Customer Listening Blog

Finn Raben, ESOMAR Director General, Interview

Laurent Flores - crmmetrix — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 15:54:41 +0100

I interviewed, Finn Raben, ESOMAR newly appointed Director General at SEMO, at SEMO the French MR event in Paris, on November 4th, 2009.

Finn tells us more about the crisis and its impact on Market Research.

NextTravel: The future of travel with technology

Laurent Flores - crmmetrix — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 11:24:48 +0100

crmmetrix was invited to speak at Totec in Paris and share insights about the future of the Travel industry with Technology.

Here is the Video:

crmmetrix récompensé par un Grand Prix des Etudes au SEMO 2009

Laurent Flores - crmmetrix — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:54:23 +0100

Le baromètre e-corporate, créée par crmmetrix et BTCI, a gagné le Grand Prix des Etudes, dans la catégorie « Etudes en Multi-Souscription ». Ce grand prix récompense un travail de plus de 6 ans, entamé en 2004.

Le baromètre e-Corporate est aujourd’hui la seule solution au monde proposant un benchmark permanent de l’impact des sites institutionnels. Il permet à chaque souscripteur de « benchmarker » directement tous les indicateurs et résultats de son site avec une moyenne arithmétique des réponses obtenues via le même procédé sur d’autres sites institutionnels souscripteurs.

Pour plus d'informations : Baromètre e-corporate

Long Tail et Presse Régionale

Laurent Flores - crmmetrix — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:14:49 +0100

C'est déjà le cas de certans titres régionaux en France comme la Voix du Nord avec lequel nous travaillons, mais la tendance est bien là: le développement du "blocal", où l'éclosion ici et là de correspondants "citoyens" locaux des journaux qui sont autant de relais de l'information (via leurs blogs) locale voir hyper locale pour la presse quotidienne. Le Guardian cherche en ce moment des corresponsants sur Leeds par exemple, voir ici:

The Dichotomy of Digital Marketing

Laurent Flores - crmmetrix — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:27:05 +0100

CRM Metrix Digital Hub Sept 25 2009

View more documents from CRM Metrix.

Great perspective and practical insights from Melissa Morrison my colleague at crmmetrix a speaker at the Digital Hub in Cincinnat last September 2009.

Melissa comes back to the basics (essential specifically in turbulent times) and organizes ideas on how to truly measure Internet branding effectiveness. Indeed, you may "count "everything, but counting is not measuring !

The image of Success or Failure? ....

Laurent Flores - crmmetrix — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:28:24 +0200

What do you think? Probably a bit of the two for now, no?

Creativity 24/7: interviews of three internet market research entrepreneurs

Laurent Flores - crmmetrix — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 18:54:36 +0200

Diane Hessan of Communispace, Fiona Blades of Mesh Planning & Laurent Flores from Crmmetrix share insights on how the Internet and technology provide access to consumer voice around the clock.

To read the full Téléchargement Research World Creativity 24_7 p 40-43

3 ways to boost your brand website

Laurent Flores - crmmetrix — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:13:46 +0200

Nice article in I-Media Connection today from Hemen Patel, my long time friend, and co-founder of crmmetrix, President, crmmetrix USA.

Three ways to boost your brand website:

Incorporate measurement tools so you can better manage your site

Avoid common design pitfalls, such as relying too heavily on Flash

Capitalize on consumer engagement and drive traffic where you want it most

To read the full article on I-Media Connection

Feedback from Esomar word of mouth measurement workshop

Laurent Flores - crmmetrix — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 07:46:40 +0200

Last week I had the chance to run my second workshop on "word of mouth measurement and beyond" at the Esomar annual congress in Montreux (Switzerland). The first one was in Sweden earlier this year. The overall feedback seems to be really positive. With my old friend Pete Blackshaw from Nielsen Online that I invited to lead the workshop with me, we really had fun together sharing insights, views about the challenges and opportunities of measuring word of mouth.

We had a full room of nearly 20 people, all very engaged, the majority of them coming from the advertiser side, with a clear mandate: "understand word of mouth and its measurement to implement things in their companies". I really have the impression that things are coming together slowly but surely when it comes to setting up measurement systems for word of mouth in Europe. We are certainly far away from a market of $200M in the US growing 15% a year as recently reported by PQ Media, but the question becomes important enough for marketers to consider wom hot enough to start dedicating specific investment measurements. Let's see how things progress in the coming months...

Beyond word of mouth measurement, one of the key outcomes obviously is really to relate to LISTENING to consumers' conversations, this is the reason I personally started to be interested in the wom topic more than 5 years ago, a time I coined the expression "customer listening" thus the name of this blog... Things usually take more time than initially expected but It seems that things are coming slowly together. Let's see what the trend will be in Asia in 2010 where I should be running the same workshop at Esomar Asia Pacific event in April 2010. Check it out and register!

technorati tags: esomar workshop word of mouth montreux wom
del.icio.us tags: esomar workshop word of mouth montreux wom

brand websites and long tail

Laurent Flores - crmmetrix — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:30:16 +0200

A recent global rool out of p&g e-commerce caught my attention : "the consumer goods giant, is adding links to its brand websites in Europe that will direct shoppers to the portals of a range of major retailers selling its products, after a similar initiative helped boost online sales in the US", Warc reports...

Furthermore..."Joe Quinn, P&G's head of global ecommerce, said the broader application of this approach will occur "as fast as we can roll it out. It's just a matter of being able to work out the technology linkages with our retailers."... Quinn said P&G has "seen double-digit percentage growth over the last several years in regards to online sales," a development that is at least partly attributable to Where to Buy, which greatly simplifies the purchase process on the web.

"The uptick in sales is enough that we are rolling it out to all of our brands globally. There is a direct correlation to sales once you put in the convenience," he added.

More broadly, Quinn cited industry research which predicts that 5% of P&G's sales could come from the internet in the medium-to-long term, up from 1%, or $500 million (€350m; £308m), at present.

What I see here is a wonderful opportunity for marketers of all sizes to equally market their brands (big and small, and small ones specifically) to allow their audiences, their buyers to find them and buy them (thanks to the brand website!) even if there shelve space is diminishing in favor of bigger revenue brands...

What a great application of The Long Tail principle initially pushed by Chris Anderson, no?

technorati tags: long tail brand website pg sitecrm

The best advertising? ... Genuine Conversation, a trial from Nestlé offering to Twittt from ad units directlly

Laurent Flores - crmmetrix — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 06:33:11 +0200

We often the best advertsing comes from peopel talking about the product naturally... an interesting iniatiative from Nestlé (reported from AdAge).

New Campaign From Nestle Encourages Users to Post Twitter Messages From Display Ads

by Michael Learmonth
Published: June 10, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Nestle's Juicy Juice isn't the first brand to try to integrate Twitter in to an ad campaign (see Skittles and TurboTax). But it may be the first to allow users to post tweets within an ad unit that can appear anywhere on the web.

Juicy Juice's Twitter display ad

Juicy Juice is testing the unit, from SocialMedia, for one month on mom-targeted sites BabyCenter and CafeMom. The units ask questions such as "How do you stimulate your child's mind?" or "How important are vitamin-enhanced foods to you?" and users can answer the queries as short messages, or tweets, directly in the ad.

If users are logged on to Twitter, the answers will be posted to the ad directly; otherwise users are first directed to Twitter.com to sign in. Posts, which also appear in users' Twitter feeds with a "hashtag" (the symbol #, used to group keywords or events for simpler searches on the site) are moderated by Nestle, but there's the option for that to be turned off.

Clicking on the ad unit, meanwhile, takes the user to Juicy Juice's YouTube site, which is chock-full of helpful videos, including a scary one about how many more germs per inch are on a water fountain than your average toilet seat.

The difference between this campaign, dubbed "Twitter Pulse" by SocialMedia, and other recent attempts is that it allows a conversation to be instigated by -- or occur within -- the ad unit, rather than just syndicating tweets already posted on Twitter.

"The ad unit is paid placement but the additional impressions are effectively earned media," said Seth Goldstein, CEO of SocialMedia, a technology company, noting that the hashtag then reaches the follower base of those who have entered tweets, and potentially sparks more attention and conversation.

SocialMedia is tracking a number of metrics for Juicy Juice, including traditional views and click-through rates but also number of tweets posted and the number of followers exposed to the hashtag on Twitter. Like other executions with Twitter, there is no revenue involved with the microblogging service, but, as Mr. Goldstein pointed out, it could be a potential source of new sign-ups and increased usage.

Brands grab 9% of all terms searched in Europe

Laurent Flores - crmmetrix — Fri, 22 May 2009 11:27:48 +0200

An interesting studyf rom bigmouthmedia reported that brands in Europe take 9% all searched terms, although there are differences between countries, this shows again that branding has never been so important to "signal" quality and drive consumer's expectations and desires. To view main results of the stuy.

Customer Centricity: the way out for the Press industry?

Laurent Flores - crmmetrix — Wed, 06 May 2009 15:41:41 +0200

I've been thinking for many years, althought not a media expert myself, that the only way out for traditional media (vs digital media) is to be customer-centric... In fact, I've been arguing that rather than managing "audiences" (I really think by the way that the term is dull, like "respondents" rather than "people" for market researchers), they should manage, nuture relationship to grow their brands... And indeed they have fantastic brands... The problem is that Press experts may not really know the value of their brands, not from an audience standpoint, not from the dollars it generates in advertising BUT from the customers/readers view point... I guess that one way out is to attract digital marketers to the press industry to help this shift...

The irony is that advertsing agencies that also face the same pain and stress that their clients impose due to budgets cut are now also telling press and media digital people that they should better manage their brands..of course I fully agree but the irony is that it comes from "middle men" that have also facing challengnes to reinvent their businesses by being more customer centric to drive positive buzz for the client's brands... Read the following article from AdAge to see what I mean, Publicis CEO recommending to magazines to really pay attention to their brands... Interesting and funny no?

In the same issue of Ag Age, John King from Fallon recommend advertisers to Build Generous Brands (we may need to be "kings" to share?)... I like the term as it really gets in the bigger question of value creation for brands and companies...It seems that we enetred a period where remarkable brands in the coming yeras that are able to share part of what they create (and their profits) with the communities they serve... This is I think a huge idea that is worth talking, shaping, sharing and putting in action for brands...

Any thoughs on this?

technorati tags: publicis maurice levy Press Industry Customer Centric Fallon Generous Brands
del.icio.us tags: publicis maurice levy Press Industry Customer Centric Fallon Generous Brands
icerocket tags: publicis maurice levy Press Industry Customer Centric Fallon Generous Brands
keotag tags: publicis maurice levy Press Industry Customer Centric Fallon Generous Brands

P&G and Coca-Cola Keep spending up despite recession

Laurent Flores - crmmetrix — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 17:07:16 +0200

The clear way to go as all academic research available shows that big brands should continue to spend and innovate to win consumer confidence specifically in down times.

Below an article sourced from WARC that provides some empirical evidence of this.

VALENCIA: Procter & Gamble, the consumer goods company, and Coca-Cola, the soft drinks giant, will continue to spend on advertising in the downturn, but both firms are also placing a greater emphasis on innovation and efficiency.

Bernhard Glock, P&G's vice president of global media and communications, argued the world's biggest advertiser is "committed to continue spending behind its branding efforts."

Among other initiatives, it will also aim to double its outlay on innovative and sustainable products to $50 billion (€39bn; £35bn) by 2012 according to Glock, who was speaking at the Festival of Media in Valencia.

He added that in the current, rapidly-changing environment, advertisers and agencies must adapt, and also seek to drive the overall transformation rather than "be changed" by external events.

P&G wants to work "hand-in-hand with our agencies," combining increased collaboration with a greater simplicity in decision-making in order to "develop and free up capacity for innovation."

Maarten L. Albarda, Coca-Cola's director of media and communication innovation, said the Atlanta-based beverage-maker was similarly attempting to "nurture" and "protect" its marketing budget, but would also be "keeping investments relatively flat."

As such, he argued that agencies should not to "look at budgets to determine position or relative strength," and also be honest enough to admit when they "can't handle something."

Coca-Cola's marketing strategy for the recession revolves around "connection planning," which Albarda defined as a "360 degree" approach that is "consumer-centric," "media neutral" and "goes across all touchpoints.”

Babs Rangaiah, director of global communications planning at Unilever, also said at the event that the Anglo-Dutch food-to-homecare company was "scanning the globe for ideas and content."

In this vein, she argued that the modern agency – "Agency 2.0" – needs to bring "everything together in the way it comes to the clients with the solutions."

Data sourced from AdAge/Rightbrainleftbrainblog; additional content by WARC staff, 23 April 2009

Google CEO to the Press Industry: Consumers Won't Pay for Most Online News

Laurent Flores - crmmetrix — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 08:32:18 +0200

This interesting article on Adage last week caught my attention and I wonder who really thought that Eric Schimdt, Google CEO, would have said the opposite ?

Since its early days, Google built its business and content on others' content, offering the mass, consumers, you and me, useful information through a "universal platform". This is not going to change any time soon as Google has taught consumers for "Free Stuff". Google is not to blame, the free content model is in Google "genes", the ones that did not really get the Internet early on, and to some extent still now, is the press and media industry, looking at portecting their content, thinking of people as "their audiences" rather than thinking about themseles as ubiqutious branded content and ways to make this content unique enough for consumers to care enough to stick to it and eventually value it to pay for either directly or indirectly. The issue is that the battle is probably over, Google drives massive audience, media websites struggle to make people loyal and make them pay using their traditional advertising and media models. It is even worse now in a troubled economy, at the end you need to follow your consumers, if they are on Google, accept it, this won't change any time soon, only try to master what you have under your reach: Your Brand!

technorati tags: gooogle press media industry
del.icio.us tags: gooogle press media industry
icerocket tags: gooogle press media industry
keotag tags: gooogle press media industry

Google Uses Twitter to Sell Ads

Laurent Flores - crmmetrix — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 08:41:33 +0200

Intuit Is First Marketer to Have Its Tweets Streamed Across AdSense Network

Read this interestintg article about what the future of "conversational advertising" may be...if markets are converstions...make ads converstional.

Thank you to Abbey Klaassen and AdAge for the feed! (published April 2nd 09)

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Twitter may still be tweaking its own business model, but Google has found a way to use the popular microblogging service to sell ads.

The search giant has started offering marketers ad units that stream their five most recent "tweets" across the Google AdSense network. The first marketer to use the ad units is Intuit, whose TurboTax brand is trying to boost its Twitter followers. Intuit used several of the measures available for any AdSense campaign to target the ads, which are running on sites such as Bebo, Facebook, Hi5, MySpace and Alltop. When a user clicks on an ad from Google, it takes them to TurboTax's Twitter page.

"It's syndicating whatever the team that works on the TurboTax Twitter account [@turbotax] posts," said Seth Greenberg, director of marketing at Intuit. When a user clicks on an ad it takes them not to TurboTax.com but to twitter.com/turbotax.

'Conversational vehicle'
The deal with Google also expands the audience for TurboTax's Twitter presence as the ads are syndicated it across the web. After all, while Twitter is growing and had about 7 million unique visitors in February, Nielsen NetView pegs the active digital media universe as 167 million people.

"We could have used this as an acquisition vehicle, but we're looking at it more like a conversational vehicle," Mr. Greenberg said. We're measuring this [in part by] how many followers can we get. Can we get to 100,000 by allowing people to know we're a resource? We're not going to hard sell you on the product, but we want people to know there are lots of people here who can help answer your questions."

The ability to put real-time feeds and data into ad units has existed for years, but one of the technological limitations of this particular execution was that users can't actually click on links that are included in the "tweets," or posts by users. Right now, the feed only pulls from TurboTax's Twitter account, rather than pulling a stream of tweets that mention the brand or tax-related issues. A Google spokesman said it is doing "limited" tests with a "small number of advertisers and publishers."

Not exactly a new concept
The concept of aggregating tweets and syndicating them on web pages isn't new, either, although it's more commonly seen on an individual's blog or other content-based websites than it is within paid-media placements. There are several widgets, blogging tools and independent third-party apps that can be placed on a website or blog to stream tweets organized by user, hashtag or keyword. Earlier this week, Glam Media launched an offering called Tinker.com, which lets advertisers buy ads around events or conversations. For examples, a retailer could buy all Twitter conversations around the Oscars, and those Twitter conversations -- along with the ad -- would show up on sites Glam Publisher Network.

The TurboTax ads are running during the last two weeks of tax season -- crunch time for tax-prep marketers. According to TNS Media Intelligence, Intuit's tax brand spends more than $100 million in 10 weeks. Intuit did not disclose how much it spent on this particular buy or whether the unit was sold at a premium ad rate.

TurboTax spokeswoman Colleen Gatlin mans the Twitter account, along with her public-relations team and Christine Morrison, social-marketing manager at the company. She considers them "enablers" -- they get people's questions to the folks who can provide answers. There are many reasons why the company is on Twitter, she said, but one big reason is that the microblogging site humanizes the brand.

Network effect
"We're raising awareness in the social community that we're here helping consumers," she said. "We make changes based on customer feedback, we're learning about the process."

Mr. Greenberg said he's still trying to work out exactly what a Twitter follower is worth from a marketing point of view, such as whether people have a greater propensity to become a customer when they're following a brand on Twitter or how valuable those customers are. But he's sure one of the advantages to the tool is its network effect.

"We're doing research about people who engage with us but also more interesting are their friends and followers," he said. "People can influence others in their own networks."

Invité du "Buzz" sur LCI

Laurent Flores - crmmetrix — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 18:00:21 +0100

Et oui, le blog, le buzz mènent à tout... et même à télé !

Suite à ma participation au débat de la semaine de la publicité organisée par l'aacc, j'ai eu l'occasion d'être invité à commenter l'actualité du net dans l'émission "Le Buzz" de Damien Givelet et Benoit Gallerey sur LCI.

Une grande expérience, très sympathique, dynamique et instructive. Merci à Damien et Benoit pour leur invitation ! Au plaisir de revenir :) !

Pour voir l'intégralité de l'émission, Le Buzz du 6 Férvier 2009 - LCI

technorati tags: Emission le buzz LCI Pubs Super Bowl
del.icio.us tags: Emission le buzz LCI Pubs Super Bowl
icerocket tags: Emission le buzz LCI Pubs Super Bowl
keotag tags: Emission le buzz LCI Pubs Super Bowl

Se faire entendre quand tout le monde parle

Laurent Flores - crmmetrix — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 18:43:46 +0100

Pour faire suite à ma participation au débat organisé par l'AACC sur la société "hypercommunicante", comment se faire entendre, ce jour Vendredi 6 Février 2009, un bel article dans Les Echos : Téléchargement LesEchos60209

En espérant que le tout participera à la plus grande ouverture des marques au Net !

Merci à Véronique Richebois des Echos et aux autres participants de cette table ronde, Laurent Bliaut, TF1, Joël Palix, Thierry Mugler Parfums et Couture, et bien sûr à Damien Givelet de LCI pour l'animation.

Vous pouvez également visualiser les échanges lors du débat ICI

Excellent we !

technorati tags: semaine de la publicité AACC
del.icio.us tags: semaine de la publicité AACC
icerocket tags: semaine de la publicité AACC
keotag tags: semaine de la publicité AACC

Super Bowl 2009: The Winners

Laurent Flores - crmmetrix — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 11:42:03 +0100

Beyond the acutal result, the Super Bowl is a great example of rolling out push & pull strategies: push with TV ad, pull with the Internet. The overall winners being brands that can engage well beyond the 30" ad and generate buzz online using social media and their brand websites.

I wrote a price about this using last year Super Bown result and showed how the brand website can work as the marketing hub for brand initatives find the white paper here (select the first paper on the list).

A company called, Collective Intelect, provides some learing on the brands that drove the most chatter online after ater airing on TV....and the winner is PEPSI!

Below are the results commented by Collective Intellect.

This year’s Super Bowl generated an enormous amount of online response - arguably due to the ads more so than the game itself, with 3D effects, new logos, and celebrity icons. Collective Intellect determined results within hours after the game. We’ve created a comprehensive report with our findings that we will make available as PDF. Here are a few of the high level metrics:

Pepsi dominated the online conversation during the game. Pepsi alone took 19% of the Top 10 share-of-voice; but when Pepsico products Sobe and Doritos are included, Pepsico accounted for almost 40% of the Top 10. (Gatorade came in at #11)

Coke managed to grab 12% of the Top 10 share-of-voice, despite its ads being pushed to the second half of the game by Pepsi’s purchase of the first half.

Of the five brands with the highest online activity, Audi had the highest “brand affinity/loyalty” association.

Of those same five brands, Sobe had the highest “economical association”, followed by Budweiser and Pepsi.

Transformers 2 was the most popular movie trailer

2009 Super Bowl Advertisers Selected Market Share

Twitter generated a huge response as well, Pepsi again dominating. Check out the top 10 tweets, as of 8 p.m. EST 2/1/09:

Twitter Top Ten

You can get the full report from Collective Intellect blog here.

technorati tags: Super Bowl 2009 Pepsi online chatter
del.icio.us tags: Super Bowl 2009 Pepsi online chatter
icerocket tags: Super Bowl 2009 Pepsi online chatter
keotag tags: Super Bowl 2009 Pepsi online chatter

Super Bowl 2009: The ads

Laurent Flores - crmmetrix — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 09:52:50 +0100

I did not get the chance to see the game but Ad Age offers the ability to watch all the ads that run during the event, which ones do you prefer ?

To watch the ads : Ad Age Super Bowl 2009 Ads

technorati tags: Super Bowl Ads
del.icio.us tags: Super Bowl Ads
icerocket tags: Super Bowl Ads
keotag tags: Super Bowl Ads