Navigating the current in social communications

Ed Dilworth

I cringe when I hear agencies use the expression “media-neutral” (mea culpa, we’ve used it ourselves). It’s the kind of language that smacks of agencies working extra hard to show they’re all caught up in this newfangled digital world. Of greater concern though is that media neutrality is a bad idea for most communication plans because all communication forms are not created equal.

Consider this, virtually every survey worth a damn shows that word of mouth is the number one reason a person buys a product or service that requires any degree of consideration.

This influence is increasing as a byproduct of two intertwined trends that are amplifying the effect of word of mouth.

The first of these trends is the decline in influence of traditional forms of communication. We think of these forms as vertical media. A combination of media distraction, ad skipping, consumption of content from noncommercial environments, among many other issues, is reducing the impact of traditional forms to influence people when it counts.

The second is the explosion in peer-driven digital options to get people engaged in whatever interests them. We think of these peer-driven environments as horizontal media.

Neither of these trends is particularly earth shattering in their newsworthiness. What is important though is figuring out how to craft a hard-working communication model around them. We took a shot at it with something we call “The Current.”

If you think of the vertical lines in this image as the classic (and dreaded) “purchase funnel” and the horizontal lines as The Current of consumer-controlled environments, you’ll see the point I’m trying to make. In order to move someone down the funnel these days you have to cross a raging current in which people expect transparent, objective, peer-to-peer or influencer-to-peer, experiential environments that cover any topic or product or service that interests them. And they’re going to get them whether the marketer chooses to participate or not.

The client base of Campbell-Ewald is largely comprised of considered purchase products and services … Chevrolet, U.S. Navy, Kaiser Permanente, Farmer’s Insurance, etc. Understanding how to navigate The Current is particularly critical in the considered purchase world. When 10,000 opinions about the quality of the new Silverado are available with one swift click, the likelihood you’re going to put all your money on that old thirty-second spot or your local Chevy dealer to guide you is pretty limited.

We made three major adjustments in the agency to better serve our clients in this new world: 1) We overhauled our strategic planning process to account for all of the changes. 2) We integrated our Custom Publishing and Digital groups because in the world of The Current, content rules. 3) We launched a Social Communications practice so that we had a singular focus on the space.

The changes we made in our strategic planning process focused on research and metrics. We created auditing systems that account for the ecosystems of consumers’ lives. Virtual maps that track behavior as people navigate not only their physical but also digital lives. If someone is a good prospect for Michelin tires, where do they live? It turns out they spend time in environments exploring things like safety, performance or green issues that Michelin has something to say about. If you’re a mom at iVillage checking out content on child safety or on the message boards asking questions about child safety, then Michelin should participate or link to it or offer content on this issue. That doesn’t mean a plug for Michelin products either. It could be setting up an auto safety content module or a chat bot for answering questions about auto safety.

In the end, offering value in the social communications world is the only worthwhile currency. That value can come in a number of forms: entertainment, information, value (deals), community or utility (widgets that perform a service), but it has to be offered for the marketer to earn their place in the community.

We built new systems for tracking the effectiveness of our social communication plans. Some element of the solution for this comes from working with industry leaders like Competitious or blogpulse but some part of the metrics solution had to be built from scratch.

We also needed a great digital content solution. We were fortunate to have the nation’s largest custom publishing group in-house that, when integrated with our digital agency, immediately gave birth to a robust digital content development division. In some cases we find that there is already good content out there and our job is just to find a way to supplement, link to or sponsor it. In others we find that there is a content gap and our clients can establish or deepen a relationship with their targets by working with us to create the content.

Finally, you must be able to create motion in The Current that favors clients. Just as media teams create motion for traditional ads in print or television or radio, we launched a Social Communications practice to create motion around content we’d either created or identified as important. The group does this through research, analysis, planning and program implementation that distributes content, initiates linking relationships, garners influencer and peer coverage and a dozen other actions required to be successful.

These adjustments are playing out for clients like the U.S. Navy. There is no amount of money we can spend in vertical media that will move people to enlist. Eventually they want to hear from peers and sailors and influencers who will give them the real deal on serving. They require an experiential, peer-to-peer, objective environment in which they can dive deep before making any decisions. Huge peer-driven aggregation nodes like YouTube have provided us a part of that kind of experience. There are over 4,000 primarily sailor-created videos on the Navy YouTube channel giving people an objective place to get smart about the Navy in an environment they trust.
We extend that experience by building links to sailor-to-prospect chats, and a dozen other peer-created content environments.

We see lots of marketers that try to play in this space by creating “viral videos” (we’ve made them too). I guess if you’re hawking potato chips you can accept that level of effort but it’s not sufficient for our clients.
Making a video you hope will get viral distribution is not a communication strategy. Setting aside the issue of semantics in calling it a viral video rather than a video, it’s just such offensive laziness to think that imitating subservient chicken or Mentos/Diet Coke is going to solve the issues of consumer control.

Ed is EVP/Chief Contact Officer for Campbell-Ewald. He can be reached at edilwort@campbell-ewald.com or 586-558-6300

Editor’s note: This is archived from 7/07.