big seed marketing

Big seed marketingThe best of both worlds

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1.About networks: The rhizome

2.About customer advocacy: The lake wobegon effect

3.About virality: No free lunch

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1. About networks:

The rhizome

•Massive•Decentralized•Dynamic•Self-organized (at several levels)

•Is about People + links

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Network effect

• Value to a potential customer depends on the number of other customers who own the good or are users of the service

• According to Metcalfe: the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system

• For the web, it’s a little more complicated

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Links, links, links

• Small world network: 6 degrees of separation

• Scale-free network: Power law of preferential attachment

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Nodes (people)

and ties (links)

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IM generation: “My mates are my media”

• They claim that they are not influenced by advertising and that they trust their peers more than the opinion leaders

• Connections tend to be with people they know– At the very most, might extend to friends of friends– But very little interest in talking to strangers (unless they have

specific profiles)

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Even on the biggest social networks

• 90.6% of messages are sent to “friends”

• 50% of messages to friends are sent to schoolmates

• For reciprocal messages partners, it raises to 71%

(Facebook 2007)

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Content or connection

2. About customer advocacy:The lake Wobegon effect

Customer advocacy drive growth

Treat everyone the same, even they have a low authority score

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It’s hard to buy coolness

Where do you find brand advocates?

On blogs, of course… (but not only)

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Engage (?)

• Bloggers can feed the media narrative over time, don’t ignore the bloggers

• Traffic alone does not equal influence/ Technorati authority neither

• Don’t punish negative opinions

• Outing a blog yourself helps but is not necessary – commenting is also part of the conversation

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But the blogosphere isn’t everything

• Reach matters and blogs have low reach

• Blogs are mostly visited by bloggers

• Conversation is everywhere: blogs, social networks but also forums, chats…. and offline

• Twitter reach is about 0,2%

• The internet landscape is still dominated by a search engine and an email service

• It’s easier to engage people if your brand proposal is strong

• What will be your performance indicator?

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The lake wobegon effect

80% of the CEOs think their brand offers a superior experience

…. 8% of their customers agree

and this is one out of many biases

3. About virality: No free lunch

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The theory: Influence the influencer

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Viral marketing is much easier to tell stories about than to implement. For every high profile example of a viral product, there are many more unsuccessful attempts that one never hears about.

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Viral effect

Burnout

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Traditional marketing versus epidemic threshold

Increase conversions

by increasing p or

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R > 1: epidemic threshold/tipping point is reached: virality works

R < 1: burnout, virality fails

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Best of both worlds

• By embracing a big seed strategy, you can leverage on 3 variables

• Reach (number of contacts)• Persuasion power• Reproduction rate

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Maximize reach

• Forget about the hype. Watch the figures!!!

• Select few sites with large reach

• In order to avoid waste, chose high selectivity's and/or targeted solutions

• Watch accumulation statistics

• Avoid too much contacts per person

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Maximize persuasion

• Find the right balance between visibility and irritation

• Keep your brand always visible

• Segment your approach

• Manage the length of the text rather than the font size

• Pre-test several creatives if possible

• Rich media (with interaction) offers more impact and higher memorization

• Internet is a media with a high emotional potential

• Context (more than content) matters!

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Maximize reproduction rate

Trust the strength of your message and the motivation of your influencers

Be surprising, provocative, unexpected, smart and go were people are communicating and give

them tools

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Take aways

• Use specific monitoring tools, it will help you in your communication strategy

• The communication channel might be different of the market intelligence channel

• Don’t overstimate your viral power: Most campaigns have too low Reproduction rates to rely only on virality

• Keep the critical mass you need in mind

• Marketing combines persuasion, reach and reproduction

• Know you target group’s network(s) and know their specificities

• Use existing networks instead of trying to create new ones

• Think user inititiated

Thank you.

Philippe Deltenre

Microsoft Advertising

phdelt@microsoft.com

generalp28@hotmail.com