Irfan Kamal on Digital Marketing

The Coming Influence Marketing (R)evolution (Wherein a Small Percent of Your Audience Drives Outsized Value)

Irfan Kamal — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 18:15:57 +0000

What if, instead of targeting 5,000 people, you could achieve the same bottom line results by engaging 500 or even 5 people, at a lower total cost? That’s the potential of influence marketing. Is it living up to that promise and will this type of marketing be possible by 2012?

What we do know:

Changes in consumer attention mean marketing is changing, and the change is dramatic
It’s becoming clear that one of key players in this change is the individual consumer
Individuals are playing a central role because they trust each other – often a lot more than they trust companies
In today’s environment they’re able to better communicate and share with each other – on many things, including products, services and causes

So, do we then target all individuals engaged in social media? Our thinking is that individuals who are influential can create outsized value. There’s been a lively debate around this (see, for example, Paul Adams excellent discussion and his comprehensive collection of relevant research links). It seems to me that most of the debate seems to center around the definitions of who is an influencer. To us, an influencer is not defined solely by the number of people they connect to. Quite simply, an influencer is someone who is capable of – and wants to – bring about changes in awareness, perception or action in a group of people, around a specific topic.

In some cases, these influencers are “head of tail”, i.e. have very wide reach. In other cases, they are pretty “ordinary” people who just happen to have the ability to reach and engage a circle of people in a way others can’t. In the latter case, they’re the friends who each seem to have their own special expertise – the one that knows exactly which is the best thin crust pizza in town, or the different friend who knows exactly which GPS has the best routing around traffic. We believe the most impactful and efficient programs successfully identify and use both types of people to achieve their goals.

Here are 3 data points around the value of influence in real world scenarios, drawn from academic research and from our own work:

An influential fraction of the audience (with modest social networks) can drive substantial business value. There’s no clear link between their influence and the size of their social networks: these are generally fairly ordinary people with modestly sized social networks. As an example, for a clicks-focused program that engaged “ordinary” people with varying degrees of social network connectedness, we tracked participant performance in driving clicks. A small set of influential individuals (< 10%) were able to engage their social networks to generate over 80% of the total program clicks. While a large majority of these top performers had a somewhat higher than average numbers of friends, there was no significant link between total number of social network friends and the ability to drive clicks. We did find other factors that were present among the top influencers.
Individuals highly connected around specific topics can be influential. A recent paper, “Identifying influential spreaders in complex networks”, discusses the importance of understanding influencers in the context of their connectedness in specific social networks. Individuals in tightly connected groups appear to form the influential spreaders in a topical social network and can be influential in the spread of relevant information. It’s not all about connectedness — so-called “hubs” may or may not be influential spreaders. The image below shows (in the center) an example of a tightly connected group of people (“influential spreaders”):

Head of tail influencers continue to be important. There are many real world examples around the ability of high reach, relevant influencers to help bring about results (we all know about the Oprah effect). In a recent study of video virality, we evaluated the very different success levels (quantified in this case by total views) of 3 short form videos with similar subject matter. All three of the videos were seeded on major video sites and received a small amount of paid media support. One of the videos also received coverage/promotion by two relevant bloggers. The video that was covered by the relevant bloggers received 26x the total views of the others and importantly had longer duration of viewership growth and a wider total base.

How can companies increase influence marketing in 2012?

Continue to identify, engage and tracking the impact of “head of tail/mid-tail” influencers. As an example, our social team at Ogilvy builds programs that use anInfluencer Mapping framework and tools for identifying head/mid-tail influencers (i.e. those with relatively high reach, but with clear topical relevance to a program and a likelihood to engage).
Expand engagement programs to individual small group influencers in your customer and prospect audience. Evaluate new methodologies and tools to help identify lower reach, individual influencers. At Ogilvy, we have recently launched frameworks and tools such as our Insider Circle(tm) platform to help identify and and engage the real-world influencers among companies’ customers and prospects.

In my next post, I’ll take a first look at Klout and Peerindex, two innovators that are in the process of quantifying influence scores for millions of individuals.

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New Ogilvy-ChatThreads 2011 Study Preview: Exposure to Social Media Associated With Sales Increase

Irfan Kamal — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 08:30:49 +0000

Can social media drive sales? One recent study found that about a quarter of social network users report having had their purchases influenced by social media. On the other hand, another recent study found that direct clicks from social media sites didn’t generate notable sales. But this type of click study doesn’t really capture the full extent of media influence on consumer behavior.

To take a more comprehensive look at the impact of social media, we tracked a sample group of Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) consumers’ exposure to a variety of brand ‘touchpoints” and obtained pre- and post-tracking data on purchase.

What we found

According to results we are previewing from this new Ogilvy-ChatThreads study entitled Integrated Social Media Sales Impact, there is a strong link between an increase in sales and exposure to social media.

In fact, we found that in the real world, social media exposure – by itself and more broadly when combined with other types of media exposure such as out-of-home, PR or TV ads – is linked with 2-7x higher likelihood of consumption and actual spend increases for some QSR brands.

Specifically, here are some key results, summarized in the diagram and listed out further below:

- Social media only exposure: 7x greater likelihood of higher spend (observed for KFC)

- Social media PLUS billboard ads (out of home): Approximately 2x greater likelihood of higher spend or consumption (observed for the entire QSR category in aggregate)

- Social media PLUS TV ads: 2x greater likelihood of higher consumption (observed for Wendy’s)

- People exposed to social media PLUS news stories or editorials spent 17% more week-over-week (observed for the QSR category)

Interestingly, out of over 60 media interactions studied, social media and social media interactions were associated with some of the highest sales impact of any media. We tracked over 20 touchpoints, including TV, print, out-of-home, social media, news/editorial (PR) and radio.

Download a higher resolution PDF summary slide or see the full preview presentation from our Advertising Research Foundation at the Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence slideshare site We will be releasing the full study in July 2011.

Methodology

The study recruited 404 individuals to use the ChatThreads BrandEncounter™ platform in reporting their real-time exposure to 21 different brand “touchpoints” across five QSR brands: KFC, McDonalds, Subway, Taco Bell and Wendy’s. The study ran in 2 segments between 1/20/11 and 5/6/11. A total of 5,623 touchpoints were reported by participating consumers. Participants were pre-screened for QSR favorability and social media activity within the past week. Shift in consumption and spend (not absolute levels of consumption and spend) were evaluated to minimize any issues related to pre-existing associations between social network use and consumption and spend amount.

The New Innovation in Sustainability: Less Gloom, More Fun? Happy Earth Day!

Irfan Kamal — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 21:46:24 +0000

The world’s demand for resources (food, energy, water, minerals) seems to be outrunning our ability to supply these needs in a way that doesn’t dramatically impact our lives. We are increasingly exposed to threats such as core inflation (described recently by Chinese officials as a long-term, not short-term challenge), financial burdens of securing energy supplies (and the cost of investing in new ones), and the multiple economic and social risks of long-term climate change on our planet and way of life.

The trouble is that, according to “Mainstream Green“, a new report released by Ogilvy Earth, all this doom and gloom hasn’t been particularly effective in driving mainstream consumers to make (and push for) changes to reduce demand for energy and other resources.

In the US, there’s a 30 percentage point gap between people’s stated importance of living sustainably (80% say this is important), and their action (50% engage in sustainable behavior, e.g. taking public transportation or hiking/biking to work; using eco-friendly products and recycling). (It’s less in China — 14 points — for reasons covered at length in the report.) The mainstream consumer isn’t adopting or championing behavior change.

The possible solution?

Frame sustainability in a way that makes it an attractive and desirable lifestyle for mainstream consumers.

Here are 3 examples of this emerging approach:

Opower has used the principle of social proof (i.e. my friends are doing something, so should I) by including indicators of comparative energy use in monthly utility bills (such as a smiley face), resulting in an average energy savings of 1.5% to 3.5% across a utility’s entire population – implemented nationwide, this could save about 60 million megawatt hours per year (that’s enough to power New York City for a full year), based on the EIA‘s US net energy consumption statistics and data from infrastructurist.com

Recyclebank rewards people for taking everyday green/sustainability actions with special offers from more than 3,000 local and national businesses; in a Cincinnati program, reported in soapboxmedia.com, over 1,681 tons of recyclables were collected (300 tons higher than any other month in the 21 year history of the program), and the percentage of recycling participants rose from 40% to 60%

The newest entrant to the idea of making sustainability more engaging and broadly appealing is Ecotopia, a new Conservation International-sponsored Facebook social game launching today.

If guilt and doom won’t drive change, these approaches — grounded in behavioral and influence principles — just might help?

Can Co-Creation Help Create New Drugs?

Irfan Kamal — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 16:22:47 +0000

Could significant advances in science come not from machines alone but from the clever co-creation effort of both humans and machines ?

That’s the tantalizing promise of a novel social/crowdsourced downloadable game and the focus of a first-of-a-kind pharmaceutical industry-sponsored “protein folding” contest.

So what’s protein folding and why does it matter? The brief version: There are many ways that proteins can fold, and the prediction of the most likely shapes is extremely hard for computers to do.

Yet, the more we know about how certain proteins fold, the better we can design new proteins to combat disease and find cures for such afflictions as cancer and Alzheimer’s. For a longer description of protein folding, check this out.

Enter Foldit: this new game was designed and built by Zoran Popovic’s team at the University of Washington to allow people to fold proteins – without any special knowledge of biochemistry. Foldit uses humans’ ability to “see” in 3D – combined with a fun game environment – to help find the shapes that proteins will be most likely to fold into.

As part of its desire to support innovative work among rising new scientists, MedImmune (an Ogilvy client, and a biologics company that’s part of AstraZeneca) teamed up with Foldit to launch the 2010 University Protein Folding Challenge.

Over 20 teams from a range of leading universities (including MIT, Scripps, Purdue, Princeton, Harvard and Stanford) competed in the 2-week long Challenge, focused on finding an optimal structure for a pancreatic cancer protein.

Location is Now Part of the Social Graph — 3 Implications

Irfan Kamal — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 19:18:18 +0000

According to Comscore, over 25 million users accessed Facebook via a mobile phone in Jan 2010, a 112% year-over-year increase.

With its initial US-based rollout of Places location functionality on the 30+ million iPhone installed base, Facebook joins Twitter and others in embracing the growing use of smartphones for social networking.

Importantly, this change allows Facebook to expand users’ social graphs beyond such items as friends, product/service affinities and demographics to now include location.

Here are three thoughts on implications for marketers, agencies and social location startups:

Of course, location checkins should help drive impulse and, to some extent, planned purchases. It’s clear that coupons, discounts and other promotions will be important for increasing share of wallet — particularly for the impulse purchases estimated to account for 20+% of consumer spending. Companies like Shopkick are already implementing functionality to enable this, and it’s clearly going to be of value to driving revenue for a wide range of companies.

Checkins will provide new opportunities to build relationships and better understand customers. Less promotional location-driven engagement will be helpful in increasing preference and loyalty. If a user must check into a location manually, they’re either doing so for convenience (e.g. to locate friends or offers nearby) or as self-expression. The latter provides an interesting opportunity for a brand to engage — for example, by providing messaging or advice that’s related to the type of location visited. This also provides an opportunity for B2B brand engagement.

Social network partners may well provide more unique experiences for brands. Much as well-designed social games from companies like Zynga and Playdom have created a powerful draw for Facebook users (consuming ~40% of Facebook user minutes), startups like SCVNGR, Gowalla, Foursquare and Booyah will likely use Facebook graph + location data to create interesting experiences. They’ll have the added opportunity to integrate data across Facebook, Twitter and other non-Facebook smartphone users.

One of the biggest potential issues to consider is user privacy — the current implementation has some issues that have been widely written about. However, in the past Facebook has eventually responded with changes to enable users to manage their privacy in an acceptable way.

Read more about key steps to take in getting started.

Photo credit: Graph, by Librarian by Day

Social Games Spanning Wider Demographics and Capturing More Time

Irfan Kamal — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 21:17:39 +0000

According to the most recent numbers from Inside Network’s Appdata, there are currently over 82 million people – or about twice the entire population of California – playing Zynga’s social game Farmville.

Aside from the growing magnitude of the player base for social games like Farmville, a recently released Information Solutions Group / Popcap study also suggests that these games are reaching a broader and more diverse segment of the population than one might expect.

Here are some of the US-specific findings about social game players from the study*:

- average age is 48

- 90% reported the same or increased game play over the past 3 months

- 27% and 25% reported less time spent reading (mag, book, newspaper) and home TV/movie viewing respectively

- 43% of the time, game players log into social networks specifically to play games

- friends’ recommendations are the #1 factor influencing social game selection

- 35% have purchased a virtual gift while playing a social game

- among the specific games studied, Bejeweled Blitz and Farmville were more popular with women; Mafia Wars and Texas Holdem Poker were more popular with men

Here’s a recent Appdata list of the 15 most popular social games. Who would’ve

*the study also surveyed UK players

Co-Creation Growing Rapidly Into a Viable Business Model

Irfan Kamal — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 02:45:00 +0000

There’s been a lot of interesting discussion recently on how to best leverage channels like Twitter to communicate. This post talks about a bit about the co-creation of new social experiences that drive conversation and engagement in innovative ways, with the potential to then communicate the co-creation activity across multiple channels – including Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Flickr.

More than ever before, people have tools to help them co-create products and services in social environments. It’s an exciting trend that’s still very much in its infancy. Many of us are familiar with Cafepress, Zazzle and Nike’s custom shoes NIKEiD program. These were early – and still successful – examples of firms that help people remix and create everything from shoes to skateboards.

We’re now seeing signs of continued evolution of this general trend, in areas as diverse as fashion, fabrication and finance. The ideas these companies are introducing will change the way a range of industries introduce, sell and market products. For marketers, these companies all demonstrate useful and innovative approaches to genuine engagement of audiences around co-creation.

Instructables (DIY)
Part of the rapidly growing online “fab” and DIY trend, this site provides one of the best communities centered around creating almost anything – including an Electric Umbrella, Pulled Chicken, a Cardboard Frisbee and even Homer Simpson’s 3D Doughnut Trophy. The site reaches over 4 million monthly unique visitors globally.

Polyvore (fashion)
Polyvore has taken traditional fashion magazine models and adapted them to create a vibrant community around remixing fashion items. You can assemble a collage of products that look good together, rate others’ attempts at the same, and click through to purchase items in collages. Polyvore reports strong growth, and over 900,000 registered users.

Prosper (loans)
In an environment where financing is hard to come by, Prosper fills a real need in an innovative and thoughtful way. Read real people’s reasons for seeking loans, check ratings and default histories, request a loan yourself, and create/invest in a custom loan “portfolio”. Prosper has facilitated over $180 million in loans. Also check out similar site Lending Club.

Got any other examples?

Introducing Conversation Impact – Social Media Measurement for Marketers

Irfan Kamal — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 02:07:24 +0000

John Bell and I formally introduced the Conversation Impact(TM) measurement model at the Advertising Research Foundation’s Audience Measurement 4.0 on June 23rd. Here’s a brief overview of the model, its goals and planned evolution.

The model was developed by our team to provide brands with a comprehensive, recognizable framework for tracking social media campaigns. We relied heavily on our experience with a range of social media campaigns for both B2B and B2C clients, and considered the types of questions and reporting requests we receive with every new project or request for information.

We focus on simplicity and comparability across media – the latter, to help guide marketers with media allocation. We categorize our metrics into 3 areas, corresponding roughly to objectives and “marketing funnel” stages; each is shown below, with representative metrics (the metrics are selected based on unique client needs). Included are both familiar and new metrics.

Image courtesy of Crimson Hexagon

Reach and Positioning

Unique monthly visits
Time on site
Overall volume
Share of voice within category or brand family
Search visibility

Preference

Sentiment index (% positive – % negative) in social media
Share of positive voice in social media, within category
Relative Net Promoter Score, absolute or within category

Action

Registrations
Sales
Advocacy

Some of these metrics we measure using software such as Crimson Hexagon, Radian6 or TruCast; other metrics we measure with more traditional panel or intercept survey-based instruments.

We invite discussion – this is the first phase of what will be an iterative process to arrive at a simple, effective way to help marketing and communications executives make better decisions on social media spend allocation and scaling.

Can Photo-Driven Crowdsourcing Provide Brand Insights?

Irfan Kamal — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 19:38:20 +0000

A new experimental site, Photocracy.org, is a crowdsourcing initiative to explore whether images are useful in providing brand identity information. The people behind the site, Princeton University student Josh Weinstein and Sociology Professor Matthew Salganik, are currently collecting information on perceptions of 3 countries – the United States, China and Japan – using votes on images of those countries. Visitors from each country are asked to choose which of 2 pictures is more representative of the country. Since the site’s launch a few weeks ago, over 100,000 votes have been cast for comparisons like this one:

Photocracy.org US comparison images - cowboy on horse vs. Obama

Why is this useful? To find out, I asked the people behind the project some questions.

What specifically are you hoping to accomplish from this project?

Matthew: This is a study of cross-national perceptions, and we are hoping to find the photos that best represent Japan, China, and the United States according to voters from Japan, China, and the United States. [We], as well as visitors to our site, will be able to see how Americans view their country, as well as how it is viewed by people from Japan and China. Likewise, we can see how people from Japan and China view their country as compared to how it is viewed by others. If the project works well with these three countries, we hope to expand it to cover additional countries in order to get a richer understanding of global public opinion.

What are the broader potential implications and uses for this type of work?

Josh: The potential implications for crowd-sourced pairwise comparisons is limitless. Both in textual … and pictorial form (as in Photocracy.org), pair-wise comparisons are an excellent and easy way to sort lists of ideas. Further, the availability of user-generated options adds a further bonus so that, potentially, ideas users submit can reach the top.

The visual basis of the methodology adds another level of potential. For starters, by using pictures instead of text, translation issues are effectively eliminated. Most importantly, this methodology is entertaining and simple for the user.

Another approach would’ve been to ask people to describe the different countries in words, or using a set of written questions. Is there something about using photos that is more effective for brand identity research – in comparison to using written questionnaires?

Matthew and Josh: The choice of pictures over text was made for two reasons. First, offering visual aids instead of written words bridges the language gap. For example, if an American uploaded that she thought that Chinese were “aggressive”, how exactly would we translate that into Chinese? There are probably several words with similar definitions, but different connotations (for example, in English there are “warlike”, “violent”, “assertive”, etc). This translation problem plagues cross-national research, but we avoid it by using photos. On our site, people interact directly with items uploaded from other countries with the researchers standing in between them. A second reason for using photos is that interacting with pictures is more interesting than interacting with text. This site relies on volunteers to come and vote and we thought that using photos would be more fun. As we enter an increasingly visual world (the internet and television instead of newspapers) – iconography and understanding the perceptions thereof becomes evermore important.

See results on how people perceive the United States, China and Japan – and cast your own votes – at Photocracy.org .

Polymeme: Track the Blogosphere by (Unusual) Industry Clusters

Irfan Kamal — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 19:18:58 +0000

Many of us are familiar with Techmeme, a useful news aggregator with a focus on aggregation of tech stories across the web and the blogosphere. Techmeme has an entertaining sister site (Wesmirch) that aggregates celebrity gossip. Other popular blog news aggregators include Technorati and search services such as Twingly.

Polymeme is an interesting new entrant attempting to focus a bit differently by clustering stories from a database of over 25,000 blogs across the following relatively unusual categories:

Policy (with sub-categories Economics, Education, International, Law)

Change (with sub-categories Green & Energy, Non-Profit, Social Enterprise, Social Justice)

Culture (with sub-categories Architecture & Design, Arts, Books & Poetry, Theatre & Music)

Media (with sub-categories Advertising, New, Traditional, TV & Cinema)

Science (with sub-categories Evolution, General, Health, Social)

Polymeme claims its technology and processes help its readers identify stories outside of what they describe as an “echo chamber” that results in certain popular ideas or news being reinforced at the expense of other worthy – but less visible – ideas.

What do you think? Is there an echo chamber effect? If there is, is it necessarily a bad thing?

It’ll be interesting to follow Polymeme and other companies that try to bring out the less traveled parts of the blogosphere. (When I checked it out, Polymeme was interesting and did seem to pull up some unique stories, but was very slow — growing pains, I’m guessing.)