FreshNetworks Blog

The Marketing Forum on Aurora

This week FreshNetworks has been at two marketing conferences: The Richmond Events Marketing Forum and the IBDG Marketing Directors Strategy Meeting.

Both events use the format of an agenda rammed with 30-minute speed-meetings between marketing service agencies (suppliers) and Marketing Directors (delegates).

I’ve taken part in quite a few of these over the years and in case you’ve ever considered one, I thought it might be worth a quick post about my thoughts and learnings.

How do the marketing forums work?

The organisers attract delegates with the promise of a free conference pass and an opportunity to meet a pre-qualified group of suppliers. For these marketing budget holders it’s an opportunity to get out of the office, to network with peers and to discuss curent issues with some suppliers they might not otherwise cross paths with.

Suppliers pay between £7-15k to attend. That’s a lot of money for an agency, but the draw is having between 10 and 30 one-to-one meetings with the Marketing Directors – meetings that would take a lot of effort to book and attend if you tried to arrange them yourself.

A key part of making the events work is that delegates and suppliers provide lots of information about their respective businesses ahead of the event. That enables both sides to flag who they’d like to meet on the day. And after the conferences, just like speed dating, both parties say who’d they’d like to meet again.

This meeting format has been around for 20+ years (I think Richmond were the original innovators). It’s a far more focused way of doing biz dev than a stand at a trade fair, but it can be quite a bit more expensive. Relative to cold-calling I think the price per meeting is in the same range: £300-£500.

Richmond Events – Marketing Director’s Forum

This is the pinnacle of speed-meeting events. Three days on a boat moored off the Jersey coast. 150 Marketing Directors trapped with no chance of escape. Except by lifeboat.

The event has a good reputation and continues to attract a high level of delegate with marketing budgets that ranage from £100k to £50M. However over the years the number of Marketing Directors who attend has reduced sigificantly and most of the delegates now tend to be Marketing Managers or Heads of Marketing. One reason for this may be that the marketing procurement process has become more sophisiticated. As a result major appointments are rarely made purely on the basis of meeting an agency on the boat.

Got any other theories?

Compared to all the other events I have attended, Richmond definitely stand out as having the best-run most expertly-organised events. I also think they maginally clinch it on quality of delegates. As for conference sessions, based on the feedback from delegates, they were pretty good. The quality of keynote speakers is always superb. Richmond clearly invest a great deal of time and effort in picking the keynotes. And the other thing that I really enjoyed this week were the lunches and dinners. These provided excellent opportunites to venutre off the usual sales patter and really get to know some of the delegates.

IBDG Marketing Directors Strategy Meeting

I’ve been to lots of IBDG events. They are held in a hotel just off Portman Square in London. What I love about these events is that whilst they only promise you 8-10 meetings, we have often met 30 potential clients in one day. The reason for this is that the IBDG team really hustle (especially Nathan Lovegrove, our trusty account manager).

On the flip side, from the last two we attended I don’t think we’ll get a payback on our spend. That may be more to do with what we’re selling (Social Media services are still surprisingly new for UK Marketeers and only the early adopters have budget for it in 2009 or 2010). I understand that they are already booked solid for 2010 as many other suppliers have re-booked.

The other negative for me is that relative to other events, these always feel like a much harder sell (to suppliers). IBDG (understandably) try to hook you into the next event whilst your still trying to meet people on the day. But this is the last thing you need when you’re trying to focus on your next 30-minute meeting for which you have already paid. There is a cooling-off period, but it all feels rather pressured.

Other marketing forums

Similar events are organised by:

World Trade Group WTG One to One meetings

Revolution Magazine: The Revolution Forum

Forum Events: The Internet Marketing Summit

Have you been to any of these events? If so what was your experience?

Facebook is a great source of information on how people are feeling. I can tell if my friends are happy or sad on a given day based on the updates that appear in my feed. Just imagine the potential of analysing what everybody says of Facebook on a given day. The ability to measure how happy or sad the Facebook users of the world are based on what they say on the social network. This is exactly what Facebook are doing with their Gross National Happiness based on an analysis of the positive and negative words people use when updating their Facebook status.

This is an example of buzz tracking and analysis. Looking at the words and phrases that people use in social media and then using sentiment analysis to assess how positively or negatively they feel about something. With Facebook, the opportunity is huge. If you combine the ability to analyse the sentiment in status updates with the vast amount of profiling data, the potential for insight into consumer behaviour is huge. Macro-level analysis of sentiment could be analysed. What is the impact on male students in New York of a new advertising campaign on the subway, for example? Or how does a government policy aimed at mums impact women in London? The ability to segment and analyse on this basis is huge. And if you add into this the ability to analyse the networks that people sit in on Facebook, and the impact an event has on them and on their friends, this could be a huge resource of information for brands and organisations to learn from.

It is, however, a shame that Facebook hasn’t yet produced data like this. The initial analysis of the Gross National Happiness, for the US, shows two things: people are least happy when public figures die, and most happy during public holidays. Informative stuff.

The real opportunity of the Gross National Happiness analysis, and of buzz-tracking more generally is not to understand what a large mass of people think and do, but to combine this data with more detailed profiling information to really analyse what different segments of customers and stakeholders think. This is where buzz-tracking starts to add real value – comparing the discussions that different people have and analysing their sentiment based on other things we know about them. Are women more likely to be positive about a brand than men, for example. Are customers of a certain value more likely to respond positively to announced product changes than those who spend less per annum?

The Groos National Happiness index really does miss out on the real insight that you can get from buzz-tracking. By combining the universe of Facebook users, the distinctions and differences that exist, and that start to provide real insight into the way people think and behave, and hidden in the data. Buzz tracking offers a really valuable source of insight for brands and organisations, especially when it compares what people say (the buzz and sentiment) with other profiling data we have about them.

On Sunday, lots of people were talking about Dannii, Danyl and instant X-Factor feedback. If you weren’t one of them (or if you’re not in the UK) let me quickly recap: on X-Factor, a talent / singing / reality TV programme, one of the judges, Dannii Minogue, brought up the sexuality of contestant Danyl when she was supposed to be commenting on his performance on stage. There has been a lot discussed about this and we posted about how Twitter is a great barometer and feedback mechanism in this kind of situation, how the brand that is X-Factor was able, almost immediately, to know what was being said about them and to plan how they should respond.

Like any good brand, the X-Factor on Saturday night would have benefited greatly from buzz tracking. From watching, tracking and analysing what was being said in real time. Analysing the extent to which the sentiments being expressed were positive, or negative, finding particularly dense areas of discussions and helping the brand to identify both what is being said and also where it is being said.

Buzz tracking really is a powerful tool for a brand, both because of the information it can reveal, but also because of the issues it raises that a brand needs to deal with. Tracking and monitoring what people are saying about your brand, products and services will allow you to know, in real-time, when something has happened that needs rectifying, or when something is said that you can use to amplify positive word of mouth about your brand. Knowing the extent to which your brand is being discussed positively or negatively provides a benchmark for you to monitor, and if you track it overtime you will start to see the impact of things you do and say, as a brand, on how people are discussing you.

And this information is very powerful. Both for making immediate decisions, and for planning and monitoring in the long-term. When a brand has a bad experience, and people are talking negatively about it (as happened to brand X-Factor on Saturday night), an effective buzz monitoring strategy will alert you to this shift in sentiment and allow you to identify what has caused this. You are then able to decide first if you want to respond and then how. You can then monitor the impact your response is having and amend or strengthen is as necessary. This information drastically shortens the time brands need to respond and so can have a very positive effect on your ability to resolve what is happening.

In the long-term, buzz tracking allows a brand to understand seasonal changes in it’s image in social media, and to show the impact that various on and offline activities have on these discussions. Work that we have done at FreshNetworks for brands in the travel industry, for example, shows that people tend to be more positive about travel brands at certain times of the year (typically when they are thinking of going on holiday or when they just return) and has helped to show the impact that TV advertising campaigns have had on the positive sentiment expressed about a brand online.

So buzz tracking is a powerful tool for any brand, both for what it tells you and for what it allows you to do. It is an information resource, and one that, if used correctly, can give you a real-time understanding of what is being said about your brand and how people are feeling about it. This kind of information is the ammunition any brand needs to inform its own social media strategy and how it should react on a case-by-case basis. Rather than have to wait to see how an issue plays out over a few days, brands can now get a real understanding of how people feel in real time and then respond to it.

Research in September by 360i, a search agency in London, shows a direct correlation between the balance of negative and positive Tweets about a movie, and its performance at the box office. Looking at four movies (District 9, The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, The Time Traveler’s Wife and Brüno) they show that films that have a greater proportion of negative posts and reviews on Twitter also enjoy a higher day-on-day fall in Box Office ticket sales after launch. And whilst we must not confuse correlation with causality, it seems for these movies that those movies who have more negative posts on Twitter also see a bigger drop in sales after they open.

The relationship between Twitter and the success of a movie is starting to become clearer. Whilst this data is not sufficient to claim that there is a direct impact of negative reviews on Twitter on ticket sales, it is evident that negative reviews in Twitter, among other things, are impacting on consumer choices. And in many cases they are choosing not to view the movie.

Traditional movie marketing and performance is tracked closely, with day-on-day ticket sales being measured and the results feeding directly into the amount and type of PR and marketing activities that take place. This is a long-standing technique that is used to bolster ticket sales if they are not performing as well as expected, and to identify over-performing movies and work to amplify the impact they are having. With social media, this approach needs to adapt and change.

The main impact of Twitter is its speed. It is easy and quick for movie-goers to post a review of the movie they have just seen, and for a blockbuster movie in an opening weekend, you might expect many thousands of reviews in a short space of time. The content is concentrated in a small amount of time and discussions about a particular movie can quickly become trending topics. For a short amount of time it is relatively easy for it to seem that “everybody is talking about” a movie when it opens. And if users are negative about it, then this can have a serious impact on the movie and on ticket sales. This is dangerous for the studios, especially those who don’t have an effective social media marketing strategy. They can very quickly lose control of their movie’s reputation and the positive word-of-mouth can get drowned by the negative.

Twitter is, in fact, a great place for studios. Whether the direct causation between negative posts and decreasing box office sales is true or not does not matter. Twitter provides an instant and detailed feedback mechanism for studios. Those with effective buzz tracking and monitoring services can quickly see the impact of a movie from the moment the audience leaves the first screening. They can then use social media, and traditional marketing and PR activities, to amplify the positive word of mouth and also to help to minimise the impact of the negative. By knowing and tracking what is going on, studios can use this information to their benefit.

Some more reading

• The Internet Takes Control of Movie Marketing (cinematical.com)
• Did Twitter bring glory to Tarantino’s new flick? (seattlepi.com)
• Is Twitter Affecting the Box Office? (mediabistro.com)
• Twitter Can Bury a Movie. It Can Also Make it a Success (mashable.com)

At FreshNetworks we aim to bring you the best posts in social media, online communities and customer engagement online. In case you missed them, find below our top five posts in August.

1. How to write your firm’s social media policy

Our most popular post is August outlines five things to consider when writing a social media policy for your firm. At FreshNetworks, our approach is to keep things simple and to make them inclusive. Have a simple and clear policy on how employees should be using social media and make sure you include your employees in the process of drawing them up. Oh, and make sure your policy encourages your employees to use social media more and not less.

2. What’s next in marketing and advertising

Last year we highlighted a great presentation from Paul Isakson on the future of marketing and advertising, where his argument was that advertising was dead and the future was marketing. In August, Isakson updated this presentation and theory for 2009, with an equally good presentation on what’s next in marketing and advertising.

3. Why every business needs a social media policy

In August, ESPN’s social media policy came in for some criticism from people who felt it was too harsh. But the truth is it is better to have such a policy than to have none at all. We are looking at a new medium which is letting people communicate in new ways. It is like the conversation with a friend in a cafe, just taken to new levels, reaching more people and being significantly more shareable. This should be a risk for all firms. We don’t need reminding of the examples where employees have posted a video that has embarrassed their employer, or a Facebook status that has lost them their job. Firms need a policy on social media and part of this policy should be guidelines for their staff.

4. Storytelling and social media

Social media is about conversations. It’s people connecting, interacting and sharing content. And whether it’s online or in the real world, the most engaging conversations involve other people’s stories. In this post, Charlie Osmond looks at what makes storytelling so important in social media and shows how a story can sometimes be told as effectively in a picture as it can be in words.

5. Dell makes $3 million on Twitter. What can we learn?

Dell has reportedly made $2 million in sales directly from their @DellOutlet Twitter stream, and a further $1 million from sales that started on Twitter but were completed elsewhere. That’s $50 in revenue for every Twitter follower they have. In this post we look at three reasons why Dell has been so successful with Twitter and what others can learn.