As business owners and marketers, we’re looking for ways to create a solid cash flow.

Everybody likes a good deal so it’s worth taking a closer look at something like Groupon, right?

But if all you can come up with is a sorry-ass excuse for a daily deal, then the economy isn’t ruining your business.

You are ruining your business.

Don Corleone wouldn’t approve if that happened, so let’s look at how you can make an offer that nobody can refuse.

The Cold Hard Truth behind Groupon Deals

Groupon is huge. The company saw its revenues sky-rocket from $33 million in 2009 to $760 million in 2010.

Unfortunately, merchants haven’t experienced the same level of success.

It wasn’t even close.

Roughly one out of three merchants failed to make a profit.

Between 10% and 77% of merchants would run a deal again, a far cry from Groupon’s claim of 97%.

What if customers return to become loyal customers?

That would make running a deal worth it, right?

Yes, except customers aren’t coming back.

Groupon has become like a railway network.

Each train represents one day with fresh offers.

Each station has merchants offering deals.

Customers get off the train at each station and don’t stick around.

They board the next train and ride to the next station.

Add in the finding that 82% of merchants are unsatisfied.

As well as a couple of bad experiences here and there.

Suddenly, marketing on Groupon sounds like a bad idea, right?

Not so fast.

Groupon Doesn’t Run Your Business

If you fail at a Groupon deal, it’s not Groupon’s fault.

Groupon doesn’t run your business.

You are responsible for your business.

You are your own Godfather.

Like the Godfather, you know what’s in the best interest of your business.

You know what makes your customers tick.

The Psychology behind a Good Daily Deal

Everybody likes a good deal.

It’s getting something at great value.

It’s something worth sharing with others so they can get in on it as well.

When you offer a good deal, you’re triggering people to take action.

At the same time, you want to impress.

You’re looking to make people feel special for taking you up on your offer.

You’re aiming to provide people with such an amazing experience that—even at the regular price—your product or service is a steal.

That’s how you create loyalty and encourage word-of-mouth promotion.

When you only focus on attracting new customers through deep discounts, you’re diluting your brand, your product/service and—in some cases—even your entire industry.

Imagine you’re running a nail salon and you’re offering a manicure/pedicure deal at 50% discount.

Where does that leave you once the deal ends?

Potential customers might not even consider visiting your salon (again), because their value perception of a treatment has changed.

Don’t treat a daily deal offer as a quick way to make money.

Your daily deal offer should be compelling to both new customers and existing customers.

Remember who your existing customers are.

Your best customers are among them.

It’s up to you to not alienate them or make them feel cheap.

Focus on creating a deal that triggers action and creates loyalty.

How to Make an Offer Nobody Can Refuse

Here are three considerations to help you create a Godfather-worthy daily deal offer.

1. Create Excitement

Offer a deal that people can genuinely be excited about.

Make it go viral by giving it personality and making it special.

Make your offer so unique and remarkable that people have to sign up and share it with their friends before it’s gone.

2. Deliver Value

Everybody wants a good deal.

Nobody wants to feel cheap though, especially not your existing customers.

Give people at least one good reason to want to come back.

Make your offer (and delivery) worth even more than the regular price.

Focus on proving your worth and creating loyal customers.

3. Offer a Bonus

Discounts are evil, because they change your customer’s price perception forever.

Consider offering a bonus.

Try offering something like “buy one, get one free”.

It works out to be the same as offering a 50% discount, but with two key differences:

• You won’t dilute your brand or your product/service. People will still pay the full amount for the first time, but they’ll get the second time as a bonus.
• You’re guaranteeing repeat business. Even if the second time is free, people are going to come back and you’ll have a second chance to stay top-of-mind.

Bonuses work well because people perceive them as things that would normally cost extra.

The only condition is that the bonus has to be something your customers would actually want.

It could be a second treatment, a free gift, a free trial, a month’s membership, or a related product or service.

As long as it offers true value to your customers.

Bottom Line

Offering a daily deal should be about more than just slapping a discount on your products or services.

Your business deserves better than that.

Work hard on creating the right offer and your customers will come. Again and again.

Technology has humanized the user experience by making it easier for people to communicate and share information.

Meanwhile, many businesses have used technology to go in the opposite direction, to dehumanize.

Look at customer service, which has sadly become a (near) robotic experience at many companies. Look at email marketing where companies send emails from an email address like “please-do-not-reply@we-hate-getting-email-from-you-com”.

Put aside all the usual stuff about social media offering great opportunities to promote your products, overturn negative experiences and build long-term relationships.

First and foremost, social media is a call for humanization in how you communicate. Social media has humanized interaction, technology has humanized the experience, but only you can humanize your business.

Here are 30 questions to ask yourself to help you humanize your business:

• How do we communicate?
  • Are we communicating in a human way?
  • What do our customers think of the way we’re communicating?
  • Are we consistent in the way we communicate?
  • Are we speaking the same language as our customers?
  • Are we enabling our customers to engage with us in a community or a dialogue (as opposed to a monologue)?
  • How do we go about transparency, authenticity and accountability?
  • How does our company culture support the humanization of our business?
  • How can we change or improve our business processes?

• How do we turn experiences into relationships?
  • How do we define our customer experience?
  • What are the things that truly matter to our customers?
  • How well are we communicating compared to other companies within and outside our industry?
  • How can we involve our customers as part of our brand?
  • In which ways are our customers sharing experiences and information about us?
  • Why are they sharing those particular experiences and pieces of information?
  • How can we promote positive interactions?
  • How do we deal with negative interactions?
  • How can we scale our communication to deal with a growing amount of customer interactions?

• How can we create value for both our customers and our business?
  • How can we leverage customer interactions for the benefit of our business?
  • How are we measuring our success in customer engagement?
  • Are we recruiting the right employees to help us humanize our business?
  • How can we empower our (first line) employees to represent our brand?
  • How are we rewarding our employees and our customers for contributing to our brand?

• How can we innovate?
  • How can we build or strengthen our customer community?
  • How can we match our products and/or services to the demand, expectations and values from the market?
  • Can we work with peers and/or competitors in our industry to provide value to the community?
  • How do we integrate online and offline communication to create a better customer experience?

I also made a SlideShare presentation with the 30 questions:

What are other things businesses can think about to humanize their business?

Photo credit: Aaron Bulger

The Dehumanization of Customer Service

Businesses have spent a lot of effort in making customer service as efficient as possible by introducing stuff like interactive voice response (IVR), self-service, and resolution scripts. It’s resulted in a poor experience where—as consumers—we have to press a bunch of buttons and wait for a long time before speaking to someone whose goal is to hang up the phone as quickly as possible.

Customer service departments have basically dehumanized customer interactions and it’s pissing people off. Respondents in the aforementioned survey mentioned “human service” and “true conversation” as key improvements for customer service.

Why Customer Flock to Social Media

Social media has humanized interaction and it’s no shocker that it’s become the weapon of choice for the new consumer to get customer service. When asked about the key sources for customer satisfaction, respondents answered:

• Competency
• Convenience
• Proactive engagement
• Personalization

Social media offers businesses the opportunity to deliver customer service in a way that scores better than traditional support methods on the four things listed above. Those who do it well will improve their customers’ experience, leaving competitors further behind.

Why It Isn’t about Social Media

Before you go all gung-ho and move your entire customer service department to the social sphere, think about this: it’s not about social media. People don’t want to use social media for customer service. People want customer service and they turn to social media because they feel that it works better than anything else you’re offering.

As we continue to see increased adoption of social platforms, it’s up to you to understand how shifts in consumer behavior will impact your business.

Creating Value from Online Customer Interactions

Social media is not the band-aid you slap onto customer service to stop the bleeding. With the right mindset, you can generate business value from online customer interactions, within and beyond customer service.

At the Customer Service Seminar, I will show you ways to create business value through online customer interactions by:

• Unleashing your own wave of new consumers;
• Analyzing your online customer interactions; and by
• Throwing away the case studies and best practices

There are only a few seats left, so reserve yours today. I hope to see you then!

The line-up is filled with people from various businesses eager to share their thoughts and experiences. Learn how social business is applied at companies like KLM and Microsoft. Xaviera Ringeling, Fred Zimny and Arjen Hof will give useful pointers on social media and customer service. Oh, and I’ve been asked to perform some tricks too.

The best part: we’re doing it for free. So head over to this page now and reserve your seat!

Online Customer Engagement

Social media has caused its fair share of brand debacles, but it’s also catalyzed great success. With an increasing number of people sharing their experiences online, pressure is mounting on businesses to learn, adapt and participate. Especially in the customer service arena, interactions are no longer necessarily private.

With growing expectations from the general public—and skepticism always lurking around the corner—it’s vital that businesses understand how to make the most of their online presence. As speakers, we’re committed to providing information, advice and findings that are of value. In turn, we also expect attendees to surprise or challenge us with their experiences.

If you’re looking to take control of your social business program, join us. We promise to make it worth your while.

The Cornerstones of an Online Community Strategy

I’m grateful for the opportunity to share my thoughts on online engagement. I appreciate the willingness of businesses to make the most of their customer interactions. In particular, I’ll be addressing the following topics:

• The Nature of Conversations Learn what causes people to share their experiences online and understand to what extent it matters.
• Customer Activation Take what you’ve learned from customer interactions to activate a whole new group of customers.
• Corporate “Social Business” Responsibility Get an understanding of how customer interactions can become the cornerstones of your social business program and how to tie them to what matters to your business.

Yes, this event is good promotion for me, but no, I will not be sales-y. I know you’re not the person who visits an event thinking “Gee, I hope someone will sell me something”. No, you’re there for the content and to meet like-minded people. I’ll do my best to contribute to that.

In A Nutshell

• What: Customer Service Seminar 2011
• When: Thursday, May 26, 2011
• Where: MeetInc – Straatweg 1, 3604 BA, Maarssen
• Cost: FREE (as in beer)
• Website: http://www.customerserviceseminar.nl/

If you think this event will be of value to you, or if you know people who would benefit from attending, the registration page is here. I hope to see you on May 26^th!

I don’t question the count, I question the messaging. It’s always been made to sound as if those 600-whatever million people are unique users. They’re absolutely not all unique and I’ll explain why.

The Effects of Social Gaming

One of the causes for duplicate account creations is social gaming. Facebook is free and the majority of the games is free, so there’s effectively no barrier for people to create multiple accounts to play social games. To illustrate what I mean, I’ve taken screenshots of people playing the game “Madden NFL Superstars”. Take a look and don’t tell me they’re dedicated personal accounts.

These probably aren't the real Pittsburgh Steelers.

Clearly, this is Cory's "gaming account".

This one's clever. Use some chick's beach photo and boom: 3,500+ friends!

Yes, we get it, Shawn plays Madden.

Facebook and Social Gaming

I don’t know how many duplicate or fake accounts there are and it’s impossible to determine that anyway. It’s far more interesting to understand why it matters. Social gaming on Facebook is huge:

• Over half of all Facebook accounts are used to play social games.
• There are over 50 million daily player accounts and close to 300 million monthly player accounts.
• Fifty percent of all log-in sessions on Facebook are for gaming purposes.
• Twenty percent of social gamers have paid money for in-game benefits. The most conservative projection I’ve found has the worldwide social gaming market exceeding $1 billion this year.
• The top 8 games on Facebook average at least one million daily players and 10 million monthly players.
• Facebook dominates social gaming with a market share of 28%. There is still potential for the social gaming market to grow within and beyond Facebook.

The Marketing Challenge

The way I see it, the rising popularity of social gaming presents a double-edged marketing challenge:

• On the one hand, the growing interest and activity in social gaming provides new monetization opportunities. With the addictive nature and time commitment involved, branded games and/or virtual goods also offer opportunities for frequent and intense brand engagement.
• On the other hand, the low barrier for playing social games renders a portion of the player base unmarketable. Demographic profile information is often incomplete or incorrect and this makes it difficult to understand the player population accurately. Moreover, underage children are also part of the player base and that makes monetization more difficult.

The Bottom Line

Don’t fall in love with the sheer volume or the absolute numbers. Get an understanding of the make-up of these numbers and how they apply to your business and your customers.

Let’s take a closer look at Facebook advertisements, how well they perform, what you should be doing and what you definitely shouldn’t be doing.

Three Forms of Exposure

As a brand, you can achieve three forms of exposure on Facebook:

• Advertisements These are ads with a link to either a landing page or a Facebook Page.
• Social Impressions These are ads with a link to either a landing page or a Facebook Page, but with the addition of the names of friends who like the ad.
• News Items These are items from a brand that appear in a person’s News Feed.

Facebook Advertising Effectiveness

According to data from Nielsen, having only an ad doesn’t result in very high recall, awareness or purchase intent. In fact, the numbers are awful for only “paid media”. Social Impressions and News Items can be considered “earned media”, because your friends have liked the ad or you have liked the brand’s Page to receive news updates. The addition of Social Impressions and News Items boosts recall, awareness and purchase intent of ads.

It is also important that Social Impressions and News Items appear frequently. Recall, awareness and purchase intent of the ad increase with the frequency of Social Impressions and News Items. This is encouraging, because it infers that active engagement with fans results in higher ad effectiveness.

However, caution should also be exercised. Recall, awareness and purchase intent say nothing about someone actually performing an action. Data from Webtrends and Chitika reveals that Facebook ads have horrible click-through rates.

There are multiple theories as to why Facebook ads suck in performance. In talking to people, their thoughts included “advertising simply doesn’t work”, “people don’t notice the ads”, and “brands don’t take the right approach to advertising on social networks”. Personally, I think the ads’ performance sucks because the ads themselves suck.

What Should You Not Do

With a growing number of advertisers and advertisements, there’s also increasing competition in the “war for eyeballs”. If you choose to advertise on Facebook, the ads need to be conspicuous, relevant, valuable… and correctly spelled.

Thanks to Rich Harris for letting me use some of his screenshots!

Getting the Most out of Facebook

Here are 5 steps to help you gain more effective exposure on Facebook:

1. Gain Organic Impressions Get people to like your brand’s Page. Whether you employ offline methods, online methods or Facebook ads to get people to like your Page, having those Fans will increase your exposure through News Items.
2. Engage Frequently Post at least once or twice each day on your Page to gain frequent exposure. Buddy Media conducted research on Facebook Wall engagement by businesses, but your mileage will value. Evaluate the feedback you get to understand the effect of frequency on your brand’s exposure. Remember that people can still hide your updates if they’re annoyed by them.
3. Drive Engagement Use Page updates to acquire feedback on your products/services as well as your social offerings. Engage actively to understand how Facebook makes the most business sense to you.
4. Relate Ads to Behavior The limited space and attention span of an ad makes it difficult to be compelling. Unlike Google AdWords that target users who are actively searching for something in particular, Facebook ads are often displayed based on a person’s profile information. The lack of immediate relevance is an important cause of lower click-through rates. Instead of targeting people based on demographic information, focus on an action someone is performing inside Facebook. For example, if they’re playing a game that’s similar to your game, you can increase your click-through rates by advertising when people are playing that game. Another example is to advertise your shop when people are visiting the Page of a brand you sell products of.
5. Create Natural Transitions When possible, create natural transitions from an ad to the eventually desired action. One way to do this is to have the ad direct to a specific landing tab on your Facebook Page. From there, you have more space and time to drive action, e.g. signing up for your newsletter or going to a landing page on your website.

The Online Marketing Framework is my attempt at providing an overview of what the main disciplines are, how they relate to each other, which types of activities they consist of, and what they focus on achieving. The framework is not meant to be all-inclusive and I hope to have addressed the key aspects of online marketing with it, but I definitely welcome your thoughts in the comments section.

The Online Marketing Framework is built up as follows:

• Purpose First it looks at the purpose, i.e. what should the efforts focus on achieving?
• Activities Then it describes categories of activities that look to serve each purpose.
• Disciplines Finally, it positions the driving disciplines that incorporate the activities.

Purpose

The ultimate purpose for online marketing—for commercial organizations—is to stimulate sales. However, there are underlying purposes that collectively serve the end purpose of sales. These four purposes represent what organizations should focus their efforts on:

• Awareness This one’s obvious, you want to get the word out on your brand and product.
• Attention Whereas awareness is about people getting to know you, attention goes one step further. It’s about people actually paying attention to what you’re saying (about your product).
• Relevance This refers to offering people something that is of value to them. Whether it’s a need or a desire, it’s relevant in people’s context.
• Trust People can know you, listen to you and be interested in your product, but if they don’t trust you, it’s less likely to lead to a sale.

These four purposes are essential to online marketing and the image below establishes the foundation of the framework.

Activities

Numerous activities are at a marketer’s disposal but not all of them are equally suitable for the purposes described above. However, four types of activities can be identified that have a specific focus:

• Promotion This category focuses on awareness and attention by distributing messages to an audience or a community. Examples of activities are email marketing and banner advertising.
• Attraction Here, you’re focusing on awareness and relevance by positioning your brand or product to be visible when people are looking for it (or looking for something similar). Attraction consists of search engine marketing activities like paid search, contextual advertising and SEO.
• Content Here’s where you created well-targeted, relevant content that helps build authority and/or trust. Examples of content (platforms) are blogs, instruction video and ebooks.
• Influence This refers more to a process than a certain set of activities. It consists of the things that your market expects or appreciates from you. Whether it’s delivering on your promise, being nice or helping people with their problems, the process of establishing trust and gaining the attention of your audience/community helps you build influence.

The image below depicts the added activity sets within the framework so far:

Disciplines

Disciplines are basically the key pillars of the framework. The four disciplines I identified are:

• Push Marketing Sometimes also referred to as outbound marketing, this discipline consists of efforts that focus on establishing awareness, attention and relevance. This is done mostly through paid media, such as search engine advertising and display ads.
• Pull Marketing Also referred to as inbound marketing, the efforts in pull marketing focus on awareness, relevance and trust through a combination of earned media and owned media.
• Social Media The efforts of social media focus on generating relevance, attention and trust through also a combination of earned media and owned media. Social media can also create awareness, but that is more the result of the way social media works—i.e. people spreading the word about you—rather than the result of your efforts as a marketer.
• Branding This is the discipline where efforts focus on generating awareness, attention and trust. Branding is the process of establishing a reputation and promoting yourself through the brand you’ve built.

This is how these disciplines are positioned within the framework.

This is the full Online Marketing Framework:

The idea behind the Online Marketing Framework is that there’s no single solution. The individual disciplines and activities have their strengths (and weaknesses). There’s also overlap in the disciplines and activities because there are synergy effects. For example, clever content marketing on a blog can help SEO (attraction).

The various disciplines and related activities all need to be implemented to get the best results. It is up to marketers to find the mix that is appropriate for their brand, their organization, their product and their market.

These are obviously my thoughts, but I’d love to hear yours in the comments!

[NOTE: This post is a recap of this week's series on the Community Engagement Framework.]

The Community Engagement Framework will contain the definitions of what I mean when I talk and write about community engagement, social business, social media and social governance.

Social Media

Social media can be defined as an ecosystem that consists of three elements:

• People People are the driving force behind social media instead of professional publishers or editorial staff for example.
• Behavior People have to do something, whether it is creating content, interacting with one another or distributing content. Behavior is what boosts social media.
• Technology Technology enables social media to happen on a quick and easy basis by providing the platforms and tools for People and Behavior.

The image below illustrates the definition:

Social media is an autonomous entity. It will take place regardless of whether a random individual or organization decides to become involved.

Once an organization decides to become involved in social media, it becomes a more strategic process. Organizations need to understand and think of what their involvement will be within social media.

Social Business

Social business can be seen as becoming involved with social media as an organization. It is a process of an organization building social capital by creating valuable relationships.

The elements that make up social business are:

• Goals and Objectives Organizations need to understand and define what they are looking to achieve by using social media.
• Strategy The goals and objectives need to be translated into an approach that will lead to positive business results.
• Organization The strategy devised has to be rolled out within the organization. Teams need to be formed, employees need to be informed and educated, and the operational details need to be figured out.
• Integration The organization’s social business should be aligned with other business activities to establish consistency and complementary results.

The image below illustrates the elements of social business:

By addressing the elements above, organizations prepare themselves effectively for engaging in social media.

Social Governance

Social governance refers to the formal and informal rules that are used to monitor and govern social media use. These fall into four categories:

• Laws Local, national and international laws can contain formal rules on how to communicate online and which disclosures need to be provided.
• Rules and Regulations Formal institutes, such as trade or industry organizations, can issue rules and regulations that members of the industry need to adhere to. An example is the blogging disclosure rules that the FTC issued last year.
• Guidelines Organizations can create their own guidelines on how employees use social media. Examples of organizations that have a formal social media policy are IBM, Intel and Kodak (PDF).
• Ethical Codes The unwritten ethical rules on communication should also not be overlooked. These ethical codes are often a good starting point for creating more formal rules or guidelines.

Social governance is needed to make sure that social media is not abused by either organizations or members of the public to deceive others. And abuse has definitely taken place. Examples of Belkin, Whole Foods and Honda illustrate how sensitive the issue is and how seriously governance needs to be taken.

Community Engagement Framework

Social media, social business and social governance come together in the Community Engagement Framework.

For organizations, social business lies at the heart of community engagement. This should be the starting point for organizations to determine their approach for engaging in social media. The operational part takes place within social media where the content creation, content distribution, and interaction take place. Social governance takes place around social media and social business as a guiding factor.

Adding Up The Numbers

As discussed earlier this month, the most important thing to discern in sentiment analysis is the uniqueness of sentiment, i.e. whether the sentiments monitored/measured are unique to a person or is distributed through influence or virality.

Throughout this post, I’ll use the following example. A company has monitored the social web and has filtered out the unique sentiments that mention something about the company. A total of 5,010 sentiments were found. The company found 1,765 positive mentions; 2,357 neutral mentions; and 888 negative mentions.

From a totals perspective, this looks quite promising. When the neutral mentions are disregarded, the company gets nearly twice as many positive mentions as negative mentions. However, it’s time to put the numbers into perspective.

Adding Customer Segments

The company in our example makes a distinction between four customer segments, based on demographics and usage: (1) business, (2) families, (3) young people, and (4) luxury. The monitored mentions have been mapped according to these customer segments and the results are in the table below.

You’ll see that the 1,765 positive mentions are still the eye-catcher of the table, but it gets more interesting when you convert the table into percentages:

In this case, some interesting figures become apparent. Each segment has something that requires the attention of the company:

• In the business segment, it’s the overwhelming amount of neutral mentions. Here, the company can work to improve those neutral mentions to becoming positive mentions.
• In the families segment, things look positive. If the company can convert the 37% of neutral sentiment into positive sentiment, it will establish a very strong position in the segment.
• Things don’t look so positive though in the young people segment. A whopping 54% of the measured, unique mentions are negative. The company clearly has to right the ship in that segment or it might lose a lot of future business.
• The luxury segment is interesting as well. Almost half the mentions are neutral, but there is almost an even division between positive mentions and negative mentions. In this case, the company needs to gain a deeper understanding of why the public opinion is so divided and also of how it can sway some of the “neutrals” to the positive side.

Of course, the sentiment measured on the social web doesn’t have to be representative of a segment’s total population. However, the overall segment is more strongly influenced by the sentiment within the segment than by sentiment outside the segment. For example, a person looking for a business-line product will look at reviews from business users of the company and not necessarily at reviews from those in the families segment.

Are you performing a cross-analysis of customer sentiment and customer segments? Gauge what the sentiment per segment is. Look at where you can improve your position as a brand and take that next step, which is reacting appropriately to the data to help boost your brand’s perception and eventually sales.

As always, if you have comments, experiences or nuggets of wisdom to share, feel free to leave a comment!

Photo credit: Megan Fizell, Tres Jolie Studios

Access

When someone posts content on the Web, people will have access to it. This is a matter of fact and relates to all content and isn’t necessarily restricted to social media content, e.g. blog posts, status updates or user-created videos. It becomes social once distribution of content takes place outside the original creator’s direct control.

Distribution

The distribution of content can have an impact on you, your brand or your products/services if there is a clear sentiment involved. Sentiment is generally classified as positive, negative or neutral. In this post, I’m omitting “neutral”, because it doesn’t carry an opinion and in some cases, can even be positive because it enhances awareness.

I’d like to reflect on sentiment through three catalysts of distribution:

• Influence
• Virality
• Discussion

Influence

Influence is attributed to the person publishing and/or distributing a particular piece of content. That person’s influence is based on his/her authority (in knowledge, trust or experience) within his/her network.

Through influence, this network of friends/peers/fans is more likely to distribute the content that the influencer has published or distributed.

However, consider the following scenario:

Bill (INFLUENCER): “Don’t buy from <COMPANY X>. Their helpdesk kept me waiting for 45 minutes and then disconnected me.”

John (MEMBER OF BILL’S NETWORK): “I’ve heard from Bill that <COMPANY X> offers bad service.”

Paul (MEMBER OF JOHN’S NETWORK): “Have you seen this post from Bill that says <COMPANY X> sucks? Thanks for the heads, John!”

While this is a very simple example of content distribution, the essence remains this: three people are distributing a message that describes <COMPANY X> negatively. However, these aren’t three negative messages, but they’re three instances of the same message. The point is that distribution of content based on influence does not necessarily equal distribution based on agreement.

Virality

Content can spread like wildfire and earn a viral status, because they’re extremely funny, sad, absurd or well-made. An example is the “United Breaks Guitars” video from earlier this year:

People will spread content like this, but—as with influence—it doesn’t necessarily mean they share the sentiment portrayed in the content. In the “United Breaks Guitars” example, people may choose to spread the content because they’re amused by it rather than because they share a similar, negative sentiment about United Airlines.

Discussion

Agreement or disagreement over content definitely comes into play when we talk about distribution through discussion. Here, members of the network respond to the content by expressing their own stance. Let’s illustrate this by revisiting the two earlier examples mentioned under influence and virality:

Example 1:

Bill (INFLUENCER): “Don’t buy from <COMPANY X>. Their helpdesk kept me waiting for 45 minutes and then disconnected me.”

John (MEMBER OF BILL’S NETWORK): “I agree with Bill. <COMPANY X> once promised to send me a replacement product once and never did! They truly suck!!!”

Paul (MEMBER OF JOHN’S NETWORK): “That’s odd, I’ve never been treated badly by them. In fact, I’ve been a loyal customer of <COMPANY X> for 10 years!”

Example 2:

Dave: “Check out this video about United Airlines breaking guitars!”

Sam (MEMBER OF DAVE’S NETWORK): “That’s outrageous, but overblown in my opinion. United is one of the better airlines out there.”

Joe (OTHER MEMBER OF DAVE’S NETWORK): “Yea, I don’t like United. They lost two of my suitcases already!”

It becomes clear that in both cases, we’re not necessarily restricted to the distribution of a single message, but that multiple messages are involved. As a result, the sentiment of each message is unique as well and not a duplicate of the source.

This is the model I designed for content distribution and sentiment:

The model starts with a piece of content. The content is then accessed by people on the Web. It doesn’t matter whether this is free, paid, membership or freemium content. If it’s published, there will be people who have access to the content. After consuming the content, the viewer can choose to share/distribute the content. The distribution of the content can have one of three forms discussed in this post: influence, virality or discussion.

In case the content is distributed through influence and virality, it’s very likely that we’re dealing with the distribution of a single message (or sentiment).

When content is distributed through discussion, we’re more likely to see multiple messages (or sentiments) as people chime in with their opinions on the content or the parties involved in the content. Also, when content initially distributed through influence and virality spawn discussions, the original distribution of a single message becomes a distribution of multiple messages. However, the inverse is also possible. When content is initially distributed through discussion but someone publishes something that’s so strong that it branches into distribution through either influence or virality.

Sentiment Analysis

When you’re out to gauge sentiment about you, your brand or your products/services, it matters to know whether you’re dealing with a single or with multiple messages.

While it’s obviously not desirable to have negative content about you distributed through influence or virality, it helps to understand whether it’s the distribution of a single message seeded by the most influential members of people’s social networks. If that is the case, you might not have to deal with thousands or millions of negative members of the public but perhaps only a handful.

On the other hand, if thousands or millions of members of the social web are actively active in a discussion about you, it’s important to understand whether the messages (or sentiments) these individuals publish are unique and not a replication of someone else’s content/message/sentiment.

Making this distinction is still very difficult for machines even though we’ve come a long way in artificial intelligence (A.I.). It’s one of my focal points for 2010 to figure out how A.I. can contribute to sentiment analysis and other social business measurement/analytics topics.

There are solutions on the market that claim to be able to automate monitoring and analytics of brand mentions on the social web. However, to my knowledge, these tools are unable to distinguish between the distribution of a single sentiment and the distribution of multiple sentiments. In the case of the first example, these tools would count three negative brand mentions, while in reality, it is only one.

As a result, it’s most appropriate if sentiment analysis is performed by humans rather than machines. Humans can spot the difference between content distributed through influence, virality and/or discussion. Using sentiment analysis in this way will help you create a clearer picture of what is being said about you on the social web. It will also help you identify key influencers in your community’s social network. Sentiment analysis is not about keeping a tally of how many positive, neutral or negative sentiments you receive on the social web. A sentiment from a key influencer is more impactful than the sentiment of a lesser know person. Note that a key influencer’s sentiment is not necessarily more important but because s/he has more reach, the word-of-mouth effect is larger and thus more impactful.

Once you have an idea of what the content distribution looks like, how sentiments about you are built up and who key influencers or seeders are, you need to take action. This can vary from rather passive activities, like closer monitoring, to very active tasks, such as participating in the discussion or issuing a public response.

Go and find out what’s being said about you, your brand or your products/services. Identify whether these sentiments are distributed through influence, virality or discussion.

In the case of influence, find out:

• What the sentiment represented in the content is
• Who the key influencers are
• How members of the influencers’ network are distributing the message
• Whether you are dealing with a single sentiment or with multiple sentiments
• Whether discussion is being created out of the original content
• Whether it’s appropriate and how you can be involved in the content’s distribution

In the case of virality, find out:

• What the sentiment represented in the content is
• What is causing the content to go viral
• Who the key seeders are

• Whether you are dealing with a single sentiment or with multiple sentiments
• Whether discussion is being created out of the original content
• Whether it’s appropriate and how you can be involved in the content’s distribution

In the case of discussion, find out:

• What the sentiment represented in the content is
• How many unique sentiments are represented in the discussions taking place
• Whether key influencers are involved in the discussion
• Whether it’s appropriate and how you can be involved in the content’s distribution

If you have comments, experience or other nuggets of wisdom, let them be heard in the comments!

Photo credit: David Sutherland