, ads today are cultural icons. They are copied, modified and re-spun, carrying the Brand, Product, or Name along with them into the virtual homes, hearts, and minds of millions of online viewers. They elicit comment and commentary. Pundits mention the most memorable in news and spoofs, both on and offline. Marketeers can find themselves prolonging pain or profit through the creation of one noteworthy 30 second video spiel.

On the other end of the spectrum of the GM debacle, in the 2007 Superbowl spectators gave Nationwide insurance an extra 24 million dollars into unpaid media exposure, according to USA Today estimates. Nationwide featured the infamous Kevin Federline as a wannabe rapper working at a fast food restaurant. The National Restaurant Association trade group complained, but their bickering earned the general amusement of the public rather than supportive condemnation. What had been a short commercial in a long line-up of expensively packaged product teasers suddenly became a national sensation. Online, people posted the ad to their webpages. On YouTube, uploaded versions received over 600,000 views.

This year, family, female, and gay rights advocates are already stocking up on potato chips and broadband in anticipation of a new line up of expensive commercials. One isn’t exactly sure what to expect. Sure, the Superbowl is a family event, but advertisers know its not the acceptable ads that generate the additional free revenue. Advocate groups are equally aware that platforms for controversy are great marketing tools. As the two sides martial millions of spectators around the television, both may be hoping for a memorable post-season play-off.

The traditional corporate model places a high premium on sales. In fact, industry sectors sometimes complain that salesmen and women push systems and merchandise that haven’t been created yet. The favourite Dilbert commercial shows the hapless IT guy complaining to a sales guy, “you sold a system that won’t be invented for the next two years! What do you think that means?” The sales guy replies, “it means that I’m a fantastic salesman and you are a terrible engineer!”

Where this is the case, the company’s reputation is at risk. As competition heats up and the rush to force early systems adoption slows down, even monoliths like Microsoft begin to emphasise compatibility. This means that the sales guy that promises a product not yet on the market will be known as a hack rather than a hot-shot.

Salespeople (like politicians) are quickly becoming the menace of the marketing world when they promise products that don’t deliver. Online, the social media results of these transactions can unravel expensive and carefully planned marketing campaigns. Consumers go to the web to vet a potential purchase–this goes for individual shoppers as well as corporate customers. Complaints and compliments are out there online. They are accessible, accessed, and more and more used in assessing a potential purchase.

This is where marketers salvage the purchasing power that many over-enthusiastic salespersons spin out of control. Marketers collect the complaints and the compliments, pinpoint the issues, and repackage the relevant information where clients and customers can access it–without suffering the innate suspicion experienced by any person undergoing a sales routine. Marketers online have renewed power, if they have the technology and skill to access it.

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.

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/43456

I saw this article first from WOMMA… They are part happy that buzz marketing is now a target of satire “we’ve made it” but also that satire can map closely with some genuine impressions of this new industry… What the hey, it made me read the article and reminded me that I should read the Onion more often. (www.Europeanonion.com is also pretty good.)

I was looking through Trendwatching.com newsletter and their newest neoligism is “virtual anthropology”. This is where you can understand people and their passions by looking at what they post online. Look inside someone’s fridge at flickr.com, investigate the contents of a hand bag, read a blog, watch their videos etc…. This is all fun and reiterates the point that there is a tsumami of content out there for people and companies to look at and explore.

Another trend spotting site recommended by Reiner and team is http://www.influxinsights.com/. New fashion and quirk includes customised airbus for those with €300M in their pocket and a need for a private plane…, a stackable hard drive shaped like lego blocks and the expanding offline record store that shuns easy online purchase for top class customer experience and legendary staff knowledge…

There is a warning that companies shouldn’t be “evil” and abuse trust of posting public. At least they are not precious about this, if you blog or post your pictures you expect that people will look at this and even seek you out. I suppose the warning here is not to inundate bloggers with stupid product offerings, spam or violate privacy…

Attentio stays away from such evil antics :)

Simon McDermott, Sales & Marketing Director

First published on www.simonmcdermott.com

A well known expat magazine based in Brussels, the Bulletin, has interviewed us regarding Attentio. The angle is entrepreneurship in Brussels and our experiences here. Setting up experience in Brussels has been mixed, having a lawyer has certainly helped but parts of the administration in Brussels have been really good to deal with (Especially ORBEM). Still, the costs of employment and flexibility of hiring are very difficult obstacles.

On the article itself, there is a funny beginning, warning people if they write blogs they should be careful, because we might be tracking them. Of course it is not like that, what an individual writes might be interesting but the people that buy our services are more interested in the aggregate or trends of the results. Anyway, if someone writes a blog I suppose they accept that people will want to read what they write, that’s the raison d’etre of a blog, right?

At the end of the week I mailed with Bernadette O’Reilly, she runs an entrepreneurship centre in Dublin and they are really expanding, she was even on RTE talking about it last week. The Belgians don’t get involved with activities like that, but if they want to create more innovation (and they say they do) they may also need to make investments like this. It seems that Ireland is starting to make some headway here http://www.rte.ie/business/2004/0429/entrepreneur.html. The support for the Belgian entrepreneur is almost non-existant but with a recent growth in the number of independents and some centres of innovation (mainly offering cheap rent), things could be changing…

Otherwise, it was a busy week writing proposals, making sales calls and discussing direction of technology. On Friday morning had to leave for Copenhagen for Mother-in-law’s birthday, thankfully we missed the worst of the “social action” in Brussels, although we couldn’t get a taxi so my car sits in airport parking €15 a day… A small price to pay for living in the capital of Europe…

s

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