P&G Social Media Lab

Procter & Gamble’s Social Media Lab

P&G was one of the top 10 brands that our members wanted to talk to. So, we felt pretty lucky to be asked to participate in the P&G Social Media Lab.

P&G marketing has historically been known to try to impact consumers directly. When they can’t find solutions to help them reach the right people, they’ll pioneer their own, like Tremor, and Vocalpoint. Direct ownership of these initiatives by the brands gets into its own thorny issues about influencing consumers, and disclosure.

The P&G Social Media Lab, I believe, helps broaden P&G’s perspective on how to harness the power of passionate consumers — beyond the simple, direct control of them. By exposing their brand managers to a broad range of robust community sites in a learning environment, their marketers are afforded the proper structure to evaluate and understand the strengths of this delicate, but powerful new source of consumer connectivity. The Lab helps facilitate the conversation between partner and marketer by instilling an even playing field for learning, and, more importantly, a structure to define success. The lab’s focus helps the conversation not slide into the predictable marketing mode of “what’s the CPM and how many eyeballs can I get”. I find that trodden line can singlehandedly stunt the emergence of new models and lead to unnatural, force-fit projects best suited for old media. Instead, our partnership discussions have been directed to define how engagement, influence, and dialogue can be measured (and priced) to ensure that the right consumers — the interested consumers — are reached. Our projects are focused on impacting the buying process, and on developing metrics which measure our members’ purchasing influence. By being invited to help craft the right success metrics, social networks involved in the Lab are empowered to make sure that their ‘consumer conversation’ projects don’t go as astray as they have when demographic reach and frequency became the end goal.

We talked a lot internally about how the P&G Social Media Lab helped ‘even the playing field’ for us so that we could influence how P&G brands should define success with our community. Because we are hyper-focused on our members’ expectations and needs, we think we can easily create something that will leave our community and P&G better off than when we started. Can’t say that for most of the eyeball deals I’ve done.

For the more official story on the social media lab…see Deb Schultz’s blog.

Apple Store iPhone debut in New York, video courtesy of our intern Billy

We have a 19 year old intern from UCLA in our company this summer. He is pretty interesting because he’s got some great film making skills already under his belt. In discussing how to get us some great consumer video, he thought up the idea (the night before) to go to the iPhone opening in NYC. He got some great footage, edited it and put it up on the same day. Because he was in a self-professed “good mood” he left out the two “criticisms” that he heard that day about the iPhone (the whole thing about not being able to connect because of the problems Apple was having with their system). He even put together his own music.

His presence in the company is a fun reminder that fearlessness will always be a big part of entrepreneurialism. I hope you enjoy his creativeness to real consumer reviewing the iPhone!

Research and social networks: self-serving vs. self-sustaining

We put out a research piece yesterday. Got good enough buzz…ClickZ’s Kate Kaye started talking to us about a related story…I got an email citing our study that flew around a big CPG conglomerate that ended up in the emailbox of one of our advisors…even Forrester cited it as insightful marketing findings…etc. I have been thinking about how we can use research to establish our company’s credibility, and extend our awareness. What I found is that not only do you need to think about what topic you’re going to address, but more importantly, whose purpose does it serve? As a social network, you have the ability to find more out about your members…not just about how much they need your site. By understanding the limits of the kind of research your members are willing to contribute on your platform, you can generate a new income stream, as well as help partners achieve their needs.

Here’s an anecdote that put it into perspective for me:
We called up a non-profit trade org in the commerce space to see if they would like to partner with us on any research initiatives. We did our little pitch…unbiased video product reviews uploaded by thousands of people, blah blah blah. Their response: “We are already partnered with [text review company] and have done a ton of research on the power of text reviews. We really don’t need to do any more.”

Fair enough. We knew about that research…we’d actually used it ourselves! But what struck us is that we weren’t thinking about doing research on text reviews, video reviews, or any reviews. We found that research so self-serving that it was unpalatable even to attempt to bring in a third party to help legitimize it. What we wanted to do was ask our community to provide research to benefit other organizations (that are obviously within context of what we do). What we realized was that as a social network, we had a *platform* for research, as opposed to a need to produce research to prove our own point.

So, we just went ahead and asked some questions we thought this organization might be interested in. We asked things like: What impact is the economy having on where and how often you shop? What impact are gas prices having on your summer travel?

We’ve gotten over 300 *video* responses to our few questions. We are creating reels that help amalgamate the thoughts of our members. The trade org we approached loved them, and totally sees us as someone to help them achieve their goals – and not just when they overlap directly with our own interests. Our members love the diversity, and love being asked their opinion on being a consumer. We are able to fulfill needs where everyone involved feels like they’re benefiting.

How can social networks expand beyond advertising as a revenue stream? When the collective or individual knowledge within the network becomes a workable asset that can be tapped into. With the ready participation of the members, there is a ton of value still waiting to get unlocked on social networks that will remain out of the reach of technology and distribution tools.

Commerce and Google Organic Drop in April 2008

Dealing with a large, unexpected drop in Google Organic Traffic is a very philosophical time. You go through six of the seven stages of grief: Shock, Denial, Bargaining (with any authority you still believe in who’s higher than Google), Guilt, Anger, Depression are all part of the scene. But as a business person you have to stop just short of the last one – Acceptance.

In March/April, there seemed to have been a reverberation of a Google algorithm change affecting commerce related sites. We identified a number of product/commerce sites that were materially hit…some were scrapers, some were amalgamators, some were creators of original content. They ranged in size to the oldest/biggest to the newest/innovative. We know of sites who lost up to 90% of their Google organic traffic, including this post I found on webmasterworld.

The best we can tell, there have been and continues to be changes that seem to take a stronger position in devaluing duplicate, widely distributed shopping content. Two thoughts on why the algorithm might have changed:
1) Google is trying to surface commerce innovation better by weighing unique content much heavier than before on commerce sites. Sites that use widely affiliated shopping feeds, content amalgamation or scraping other sites may need to work harder to distinguish their value-added service to the bots.
2) Google is trying to provide the best search experience for product price on Google Product Search, so could de-weight other providers whose price algorithms are based on being paid by retailers. (This, of course, only is a greater good if GPS doesn’t rank retailers by getting paid.)

Of the few we’ve spoken to directly, we believe all regained their traffic. In one case it was within a week, in other cases a few weeks. The changes in those sites were basically to:
1) ensure that the bots see, very clearly, any original content that you create
2) that you use minimize your page dependence on content that is duplicated throughout the web, whether it be from API feed partners, or from other methods
3) you keep a closer eye on the bots and how often they are crawling you, lest they find that some of your content is duplicate and not worth looking at
4) you follow Matt Cutts… even his old stuff. Plus he just opened up his Twitter feed. (oh, and so did i!)

Measuring Innovation, New York Times, Freakonomics, and ExpoTV!

I’m more thrilled to be in the company of these other contributors, but Bill and I got published in the NY Times Freakonomics blog!

The topic is measuring innovation. We both were fans of the Freakonomics book by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner when it came out. There was a very personal story attached to the economist Levitt’s motivations that was made it very authentic. It’s along the lines of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point in that they both present digestible, real world examples of very important socio-economic concepts.

Hope you have a chance to check it out. Seth Grodin of Squidoo and The Purple Cow is also a contributor to the blog.

What’s in a Web 2.0 name?

So, we have always gotten little pings from valued advisors…about how our name ExpoTV may be holding us back. Here are some comments:
1) “Expo” doesn’t connote anything
2) “Expo” connotes a B2B
3) “Expo” connotes the world’s fair
4) “TV” anything is bad

My comeback has always been…Amazon was once a rainforest region. Back in ‘the day’, I worked for Oxygen Media, the women’s programming network. The name Oxygen came to Gerry Laybourne in a dream…it was meant to connote a breath of fresh air for women viewers, and a refreshing place to create for show producers. An exec in the marketing group who had the daunting task of owning the word Oxygen for American TV viewers once said to me, “If I could name it ‘Cable-network-for-women-18-to-49′ I would have done that.”

Expo came to my co-founder and me one day while traveling. It meant to us a place where like-minded enthusiasts gather to exchange ideas, see new things, and get to interact — all with stuff, products, things — in an atmosphere of no high-pressured sales people. Like the MacWorld Expo, Web 2.0 Expo, here is even the Waste Expo 2008. These are all people who share a passion for something — mostly products — and feel this is the place they can express themselves and be valued for their enthusiasm.

So, yes, Web 2.0 convention is to have a nonsensical (read: copyrightable) name with two of the following:
1) “Z” sound, which can be an X or a Z
2) end in a vowel
3) have a double o “oo”
That includes squidoo, kaboodle, xobni, zoho

So, ExpoTV doesn’t really fit. But we did get the copyright.