I received an email today from a friend at a large, publicly held company, begging for access to Scout Labs. His story was so “typical” that I just had to, with his permission, comment on it. It seems the company in question just launched a version of its web-based software that just didn’t work very well and broke a bunch of things that used to work. A scathing article about the flubbed launch was written on an influential blog in their space. The post was seen by a partner to the company and was forwarded to a channel manager which finally made it to the executive team. The last few days have been hectic for the team — the post has been circulating around the company via email, the marketing team is trying to put a response together, they hastily hired a guy to be responsible for managing a “blog strategy”, and so on. Days later, and the company still hasn’t jumped in to the conversation.

This series of events is all too common. Some lessons that this real-life parable suggests:

• Obviously — don’t launch broken stuff. But even if there is a reason that you need to get something into the market that is not quite baked, be ready for it. Make sure your whole team is ready for it. Be prepared to explain why things are the way they are and what will come next. And ideally, be the first to state the obvious — don’t let customers “reveal” something, as if you had no idea it would be an issue. If there’s a problem, they will find it. Deal with it early. Get your team, tools, processes and policies in place now - don’t wait for a crisis.
• Listen regularly, and be prepared to do something about it. Don’t think about customers as people to deal with after your products are in market. They should be involved every step of the way, on an ongoing basis. Many of the complaints aired in this specific negative blog post were not just related to the recent launch, but were nagging issues that this influential customer had endured for months (years?). He would have liked to have been listened to all along.
• Be part of the conversation when times are good, and things will be easier to manage when times are bad. When you are an engaged part of your own community, customers get to know you. If you do it right, you become a trusted resource and you are seen as a real person trying his best. When things go bad, you will have “social capital” to draw on and get you through.
• Know your influencers and what they are saying about you at all times. Make sure you don’t hear this stuff, after the fact, from a customer or partner. And fighting fires days after the event makes a tough situation even worse.

If you have any additional lessons for my friend at this unnamed big company or to share your own painful experiences and lessons, please jump in and comment.

The February issue of FastCompany magazine includes an article provocatively-titled, Is the Tipping Point Toast? about the work Duncan Watts has done researching influence. The article doesn’t exactly torpedo Gladwell’s hypotheses, as the title suggests, but it does argue that influence is a much more random phenomenon than Gladwell and a string of high-profile marketing gurus - not to mention our own intuition - would have us believe:

[Watts] has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.

Strong words, and not ones that marketing folks want to hear. But let’s back up and look at the two schools of thought at odds in this debate.

The Gladwell school (previously put forward by Ed Keller and Jon Berry in their book, The Influentials) holds that a relatively small number of elite and well-connected tastemakers is responsible for igniting the first small flames of buying or behaving that eventually spread like wildfire to become mainstream trends. Marketers like this model partly because it makes sense intuitively. We can all think of people in our lives who are consistently ahead of the curve with things, or whom we depend on as consistently reliable sources of information. It’s nice to think that if you can, as a marketer, put your message or product in the hands of these elite few, then they will do the rest of the work for you.

Watts, however, isn’t buying it. His research - a variety of computer models as well as social experiments using real people - doesn’t support the existence of this special class of powerful people. As far as he can tell, a trend can start anywhere and with anyone, as long as the marketplace is primed for it. This is borne out in a well-known experiment he conducted by building two identical online music communities where users could rate unknown songs from unknown artists. In one community, the users couldn’t see anyone else’s rankings. In the other, people could see how everyone else rated each song. He wanted to see whether word of mouth would affect the rankings in this second community, and whether any of the participants would emerge as the tastemakers.

In the first community, people rated the songs fairly evenly. But in the second community, as one would expect, favorite songs did emerge, as word of mouth took hold. Even more interestingly, in eight repeats of the experiment, different songs emerged as the favorites each time. For the most part, it wasn’t even close. The #1 song in one community, for example, was ranked #40 out of 48 in another. And there was no evidence to suggest that any participant in any community was significantly more influential than anyone else.

Watts’ experiment confirmed that word of mouth is powerful but, to the chagrin of marketers, it also seemed to show that it’s completely unpredictable.

So is the Tipping Point toast, like the article says? The most likely answer of course is no, and that both arguments are correct. There certainly are people who are influential by virtue of a large audience or expertise with regard to a particular subject. On the other hand, there are certainly many trends that started with seemingly random people.

Watts’ solution is to forget about trying to identify or engage with any supposed influencers and to focus instead on the masses. To this end he has developed a form of advertising with built-in sharing (and tracking) mechanisms designed to facilitate their spread.

Perhaps he’s onto something, but I think that developing a good mechanism for sharing is much less important than developing a good message that people will want to share. The “why” is more important than the “how.”

The currency, so to speak, of influence is the message. There is a science to crafting a good message, or meme. I like the formula offered by Chip and Dan Heath in their recent book, Made to Stick, which states that a good message is:

• Simple
• Unexpected
• Concrete
• Credible
• Emotional, and
• a Story

If marketers follow this formula, the chances that their messages will go “viral” are much greater, whether influencers are specific and identifiable elites or just random folks on the street.

The last piece of the puzzle is the marketplace, and this is something we’re trying hard to make more predictable too. Or, if not predictable, then transparent. Understanding what makes an effective meme is key to spotting them as they develop, but it’s still very difficult without reliable visibility into the marketplace. We’re aiming to provide this with some of the tools we’re developing, because this is at least as essential to the influence problem as attempting to identify some elusive special people at the top of the chain.

I had the good fortune to hear Malcolm Gladwell speak at The Conference on Marketing held in Naples, FL earlier this week. His talk (refreshingly delivered entirely without slides) explored the concept of two distinct types of creative innovation: Conceptual and experimental.

Conceptual innovation, he argues are those bold, breakthrough ideas that are well articulated quickly and delivered into the world. Experimental innovation is the slow, iterative process of exploration that may happen over a lifetime before it’s gotten right.

Examples of conceptual innovators include Orson Wells, Picasso and Herman Melville. Conceptual innovators tend to peak early—often the value of their output decreasing over time. The highest price Picasso ever fetched for a single painting occurred at the age of 26. Work done in his 60s is valued roughly at ¼ of his peak prices. And we all know what happened to Orson Wells after Citizen Kane. Not much.

Cezanne, on the other hand, was an experimental innovator. He painstakingly painted the same scenes over and over again, evolving his genius in slow, iterative, baby steps. Cezanne peaked in his 60s, his later work valued at roughly 15 times work done in his 40s. Another experimental innovator, Alfred Hitchcock, explored the thriller genre again and again over a lifetime delivering perhaps his best picture, Vertigo, at the age of 59.

Gladwell argues that much to its detriment, today’s culture has lost patience with the experimental innovators. Musicians are now routinely dropped from the roster if their first single isn’t a blockbuster. Yet the traditional music industry is now in complete free fall according to Gladwell, because “you cannot run a creative business unless you have a combination of Picassos and Cezannes to create lasting value.” Long term, lasting value comes from a portfolio of ideas that include both the bold and groundbreaking as well as those that need iterative experimentation in order to mature.

Moreover, consumers form a very different bond with Picasso and Cezanne ideas. Picasso ideas get a lot of attention, but don’t develop lasting loyalty or significant influence (Friendster who?). Cezanne ideas may take a while to mature, but have much greater impact and create more lasting value over time.

The Sopranos, we are reminded, didn’t have much of an audience in season one or even season two. But with a little patience, HBO allowed the writing, the characters and even the audience to mature and the series has now arguably changed the face of in-home entertainment for a long time to come.

Fred Shapiro,Editor for the Yale Book of Quotations has published his Top 10 Most Memorable Quotes of 2007. Ah, so many good ones. But “Don’t Tase Me, Bro”, a phrase that swept the nation after a U.S. college student used it seeking to stop campus police from throwing him out of a speech by Sen. John Kerry, made the top of the list.

This quote became pop culture in record time this year. Two days later, according to Wired:

• The term hovered between 9th and 11th place as the most searched for term on Google for Wednesday, according to Google Trends.
• The video has been the number 1 Viral Video for the past 24 hours. The Meyer arrest video has received 2.6 million views and almost 40,000 new comments since Monday.
• Many of the leading opinion shapers on both the left and the right, as well as newspaper blogs, offered their thoughts and insights on the incident.
• Television pundits across the dial offered their opinions, and those opinions were archived for posterity on YouTube.
• Several enterprising individuals have even snapped up variations of the spelling of the phrase as Web addresses. One of them points to a Wikipedia entry for the University of Florida.
• Mashups are proliferating on the Web.
• A couple of t-shirt designs, and bumper stickers have emerged.
• Dozens of people have felt compelled to record their own video responses in a YouTube forum discussion on the matter.

The other most memorable quotes of 2007:

2. The tortuous answer by Lauren Upton, the South Carolina contestant in the Miss Teen America contest, responding to the question of why one-fifth of Americans are unable to locate the United States on a map: “I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and Iraq and everywhere like such as and I believe that they should our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or should help South Africa and should help Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for us.”

3. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s October comment at Columbia University in New York, “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.”

4. Shock jock Don Imus comments about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team: “That’s some nappy-headed hos there”.

5. “I don’t recall.” — Former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales‘ repeated response to questioning at a congressional hearing about the firing of U.S. attorneys.

6. “There’s only three things he (Republican presidential candidate and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani) mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11.” — Sen. Joseph Biden, speaking at a Democratic presidential debate.

7. “I’m not going to get into a name-calling match with somebody (Vice President Dick Cheney) who has a 9 percent approval rating.” — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat.

8. “(I have) a wide stance when going to the bathroom.” — Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig’s explanation of why his foot touched that of an undercover policeman in a men’s room.

9. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” — Biden describing rival Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

10. “I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history.” — Former President Jimmy Carter in an interview in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper.

I’ll have to do a 2007 Top Ten most painful moments for companies caused by regular old consumers and their new media, next…

Initial findings from a new study presented at the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) symposium over the weekend validate what we already know about the importance of social media to businesses: It’s important…

Fifty-seven percent of respondents said that social media tools are becoming more valuable to their activities as more customers and influencers use them. Twenty-seven percent reported that social media is a core element of their communications strategy.

But the study, funded by the Institute for Public Relations and Wieck media, also sheds some light on some of the ways and reasons companies are adopting strategies to address social media. The respondents talked about proactive and reactive strategies, and the findings suggest some clear priorities for both.

Respondents reported that the most effective tools for their social media initiatives are currently:

• Blogs
• Online video
• Social networks

Surprising to the researchers was the fact that criteria that measured online engagement for blogs and podcasts were among the least important to the respondents.

However, for online communities and social networks, the top three criteria for evaluating influence do reflect the importance of online engagement:

• Participation level
• Frequency of posting by the community member
• Name recognition of the individual

Furthermore, 51% of those surveyed are formally measuring the effects of their social media initiatives, with a particular interest in how successfully they are engaging with key audiences. They want to understand and, of course, enhance their brand’s reputation (and product awareness, etc.) with those audiences. They want to know how well their own forays into blogging and social video are faring, and they want to know who is writing or commenting about them, how much they are writing and what they’re saying. It’s also interesting to note that near the bottom of the list was traditional media coverage.

This is why it was important for us from the very beginning that our application focus not only on finding and measuring consumer generated content, but also enable companies to engage with the consumers who are generating it.

Yesterday’s word of the day, apparently, was “influence.” At least that’s what was on the mind of a few big bloggers. Steve Rubel started the conversation by declaring dead the notion that link count equals influence. He argues that counting inbound links is irrelevant outside the blogosphere - in Facebook or Twitter for example - where many conversations go down. His bottom line is that using inbound links as the barometer of influence misses too much.

I disagree with Rubel’s suggestion that link count is or has ever been synonymous with influence. I’ve always seen it as just part of the formula. Maybe a disproportionately large part, but only because there’s so little else that can be quantified. Traffic data can tell you the reach of a source - which is another mark of influence - but publicly-available traffic data is pretty unreliable. Right now, Rubel is right to point out that the formula for measuring influence is oversimplified, but I don’t think it’s due to a lack of sophistication on the part of those who seek to do so. The problem is a lack of measurable data, and as that improves over time, so will influence metrics.

A companion piece by Rubel’s colleague, David Brain, lays out the beginnings of a more nuanced formula for measuring influence that starts with the top 30 bloggers (using rankings published by various sources) and attempts to factor in a variety of social networking activities carried out by said bloggers, as follows:

• Blog - analysed Google Rank, inbound links, subscribers, alexa rank, content focus, frequency of updates, number of comments
• Multi-format - analysed Facebook - number of friends
• Mini-updates - analysed Twitter - number of friends, followers and updates
• Business cards - analysed LinkedIn - number of contacts
• Visual - analysed Flickr - number of photos uploaded from the person/s or about the person/s
• Favourites - analysed Digg, del.icio.us

This implicitly accounts for some notion of reach, along with some rather ad-hoc and unscientific social media metrics, but since it’s limited to just 30 blogs, it fails to address anything but the most general questions around influence and influencers. Many of the top blogs are technology or marketing focused, so while they might be highly influential to a few key audiences, they are totally irrelevant to, say, urban teens or middle-class parents of toddlers.

Rubel and David Brain also touch on the “Facebook phenomenon,” and there’s no question that Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and the other buzzing social services deserve a place in any discussion about influence, but what place? Because these services enjoy such a high profile right now, it’s tempting to overestimate or misunderstand how they factor in. Facebook user profiles are not accessible to the general public or even to other Facebook members who are not connected as friends - unlike the top bloggers, who enjoy large reader audiences and a lot of visitor traffic. So the only way influence can exist on Facebook is virally - with memes spreading gradually across overlapping circles of friends, through direct contact between individuals. Basically like the real world, and probably just as difficult to predict, detect and measure.

Jeff Jarvis chimes in and pokes fun at Rubel, calling him a sort of “grim reaper of measurements” who “likes declaring things dead.” On the subject of influence, Jarvis discusses some of the complexity involved in quantifying it. He points out that there are different and dynamic spheres of influence that have to do with things like an individual person’s reputation, subject matter expertise and credentials, nature and reach of their forum (e.g. traditional media vs. blog), and nature of the audience.

This brings us to a more fundamental problem that underlies the challenge of measuring influence. Namely, that there’s no consensus on what “influence” actually means. What do we want to measure? What exactly are these mysterious influencers influencing? Brand perception? Purchase decisions? And whom do they influence? Furthermore, a lot of the work on this problem is focused on identifying influential sources - people or publications that tend to influence other people. But a single well-written product or movie review, or one disastrous customer service call can be hugely influential, regardless of the author’s credentials.

It’s clear that no one has influence figured out, which makes it an endlessly fascinating problem area. We’ll keep tinkering with our own formula, and as we’re able to factor in more data, our influence metrics will get better and better.

Here’s a video of P&G CEO saying marketing HAS to change to relationship marketing, no more one way spinning. He implores marketing agencies and partners to help them get there.

(login required)