IMV37: Online Brand Monitoring

The following is a transcript for IMV37: Online Brand Monitoring. The original podcast is located here.

Announcer:

Welcome to the Internet Marketing Voodoo podcast, brought to you by MindComet. And, now, here’s your host, Paul Lewis.

Paul Lewis:

Okay, welcome to Internet Marketing Voodoo. I’m your host, Paul Lewis and with me today is our guest, Katie Delahaye Paine. Katie is the founder of KDPaine & Partners, LLC and she’s the publisher of The Measurement Standard. Katie, can you tell us a little bit about your background?

Katie Paine:

Sure. I actually started out in life as a journalist, decided I wanted a quote unquote normal life, and went into marketing in Silicon Valley in nineteen eighty… yeah I don’t know when, seventy something rather, a million years ago, and back then anybody who could write and English sentence could get a marketing job in Silicon Valley so I did, and eventually came back out to the east coast and happened to be the ninth person in the director of corporate communications job at Lotus in five years, at which point I realized that I’d better figure out a way to justify my existence or I’d be out on the streets because they perennially looked for a new director of corp comm every fall.

So I invented this way of measuring public relations, and my agency at the time was Helen Altonn and they said, “Anybody who isn’t using this by the year 2000 doesn’t deserve to be in business.” And so I quit my job and started the company. And that was some twenty years ago. I then sold that company and started KDPaine & Partners in 2002 with a notion that the other company was great at serving very large Fortune 500 companies, but they weren’t the only ones looking for measurement and that I felt the need to provide measurement services and measurement knowledge and advice to non-profits and agencies and government agencies and smaller companies. So that was the original premise behind KDPaine & Partners and we’ve since gone back into the servicing the big guys as well as doing more in the area of non-profits. Basically what we’ve been doing for twenty years is measuring the effectiveness of corporate communications programs, be they public relations or events or now, consumer generated meetings.

Paul Lewis:

So you’ve seen this coming for a long time. Tell us a little bit about how the Internet has turned consumers into publishers and what are some of the impacts of that?

Katie Paine:

Well the first thing we saw was about ten years ago, actually a little more than ten years ago now. We had a client in Epson Computer who basically said, “Okay Katie, now you have to measure the Internet.” And we all sort of scratched our heads a bit and said, “How are we gonna do that?” And I think the first project we printed off something like a thousand different postings in print, killed a whole forest to do it, and started analyzing it and started figuring out what the differences were between our traditional mainstream media analysis and analyzing what consumers had to say and we learned a lot ten years ago.

We learned that consumers would, you know, two weeks after a major announcement that Epson would put out there, you’d hear the customer’s response. They would sit there and they would say, “Hey, did you hear about this?” “Hey it’s got photo quality output and isn’t that wonderful?” And so you could actually see the customers and potential customers, prospects, picking up on the messages that were being put out there through press releases and through the launch activities. So that was the first thing that we saw was that by monitoring newsgroups and chat rooms and what was considered consumer generated media ten years ago, you could learn a lot. And you could learn a lot about what the competition was doing.

And then obviously with the invention of you know, things like TypePad and blogs and YouTube and all the rest of the stuff where now consumers really are the media, now you just see all of that exploding. But is it radically different? No. It’s just more of the same. It used to be that somebody with an agenda could get on a newsgroup and advocate for or against a particular product. Well you can still do that, you still see that happening. The good news is that in today’s media, it’s environment, you have more people engaged in participating. In the olden days, ten years ago, a whole newsgroup could be dominated by ten or fifteen different commenters. It’s unlikely now that an industry would be dominated by ten or fifteen people simply because they’re that many more people on the Internet, that many more people reading blogs, that many more people participating in this giant social conversation that’s going on out there.

Paul Lewis:

So hopefully it’s a lot more balanced.

Katie Paine:

It is a lot more balanced, and our research shows that it’s a lot more balanced. I mean that’s one of the things that I keep telling people is the fact that you know, you don’t have that much to worry about. I mean, you can in fact look at statistically and say, “Okay, fifty percent of all the stuff out there is pure observation, it’s not ranting or raving or anything else, it’s just observation.” What you’re seeing is the thing that it used to be that, and here’s the real shift I think, is that it used to be that by going onto newsgroups and ranting and raving to your fellow users of a particular product, that was the only way that you could vent your frustrations with a product or a company. And to a certain extent, that’s been true up until now, that you know, you could go on to Dellhell.com or you could go onto you know, any one of the Suchandsuchcompanysucks.com --

Paul Lewis:

Right.

Katie Paine:

And you could go to those sites and you could vent. Well now, because so many more corporations are starting blogs and so many more people are literally opening the door and saying you know, let’s have a conversation, now you, it’s much more likely that you the consumer can actually talk directly to the product developer or the product manager. I mean one of the most extraordinary things that I see all the time is these dialogues that go on between customers and product developers and product engineers, and it’s a beautiful thing. And it didn’t used to happen before. So it’s not just that the consumers are the developers of the media, and they certainly are, I mean they are acting now like editors and reporters in many, many ways, but they’re also, people are just so much closer to their customers.

Paul Lewis:

So it’s often, when done right, more of a dialogue with the company where before it might have been a monologue rant.

Katie Paine:

Well it was just stupid monologue in two directions. It was like the company would scream at it’s marketplace and say, “Buy my product, you know, ten percent off coupon.” But scream marketing was the rule of the day. And the customers in their frustration would scream back in newsgroups or on help lines or whatever. But now it’s definitely, it’s a conversation.

Paul Lewis:

Why is it important for companies today to monitor CPM, CGM excuse me?

Katie Paine:

The quick answer is, “Oh God, there might be something bad out there.” And granted, you know, frankly I’m in the business of telling people and advising people and selling them on CGM monitoring, so I mean that is certainly if you are in a controversial marketplace or if you are vulnerable yes, you should be monitoring it because oh my God, somebody might say something bad about you. But you know what, start a blog and they’re gonna say it to your face instead of behind your back which is better. But you know, you want to engage people in conversations and you want to know what’s being said about you and you want to know if it’s bad. But really, really the reason to monitor consumer generated media is to understand the competitive marketplace, is to understand what your competition is up to and what the marketplace is up to and listen to your customers and find out what it is that they want and what the trends are and what the chatter is and what the discussion’s all about. It’s great competitive intelligence and it’s great consumer intelligence. That’s the biggest reason.

Paul Lewis:

Yeah, in the minimal case it’s kind of like having a disaster recovery plan, but hopefully the way it can really be used is a competitive tool to advance your position in the marketplace.

Katie Paine:

I mean this is where I keep telling people over and over again that yes, it is new media and yes it is sort of, it’s a scary new world out there. But many, many, many of the same principles and the same tools still apply. So for instance I’ve been telling people for twenty years that they need to monitor what people are saying about them in the media, and they buy my PR measurement services and they don’t do competitive analysis and they just use it to justify their existence and they get a gold star because they increased their message content of their clippings by twenty percent. Okay, fine. That’s all they know is that they increased their message content by twenty percent. They have no idea whether in fact, at the same time the competition increased their message communications by fifty percent. They don’t know what the competition is up to because they’re only looking at their own little gold star. And the same thing is true in consumer generated media. You can certainly do an analysis to say, “Okay, how are we positioned in consumer generated media?” But all you’re gonna know is that’s how I’m positioned, not how what’s going on in the marketplace. So it’s all about the competitive intelligence and market intelligence that you need.

Paul Lewis:

So in the very minimal example though of just staying out of the firestorms that sometimes occur on the net, can you share with us maybe an example that a company has been caught into when they weren’t adequately paying attention to what was being said in consumer generated media and didn’t have a viable action plan for that?

Katie Paine:

Well I think, I mean the Dellhell scenario is probably the one that everybody talks about, but I talk about it because of one particular reason, which is there’s all kinds of, there’s kryptonite blocks is one story, where nobody knew what was being said about them and they were trashing them and then there’s another thing about Dodge cars and moms and all kinds of other things, but the Dell computer story where you know, one guy started ranting about his customer service and the next thing they had a thousand people ranting about Dell’s customer service and it made the New York Times, but --

Paul Lewis:

That was the Jeff Jarvis one?

Katie Paine:

The Jeff Jarvis one.

Paul Lewis:

Yeah.

Katie Paine:

But, the reason why that got everybody’s attention in every boardroom in America was not because people ranting and raving about the customer service, it was because the stock price dropped. And for the first time HP’s stock went up and Dell’s stock went down and that’s why everybody in every boardroom in America started paying attention to what consumers were saying.

Paul Lewis:

If there is adequate monitoring in place and companies have an effective plan, what sort of avenues are open to them to try to mitigate those types of situations?

Katie Paine:

Here is the problem, is you cannot jump into the blogosphere and try to influence an A-list blogger to run or not run a story. You can’t just come in from nowhere and say, “Oh I’m gonna pitch this blogger” because it just annoys them because you don’t know anything about them.

It’s the same thing that is true of any other good public relationship building campaign which is if you have a system in place to monitor stuff, and this literally just happened with a client of ours, where an A-list blogger was really being unbelievably vicious, and he was getting more and more vicious every day. And I have a blog, he knows my blog, I quote him in my blog and he knows me and I’ve quoted his book and promoted his book and all the rest of the stuff, so I have a relationship with this guy. Enough so I felt comfortable enough to email him and say, “This is vile. This is beyond acceptable and I’m insulted and I think you owe this person an apology that you’ve been trashing for all these reasons. I just think it’s despicable what you’re doing.” And he did, he issued an apology.

Paul Lewis:

Wow.

Katie Paine:

You know, and it was a big deal that he did, but that would not work if I did not have my own blog, if I did not have a relationship with this guy, and if I didn’t fundamentally believe that this guy was missing a piece of information and that’s why he was doing this. Unfortunately it is a client of mine and I don’t want to expose the wounds all over again but --

Paul Lewis:

Sure.

Katie Paine:

-- or I could talk about it more but I really do think it’s about you have to have some credibility in the blogosphere before you can try to control an image or control a story or do anything or pitch a story or any of that stuff.

Paul Lewis:

We tell our clients all the time you have to make the deposits in the bank before you try to make the withdrawals.

Katie Paine:

Bingo. Absolutely, that’s exactly what it is is the fact that you have to have something there first. It’s funny, I was just at a PRSA national conference and had half an hour’s worth of questions after my speech. And almost every single one of them focused around, “Well what do I do about this stuff if I find out?” And I’m like, “Well frankly, by the time you start seeing a whole bunch of negative stuff, if you don’t have a blog, if you don’t have any presence there, if you don’t have anything else, you’re gonna be hard pressed to turn things around in a hurry. Unless there’s solid evidence that a blogger is completely off the wall, you could probably present him with evidence that he is.” I mean you know, there’s lots of times when I’ve seen people say well you know, you’re not right about this, or you know, you can jump in and do that. But you do run the risk of annoying people.

Paul Lewis:

And escalating the situation sometimes.

Katie Paine:

Yeah, you do. I mean you’d better be damn sure of your facts.

Paul Lewis:

One of the things that we talk to our clients about is where does this belong in the organization because it touches on so many areas. You can have developers who are talking on blogs, so is this something from HR? You can have it be, well this is technology so it’s in IT? Or is this part of branding and marketing or is it a new area in companies? I mean every company is struggling with this today. Where do you see this sitting in the organization?

Katie Paine:

I think it’s actually sitting in many different spots of an organization; I think that’s what makes it kind of interesting. I think that if you look at Intuit, their TurboTax blog, they just went off on their own. They said, “We’re not gonna sit around and wait for PR or corp comm or anybody else. We have customers that need us; we want to start a dialogue with them and solve their problems.” So they went out, they purchased a TypePad account for fourteen dollars and ninety-five cents and started a blog. And within two weeks, they had turned around a whole bunch of really hostile customers that were screaming and yelling out there in the blogosphere about problems that they’ve had. And they turned those guys around from being enemies to being friends. And that’s when I say, you know, that’s the kind of stuff you don’t need to measure. You don’t need to measure the value of good customer relationships versus fourteen dollars and ninety-five cents.

Paul Lewis:

What’s the ROI on that?

Katie Paine:

Yeah exactly. And then it’s like as Shel Israel would say, “Do you need to measure the ROI of your trousers?” No, you put ‘em on one leg at a time, you know, do you measure the ROI of your telephone? Not anymore. Maybe you did in the beginning, but not anymore. Back to where does it belong in an organization? I think the best answer is it is a separate, there’s a separate blog specialty group. Hewlett Packard does this, they have a specialty blog expertise that is all central, I mean it’s all you know, located in one sort of team. And it is not the PR team and it is not the HR team, they let their engineers blog; you know, they encourage their engineers to blog. They encourage blogging throughout the company, but they do have a very strict set of rules for blogging and the blogger expertise team, I don’t know what it’s called, but that team are the people that call the shots. And I think that’s what it should be. I mean it would be nice if public relations or marketing or branding had all that expertise but chances are they don’t, and so I don’t, I think it should be wherever the expertise is.

Paul Lewis:

Right. And sometimes if you don’t have the expertise then that’s the time to either bring that in or start a new group within the organization.

Katie Paine:

Right. Exactly. And I think the other thing that is true, I mean I am a huge fan of internal blogs for HR purposes, you know, for all kinds of reasons. And I think that they’re good things, but I don’t necessarily think that there’s a lot of expertise in the human resources department to manage internal blogs.

Paul Lewis:

Where do you see this whole consumer generated media marketplace going? I mean obviously the success of MySpace and YouTube and Facebook and all of these different Web 2.0 start-ups that are gaining traction very quickly, where do you see the marketplace going and what does that mean for the role of online brand management?

Katie Paine:

I think it’s very, I think that’s the question of the hour because, and it’s funny I teach the freshmen business school at the University of New Hampshire, and today’s session happened to be you know, an hour, two hours ago I was talking about marketing to them. And I said everything in your textbook is garbage, do not pay any attention to it. I said they had three lectures that they had to listen to. I said listen to the guy from the agency, he’s the only one that was really talking about here’s the future, but frankly he’s a couple of years behind.

What is so different is, is the fact that you’ve got this generation who are so used to texting and instant messaging and being the editors, being the entertainment, they all want to be the entertainment, they all want to be actors and actresses and everything else. They have this sense of we are it, we are the world and we’re gonna run the world and this is the millennial generation that’s coming up, and they’re used to being the entertainers and they’re used to being the photographers and the whatever. And it’s not about, “Gosh I want to be famous because I want a million people to see me on Facebook”, it’s, “I just want the people that I care about to see me” and marketers will have to do the same thing.

You’ve got to give up on reaching the walls. You have to say okay, I want to reach the people that are interested in what I have to sell when they’re interested in buying from me. And therefore I’m going to produce a podcast, a blog, an email, an event that’s going to reach those people. You know, I keep saying it is the death of scream marketing. I mean it’s just it’s not about blasting messages out there anymore, it’s about reaching people when they’re interested in being reached and when they’re open to it. And that’s the big thing is just the fact that you’re going to see a lot more entertainment and a lot more niche marketing, niche you know, target audience direction because that’s gonna be more efficient. You’re just not, it’s not gonna be cost effective to buy huge amounts of space in all of these different areas.

Paul Lewis:

Right. I mean as the market becomes more fragmented, it just becomes cost prohibitive to try to reach every one of those fragments. You have to be selective.

Katie Paine:

I mean these kids were saying, “Oh well we have a you know, we’d have a targeted ad campaign on television and radio.” And I’m like, “No you won’t.” They had to do a sample marketing plan for a bowling alley and I’m like no. Maybe radio, maybe radio. But if you’re targeting senior citizens for senior citizen’s bowling day, why go on radio and waste all those ears that you don’t need to reach?

Paul Lewis:

Yeah, exactly.

Katie Paine:

The classic thing nobody seems to be taking away from this last election thing is the thing that you think the Republicans and the Democrats are the only people who have targeted databases? Of course not. I mean most major consumer package goods companies can tell you that I’m sitting here in Durham New Hampshire and I bike and I run and I drive a Honda Element, and therefore I’m more likely to you know, drink a particular brand of vodka or whatever or wine. All that data’s been out there for years, it’s just a question now that the technology is there that people can mine that data and ever more effectively target those people. I mean I get three things in the mail today, clearly mass mailing things, but addressed to me and identifying something specific that they knew about me, which was a reason why I should buy whatever it is they happened to be selling.

Paul Lewis:

Right. I think it’s finally reached that critical mass where the data, the technology, and the strategy to use those two tools have all finally come together in the last few years.

Katie Paine:

Absolutely. That’s where it gets to be interesting because then you can sit there and say, okay, I can now do an ad, I can put it up on YouTube, here’s my favorite example of where this is all going. We had a candidate who was literally so under-funded and so outspent by the competition that nobody on their right minds ever thought she was gonna win. The classic example was her fans, her supporters put together these five radio spots; they were hysterical. And they only had enough money to run them on you know, a tiny little community radio station up north in New Hampshire. But guess what? Thousands and thousands of people saw them because they were sent everywhere because they were so funny that people saw them in Utah, people saw them all you know. And, oh by the way, A, she won by five percentage points, I having been outspent ten to one, B, the Democratic National Committee came up to her afterwards, the day after the race and said, "Well we’d be happy to pay your debts.” And she turned around to them and said, “We don’t have any.” She won election to congress on a hundred and twenty-three thousand dollars.

Paul Lewis:

Wow.

Katie Paine:

And it was all because of word of mouth and the Internet. And people doing things like these funny little radio spots because that was all she could do. And that’s where I think that the big guys are gonna see huge competition from little guys coming along. I mean look at Skype is a perfect example. You know, Skype spent no money on advertising, you know, Firefox is another one, spent no money on advertising, all word of mouth, all email, all sort of guerilla tactics. So you’re gonna see little companies come along and knock the big boys out because of this ability to generate your own ads and virally market what it is you have to sell. It was a very exciting time, I think, for new ideas. I would think that if I’m a major corporation I’d be shaking in my boots.

Paul Lewis:

It is definitely an interesting time to be alive, especially in our business.

Katie Paine:

Ah. Absolutely.

Paul Lewis:

Well Katie, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Katie Paine:

You’re welcome.

Paul Lewis:

For more information on KDPaine & Partners, please visit www.measuresofsuccess.com. I also want to quickly mention that my agency, MindComet, is now partnering with KDPaine in the areas of online brand monitoring and strategy. Together, we have unveiled a comprehensive solution complete with consumer generated media monitoring, detailed reporting and analysis, and most importantly, concrete data backed development of online communications and public relations strategies. As always you can learn more about this at internetmarketingvoodoo.com or mindcomet.com. Until next time, keep it real and thanks for listening.

Announcer:

For more information on this week's topic, visit www.InternetMarketingVoodoo.com. This podcast has been brought to you by MindComet, The Relationship Agency.

[End of Audio]

Marketing Resources
Listen to the IMV37 : Online Brand Monitoring podcast.

Contact MindComet for more information on online communities.

Subscribe to the Internet Marketing Voodoo podcast in iTunes.

Technorati Tags
cgm, consumer generated media, public relations, blog monitoring, brand monitoring