Positive Word of Mouth Buzz. Guaranteed.

Much has been written recently about bloggers and how easily manipulated they are, and how they seem to almost be living off the fat of free sampling and prizing in exchange for positive posts. Two consistent sources of such fodder are journalists and traditional media outlets. Both of them have inherent conflicts of interest and shouldn’t be your sole source of information about navigating social media's unwashed masses.

While I want to point out their bias, the position that social media marketing is risky for brands is far from unfounded. The democratization of any medium is almost by definition messy and uncontrolled. That is a scary place for brands to be. But the smart brands know that it’s scarier to not be there at all.

We have been working with a number of those smart brands. P&G and LG Electronics were our flagship clients when we launched our product last year. We have learned a lot in the past year, and realize that it’s actually very easy to guarantee positive buzz about products. We use three ingredients to ensure that everyone wins…our clients, our creators, and our consumers. So, without further ado, here is:

How to guarantee positive word of mouth buzz,
and keep the FTC off your back at the same time

1. Start with a great product

Hey, don’t roll your eyes at me. I’m serious. We don’t work withF500 brands because they’re the easiest ones to get to. For a small company, they’re the hardest to get to. But we target working with F500 brands because they launch great products. They do a tremendous amount of work beforehand to ensure the success of a product. P&G spends $2 billion a year on 8,000 engineers. LG maintains 30research centers for $3 billion a year. Can you think of another way to guarantee great word of mouth for a client other than by starting with a product that has millions of dollars of R&D and months of consumer testing behind it? Expo has actually turned down a number of companies because we thought that the products were not high enough quality to ensure success for the client. (Of course, we didn’t tell them that. We said we were busy.) Only a great product should be able to creategreat buzz.

2. Don’t ask the bald guy about shampoo

Part of the power of social media marketing is that it is intensely personal. Sites should know so much more about their community than ever before. Companies that allow anonymous text postings, or encourage thin veils of member credentials are simply socially bankrupt. The more information your community shares with you about itself, the more you can tap into the appropriate, relevant social network for clients. A great product needs to be in the hands of the person it was designed for. Great brands design their products with a very in-depth consumer profile in mind. These profiles don’t just encompass age, gender, income, but also include things like buying habits, social activities, lifestyle choices, and family size. We have located, on behalf of our clients, consumers with a certain hair length, buyers of no-frills grocery products, people who watch a specific TV show, even women who are breastfeeding!

3. Reward an honest relationship

You started with a great product. You put it in the hands of the target consumer. What can go wrong? At this point, very little should go wrong. But, alas, companies out there have screwed it up anyway. A few thoughts on how to avoid the last few potholes on the way to buzz nirvana…

• There should be no need to bias the consumer. If you feel a need to somehow inject incentive for positive reviews at this point, then something in step 1 and 2 isn’t working.
• The target for a positive buzz campaign should be 80%. Our average product (out of a library of 300,000 videos) generates 85% positive, 5% negative and 10% neutral video reviews. Text review sites find the same type of ratio. 80% positive is a lot of positive buzz. We will turn down clients expecting us to generate a 100% positive campaign. Trying to manipulate an unnatural result leads to disastrous choices.
• Disclose until you can’t disclose anymore. Don’t just do this for FTC reasons…which are only there to protect the reader/viewer of the content. Disclose and require disclosure so the community of contributors knows that those are the rules you play by. Build a relationship with contributors where everything is out on the table. You will attract people who want to play by those rules. Those are the people that will strengthen your ability to guarantee a natural, authentic and honest result.

Google Search Options: A naked bid for word of mouth commerce

I see Google's new filter, Search Options, as a very specific attempt by Google to own consumer word of mouth -- that untethered sea of millions of voices speaking about products, experiences, brands. The Search Options that Google launched: Video, Forums, Review…are all currently the strongest forms of consumer expression. In evidence of their interest in commerce, the example in their video demonstration of Google Search Options is a product search: “Powershot SD 750”.Based on the selection of filters available in "Show Options", Google is obviously hoping to capture a larger share of product researchers by optimizing their search results. Let’s break down the first few critical Search Options that Google chose to launch.

Video: Well, there’s expotv.com, the largest and only video site dedicated to word of mouth video for consumers. Great content to surface in Search Options! And then there’s youtube, which could be characterized as the largest video platform dedicated to word of mouth video for anything. Unfortunately for users, youtube's page rank of 9 will render this Search Option less helpful. Youtube’s product-tagged video will surface often, but the results will have a number of weaknesses for consumers looking for helpful product information. The two that we often point out are:

(i) the horrifically uneven quality, type and quantity of information that is presented from video to video

(ii) the inability to search effectively no matter how specific your search terms due to poor tagging by great videos, and great tagging by poor videos

However, if you’re Google and you own Youtube, then helping youtube surface even potentially relevant consumer video is a great way to monetize the content.

Forums: Why search forums? Aren’t they the sources that you most avoid when doing a search? Sorting through a bunch of moms talking about swine flu is not going to give you much serious information about the disease. But if the search is on products – forums become an authentic source of consumer enthusiast information. Unlike on Web 1.0, corporate poseursare now often outed immediately on forums. Hard-core enthusiasts take legendary status on forums as moderators, contributors, and consumer experts. The information on the best and biggest forums offer sincere,personal and authentic discussion by enthusiasts. Go to a Disney boardif you want to know the best rooms on the Disney Cruise ship, not Disney.com.

Reviews: I assume I don’t have to cover how reviews are relevant if Google wants to own word of mouth consumer search. The proliferation of text reviews (and even the proliferation of tools that allow sites to implement text reviews) make Google’s search of the resulting vast expanse of content invaluable. Amazon does a great job of sorting through its user reviews in order to spur conversion to sale. Why shouldn’t Google apply that same logic to ALL user reviews.

From Expo’s point of view, Google’s optimization of consumer word of mouth is a boon for content sites like ours. Expo will benefit from the care and attention Google is putting to format, content, and source of user generated product information. We think product researchers will undoubtedly benefit as well.

What’s next for Google Commerce:

Google’s already reached perfection taking both irrelevant and relevant content and attaching a commerce component via Google Adsense. What’s left? Price comparison is dominated by the engines like shopping.com and now it’s commoditized with APIs. Product selection search is dominated by Amazon and its vast marketplace of products. Google then tried inter-Amazon search through its "site search box". While a smart move by Google, it’s a terrible user experience since Amazon does a much better job of searching its own site and tailoring it for the non-anonymous user.

My bet is on Local Commerce. Local commerce is one area that has yet to unlocked by online tools. My bet is Google will win that game against the brilliant start-ups out there trying to attack local dollars. Local cannot be attacked on a national scale (thus the different names), but GPS is allowing hyper targeting to become relevant to geo-targeting. By vectoring GPS, maps, and local search, Google has the winning combination of national services to synthesize local advertising. Remember, they don't need to create the local content, just find the right person to deliver it to.

Youtube Promoted Videos, aka Video SEM

Woefully behind on tricking out our Youtube page with new utilities. Today, Youtube SEM.

1) You can now set up a text ad much like an adsense ad, and then buy keywords for placement of a link to promote a specific youtube video or video channel. The example on the right shows how I purchased the word "consumer reviews" and you can see my bid earned me first placement among...one bidder. The layout is integrated, with a video thumbnail and my text descriptor.

2) Obviously, the key is finding the right keywords that work for you. There are similar tools to adsense that will suggest related keywords to the ones you are targeting. I assume those are based on popular youtube search queries.

3) Youtube allows you to set a maximum bid price and a daily maximum budget. The interface allows you to see the average slot placement you earned based on your bid. You can change each keyword individually. Youtube serves google adsense results when there is no youtube bidder. In my small tests, it seems if there is at least 1 youtube bidder on a word,

youtube seems to displace the adsense module for the youtube bidder. My bids were very high, so it's possible the unit is already be optimized to serve adsense or the youtube bidder based on which yields the most revenue. However, for strategic reasons, I would think they would favor heavily the youtube bidder. Such a weighting keeps the visitor within youtube, since the paid link goes to a youtube video or channel. That allows youtube to show effectiveness of the ad unit, and the ability to keep the user to monetize further.



The Youtube Promoted Videos is an interesting ability to get distribution for your video. The trouble for youtube will be finding users who have the ability to monetize their video or channel, or have rationalized some other reason to pay for viewers. The rates are relatively high...I'd heard the average is $1.00 CPC, although we have been experiencing significantly lower CPC than that for first slot placement on our keywords. (Obviously, it all depends on what words you're going for.) I'll update that range as we expand our buys.

More on the impact of these changes to commercial applications after I post about the Youtube Insights module next.

Youtube: Giving up on monetizing "The Evolution of Dance"

Clickz broke a great story about changes to youtube. Basically, youtube seems to be throwing in the towel on monetizing their brand of UGC. They're creating a tabbed 'ghetto' for not only amateur videos like "Charlie Bit My Finger", but also for semi-pro content as well (sorry semi-pro, you're more semi than pro).

Between closing down the Google Adsense/Youtube units and now creating a monetizable player specifically for professional content, I think Youtube is taking a business plan stand. Their UGC, with billions of eyeballs, is pretty much unmonetizable. UGC (and copywrite infringements...and porn...), with its $470 million of loss for hosting and serving, may be the french fries that bring the search audience to youtube. But it's the professional content where youtube is now betting to make its money.

Some changes I would expect?
Search results will begin to favor professional content in the results. UGC, which is next to impossible to search productively anyway, will become subordinated to the professional results. If you search for "how to bake a cake" chances are you wouldn't mind finding a Food TV segment, or Martha Stewart or anyone you know. Of course, you actually get "lfritz73". And as charming as she is, I have no idea if she makes a good cake. Segregating the two will allow you to find all the copywrited clips you want...all legally if Youtube can get their syndication deals done with the majors.

Copywrite infringing materials will get taken down faster, or through a better process. With revenue at stake now, both youtube and copywrite holders (NBC, ESPN) will want to have their results found on the monetizable, "good" player, not the UGC ghetto tab. Previously, there was no economic incentive to takedown infringing content (and actually incentive to leave it up for the audience those clips attracted). Which leads to....

Professional publishers will be more liberal with what they put up online. If youtube is monetizing the content, and they are counting the eyeballs, and there's a pretty player....well, voila, that's kind of TV.

More and more eyeballs to broadband...less and less to the TV box. Watch out Comcast. The repeats and archives are now moving online. You know what's next.

Adsense cancels youtube video units product

Most of you won't be affected by this, since it seems very few people were using it. Google Adsense discontinued offering Youtube Video Units as part of their never-ending-search for youtube's revenue model. As part of the program, Adsense users were able to find a youtube video, attach it to their Google Adsense account, and embed the ad-enabled video into their site. Then, they could sit back and let the Adsense for Video overlay money roll in while they slept. From an email they sent to Adsense account holders last week:

"After reviewing our AdSense video units feature, which allows you to show YouTube content and ads on your pages, we've found that it hasn't had the impact we had hoped for. As a result, we've decided to retire this feature at the end of April so we can focus our resources on other opportunities to help publishers earn from their sites. "

What were the problems? We don't really know, but let's assume that Adsense publishers really did embed adsense-enabled youtube videos into their destinations. Here are some guesses as to why Youtube still might not have found success:

1) The ads were unable to correctly discern the context of the video in order to match relevant advertisers. Adsense works because of its unparalleled ability to contextually match an advertiser to related text content. Adsense for Video, however, is dependent on Google's ability to read the tags and metadata attached to the video. The metadata for Youtube videos are created by the uploaders, which include things like "27309 1/9". In that specific case, the video has no other metadata other than being in the "People and Blogs" category. Hard to create advertising relevancy with that level of information -- even for Google. Therefore, not only could the viewer be negatively affected by irrelevant ads, but that leads to poor performance for the ad units.

2) The videos that people wanted to post don't lend themselves to advertising. Many viral videos, as we know, are extreme, funny, or extremely funny. Most don't lead the viewer to think, "Hmm...I would like to know more about a cheap plane ticket to Florida right now." Even if Google was able to discern the context of the video through proper user-selected titling, tags and metadata, finding a relevant ad on the skateboarding cat is hard to do.

3) The age old problem: Branded advertisers want to know where their ad is showing up -- not just on which embedded video, but on which embedding site. Advertisers on youtube video overlays often turn a blind eye to whether the video itself is appropriate content for their brand. If you pay by the click, sometimes you just care about the people who clicked, not the people who didn't. However, in this program, the advertiser must also extend their 'blind eye' to include whether the embedding site is appropriate. If Youtube tries to sell CPM video deals with branded advertisers as opposed to applying only CPC affiliates, then the importance of knowing where the video is being played rises. Branded sponsors have too much at risk to tie themselves to unknown destinations, once they get over being tied to unknown video content.

We like the Google Adsense for Video service that places relevant Adsense overlays on video. For informational video content attached to rich metadata, there is no reason that GAFV shouldn't be as successful for Google Adsense in generating revenue for video publishers. At Expo, we experience very rich RPM from GAFV and high CTR due to the relevance of the ads to our video content. A Krups coffeemaker video review will display a "Krups at Macys" overlay every time. We wouldn't be able to do that without Google Adsense, but the bar for user gen video is as high as any other content to properly leverage Adsense's strengths...metadata, quality and relevance of the content still matter.

UPDATE:  If you're confused about all these monetization attempts on the part of Youtube, here is a clarifying page Adsense put up to help discern them all

Amazon Video Widget

If you upload a video on amazon, there's an insteresting app that will let you make referral money off it. Gets into a murky area if the video you're uploading is a product review or claims to be unbiased, but it's a cool tool regardless.

A friend of mine uploaded a product review to Amazon under my associates account, and I added a bunch of products to it. Some were irrelevant, but fun to add. Very simple. I like it. Lots of possibilities if Amazon can hone in on what video they're looking for people to upload, and what behavior they want to reward.

Solvate: New New York City Business

Julie Ruvolo, who pops up everywhere on the digital scene all at the same time, has joined a startup that went alpha this month. www.solvate.com

The concept revolves around creating an uber-database covering answers to common customer service issues that people individually need to solve hundreds of times each day. Solvate allows frustrated customers to not have to re-invent the wheel each time one of us has a problem someone else had before. For example, something like "How can I return my cable box back to Time Warner so I can cancel my cable subscription" probably takes us 45 minutes working through TWC's byzantine call centers before we find out our options. And even then, we probably only find the option that one customer service rep knows, which I bet would be a different option if we were connected to another rep on another day. Meanwhile, I know hundreds of other people had to have gone through this...why don't I know what they know?

Solvate plans to standardize the 'answers' to these questions, so that Solvate agents (and I assume the online public) can provide fast solutions to the second client who asks the same question.

Solvate charges by the man-hour to find the solution, and is currently offering your first hour of agent time for free. So, I tried it out by asking about the best online site to find a deal for a Disney Cruise. I know that Disney itself doesn't offer many deals directly to cruisers, but they do offer them to agents (who then can pass on the deals to cruisers). Solvate did work, I did get a list of places from "Ryan C", my Solvate agent, that offered consistent specials and weren't shaky fly-by-night travel sites. I'm not sure if it saved me time, since it was just an online search. But, I would guess that if my problem involved customer service reps, and phone calls, and escalations, and specific departments, Solvate would save me time and aggravation. And if I was the lucky second person that asked a question, I am sure that the pain of the first person would benefit me. I think the trick for Solvate is to hone in on the problems people would be willing to pay Solvate to solve. ate.

Good luck, Julie and Solvate. I'll call you back when I need to cancel my cable subscription so I can get FiOS.

Victims can be rich, too, I guess.

While some of you might not have too much sympathy for Jake DeSantis who resigned from AIG, I think that we should all feel sorry for ourselves that talent is definitely draining away from solving the complex, intricate problems we have before us.

On the one hand, I'm incensed that ex-Countrywide executives who caused the problems are able to participate in the solution for additional personal gain. But I also turned to my husband yesterday and said, "Why in the hell is Edward Liddy still working at AIG? Why doesn't he just say 'Screw it. YOU people try to solve this problem' and walk away?" He's got these idiot Congressmen judging him who can't even figure out their own taxes. Does anyone realize that he was ASKED to take this job by Treasury Sec'y Paulson? “Six months ago, I came out of retirement to help my country,” Liddy said at yesterday’s House Financial Services subcommittee hearing in Washington. If we're going to make a scapegoat of someone innocent, we should at least pick someone who was there when the crime occurred.

I have limited sympathy for this guy who wrote the AIG letter above, because I am *sure* in his career he was overpaid, and the money that he says he earned for AIG was enabled by a machine *he knew* was overpriced, overcomplicated, and under-financed. But, we should be careful when John Q Public thinks he knows how best to run these companies, lest we end up driving away people who really do. I certainly don't want Senators with "wide stances" in charge of maximizing the value during the wind down of a complex financial derivative product company. But I guess beggars can't be choosers.