Is Human Media the Next Frontier? A Chinese Case Study

By now, we all know that we live in a world in which word-of-mouth rules.  The recommendation of a friend or family member outweighs anything a brand may have to say for itself.  

As a result, marketers from around the world are racing to measure the degree in which their customers, and the market at large, is likely to recommend them.  And, more importantly, what they should do to be more liked in the social media space that is called my kitchen.

For this, various measures are used, of which my favourite is the Net Promoter® Score.  It not only measures the propensity of customers to recommend, but also links these insights to economic behaviour, competitive position and opportunities for operational improvement.  But ever since I discovered it in 2006, I’ve had this feeling that there was even more mileage to be gotten out of that famous question “How likely are you to recommend this brand … ?”.

A few weeks ago, Futurelab’s Shanghai associate Jan Van den Bergh proved that there was.  Together with two partners he has set up Holaba, China’s first brand recommendation platform. 

In line with Net Promoter® thinking, Holaba surveys an ever increasing group of Chinese netizens on the likelihood in which they are willing to recommend 5,000 different brands (50,000 products), as well as their reasons for doing so.  Combining this NPS®-data, with additional customer experience, shopping and popularity measures, allows them to create an ongoing picture of every brand’s recommendation power.

But more importantly, by offering brands to connect out to individual consumers which declare themselves to be promoters (or in China recommenders) Jan’s team has effectively created the first human media network in China.

How this will effectively be used by brands, the future will tell.  But the following two slides are already a nice illustration of the information this can generate.  It’s all still experimental, yet the direction is quite promising (for the full Holaba presentation scroll to the bottom of this post):

• The first slide gives an overview of the recommendation scores achieved by the top 18 social networking services in China, using the Net Promoter® methodology  (n = 1500 to 7500 per brand)
• The second one cross-correlates the propensity to recommend a given social media brand (Tencent) with the loyalty to other brands.  This opens up a world of opportunities for cross-promotions, multi-brand community development, etc.

Recommendation scores of social networking sites in China

Have you heard of other human media initiatives that operate at this scale?  If so, I’d be quite interested to hear about them.

Social Networks & Recommendation in China

Full disclosure: As is apparent from the article, Jan Van den Bergh is a Futurelab associate, which is a cause for bias.  Still, even if a complete stranger would have walked in with the same proposition, I dare say I would have reacted the same.

Trademark notice:  Net Promoter, NPS, and Net Promoter Score are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, and Fred Reichheld.

A Little Less Conversation, a Little More Action

If there is one event I would have hoped to attend this year, it is the Marketing 2.0 Conference which is taking place in Paris later this month.  Put together by Nils Andres of the Brand Science Institute, it features a lineup of remarkable individuals to talk about the future evolution of marketing as we know it.  Alas, travels take me elsewhere, so I will have to rely on blogs, Twitter and whatever shows up on Slideshare afterwards.

Still, the beauty of blogging is that you don’t need to be “at” an event to throw some questions into the pot and – hopefully – stir up some debate.  Especially as the title of the event and some of the speakers seem to suggest a fashionable amount of attention will go to social media matters.

While I have spent some time pondering social media in 2006, this topic is getting dear to my heart again.  Partially because – here at Futurelab -  there has been a marked increase in the number of requests from large organisations to help develop a “social media strategy”.  This is often accompanied by the words Facebook, Twitter, buzz and monetization.

My usual one-line response to these queries is that developing a strategy for social media, is about as useful as developing of a strategy for a fax machine.

I believe that too many people keep focusing on the tools and the media, rather than on the customer relationship they support.  After all, in the context of this relationship, the (social) media that are used to communicate are only of secondary importance. 

Just like a retail store or a call-centre, social media are merely a reflection of the overall behaviour of a business.  If a company does not have the habit of having conversations with its customers, it will struggle online.  If it is unable to monetise its online presence, it probably hasn't fully considered its total customer value strategy.  If it faces negative online buzz, there is probably a reason for it in the offline world.

So my thesis is the following. 

Social media are highly visible and thus warrant immediate attention and management.  No debate.

But rather than spend too much time on coming up with a social media strategy, businesses need to look further than Facebook or Twitter. 

Instead, they need to focus on the “customer’s world” and realize that the best way to:

• improve their online reputation, is to start creating happy customers.
• monetise the digital/social media franchise, is to develop a strong customer value strategy.
• have effective online conversations, is to enable their people to have them everywhere.

Make sure the above is in order, and the “social media strategy” is a no-brainer.  Get them wrong, and no matter how many people you put on having conversations, you’re not going to win the game.

Or as the King used to say: A Little Less Conversation, A Little More Action.

Thank you very much ;-)

On Accountability, now on Slideshare

Apparently the guys at Marketing3 in the Netherlands liked my I am the media slide-show enough to ask me back for more.  This means that this year, I had the honour of sharing the stage with Charles Leadbeater and Andrew Keen.

To take a different tact from last year's journey into the land of Web 2.0, I went all out on the topic of marketing accountability and combined a few earlier presentations with new material into an updated version of the Marketer's Bushido.

I've published it on Slideshare, so feel free to mash-up, abuse, re-use and distribute to your heart's content.  Credits are appreciated :-)

Marketing3 Presentation

View more presentations from Alain Thys.

People Power Lands Hoff on #3

I promise this is the last time I post about our Knight Rider, yet as the project Hoff Alert had now managed to land this most unlikely of musical heroes on the number 3 spot in the UK, I just had to find out who was behind it.  Was it really a bunch of fans who got together?  Or was it an innovative ploy by a record company executive looking for a fast buck?

It turns out the unlikely Hoff Alert was a (mildly beer inspired) plan hatched in a pub by three twenty-something friends who were thinking about how we could use the internet to make funny/daft things happen.  

Jon Drysdale, Michael Chadwick (who work in advertising) and David Hart (a computer expert) thought that trying to get an unlikely song into the charts would be something to try and do.  The Hoff seemed to be the obvious choice because "everybody loves him".

So the goal became to get the Hoff to number 1, and also to "show how 'people power' can work", with everyone coming together to make something big like this happen, which would normally be in the hands of record companies.  They made it to number 3, yet in my opinion they did make their point.

And on the obvious questions:

• they are not associated to record companies or David Hasselhoff
• they have not yet had the pleasure of meeting (or hearing) from the Hoff
• and yes, they have more plans to harness the people power yet these stay under wraps (only fact is that they don't involve Hasselhoff. Or Mr T or Chuck Norris for that matter.

Pity, I always kinda' liked Mr. T ...

 

Good job guys!